Calamity Shazaam in the Kitchen

Sunday afternoon cooking is awesome up until 4:45pm, when the lovely long rays of afternoon sunshine that filter through the yellowing maple leaves suddenly switches to midnight blue and you still have a massive amount of washing up to do.  Sigh.  Today I am starting to prep the Thanksgiving meal. Usually I make the stuffing base early because I like all the flavors to meld together into mushroomy-buttery-garlicky- sagey deliciousness which I will combine with bread, turkey sausage, and broth on the Big Day.  And today I got to thinking about mushroom liquor. Did you know that oysters and clams also produce their own liquor? I knew it, but I never thought it out before. Recipes for both oyster stew and for clam chowder often instruct the cook to "reserve the liquor" and now I am thinking, other than mushrooms, what other veg produces a "liquor"? And for the record, mushroom liquor is DELICIOUS. 

Oy vey. No one tells you that as you age you stop staring at your navel and start slowly looking at the world around you through the lens of experience. Which is making me into a complete Debbie Downer. Ugh.  I love Thanksgiving and I am not sure exactly why I should still. It signaled the brutal eradication of an entire civilization which we mark by stuffing ourselves stupid.  Can you imagine if in Germany there was a national holiday to give thanks for Kristallnacht? Maybe now is too soon, but in two or three hundred years? Who can say. What I do know is I can't discuss this with most people because pretty much no one wants to talk about sh*t that happened in the past, especially if they think they are going to be made to feel guilty about it. Everything ugly gets swept under the rug and we hope for better tomorrows.  You see where I am at with this kind of thinking? Debbie Downer City.  However I can't bring myself to not have some kind of fall celebrati

Things took a turn for the worse when I bounced my forehead off my desk this afternoon. Turns out nap-nods can escalate quickly to nap-faceplants. Uh-glee! Definitely NOT a pretty sight at all. Why so tired you ask? Well, guess what I forgot to do today? 1:47pm - November 9, 2012 Yes. I forgot to have coffee. It's like forgetting to put pants on in the morning. Coffee is as fundamental as oxygen and chocolate, as far as I can tell. And then I saw this image on Pinterest (a whole 'nother addiction) and first I was like "yep" and then I was like "hahahahahahahahahah!" I hate that I totally get it. And also I hate that I am about to go back for cup number 2 just as soon as I click "Publish".

So what if I am slowly starving it to death, right? Well thank you to YOU dear reader, you are the only one left. What have I been up to since August? Oh, not a whole lot. I think that I've been a bit lazy of late with the blogging thing - too many photos of what Ima puttin' in mah piehole and not enough writing to go with it. You wanna know why? Because I fricking HATE writing recipes. OMG I would rather scrape wallpaper at a hoarders house. I know how to cook like people know how to drive a stick shift and for the record I cannot operate a manual transmission unless bunny-hopping from point to point is considered operating.  So I have lots of empathy for people who can't cook and who rely on microwave meals and powdered crap in a box. Which you would think would make me super patient and recipe-writeable. You would be wrong. I just cook. Occasionally I will read a recipe because I've forgotten how to clarify stock or to look up the set temperature for jelly,