Nobody's Fool

Dinner Guest

It's Dungeness crab season!

they have a pepper bar!

I'm not sure if I should be proud or mortified to admit that I recently became a regular customer at Quizno's exclusively because of the spongemonkeys.

what's for dinner?

So, the vegans and the Atkins diet people are having it out. Our social life lately is a microcosm of this battle — we have one friend who recently went vegan and a couple who are on Atkins. Entertaining is virtually impossible.

As a passionate food-lover, I am suspicious of any diet that eliminates multiple entire food groups. What ever happened to the balanced diet and regular exercise?

Different Ways to Skin a Turkey

Andrew and I have been marveling over all the discussion this year over the best way to cook a turkey. Seems like everybody subscribes to a different school of thought, and for all the Thanksgiving-themed programs on Food Network, every half hour a different celebrity chef advocated a different approach to the best turkey ever. Martha stuffs and bastes. Alton refuses to stuff or baste (he says it dries out the turkey). Wolfgang brines.

Brining, in fact, seems to be the biggest trend this year: the SF Chronicle declared brining to be the very best way to prepare the Thanksgiving turkey. Then of course, everybody's talking about deep-frying and BBQing, which have both caught on recently.

A couple of years ago, it was all about cooking it upside down (so the juices would disseminate through the bird).

When you've been cooking Thanksgiving turkey the same way for so many years, it seems risky and a little brash to try one of these techniques on such a critical day (especially when there's so much disagreement about which way is right). Isn't lamenting the dryness of the meat part of the holiday tradition anyway?