Thanksgiving is upon us! It is time to give you my “Thanksgiving Planning Guide”.  It doesn’t matter if you’re having just your family of 4 or 40 people for the big day, you need to have a plan and that plan needs to be set into action now!

10 Days to One Week Before Thanksgiving

• Confirm the number of guests and plan the menu.
• Create your shopping list, and buy nonperishable items and the frozen turkey, if using frozen
• If you are using a fresh turkey, order it now. Order pies, if needed.
• Plan your centerpiece(s) and decorations. Purchase and put together everything that is nonperishable.
• If you’re making pies, prepare the crusts. Roll out the dough, transfer to pie dishes, and store in the freezer.
• Bake any bread and rolls, and store them in the freezer.
•  Clean and press the table linens or take them to a dry-cleaner.
•  Polish the silver.
•  Clean out your refrigerator, making room for Thanksgiving foods.
•  Arrange to borrow or rent any tables, chairs, or linens.
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Pepitas are the seeds of squash, most commonly a pumpkin. The word pepita can refer to just the inside kernel of the seed or the entire un-hulled seed. What we want for this recipe is the inside hulled kernel, which is typically what you will find packaged and labeled as pepitas in our markets in the USA. They can be found raw or toasted, salted or unsalted. Another common use for the pepita kernels is to grind them and use them in mole (pronounced MOH-lay) which is the undisputed national sauce of Mexico.

Pepitas can be easily found in Mexican markets, health food stores, and locally at Trader Joe’s.  As with other seeds and nuts, pepitas have a high oil content and will turn rancid quickly, so only purchase the amount you need or store for up to 6 months in the freezer.  These make not only a great snack, but are delicious as a salad topping and are a perfect hostess gift for the holidays. Although this recipe is for pepitas, any nut (walnut, pecan, almond, macadamia, peanuts, or mixed nuts) may be substituted.
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Lemon… is one of my all-time favorite flavors!  Savory or sweet … main course or dessert … international or all-American … in my mind, you can’t beat the taste of lemon. I’ve made many different versions of lemon bars over the years; meringue topped, layered with cream cheese filling, raspberry topped, and so on. The flavor of the day is a lovely tropical blend of lemon, coconut, and almond. Until just recently you always had to toast most nuts yourself, but now you can find already toasted almond slices (and pine nuts too) at Trader Joe’s – another wonderful gift of convenience given to us by the wonderful TJ”s!

Dave and I are traveling down to Tucson for a quick 24-hour turn-around trip to visit our darling daughter, Marissa. After the Cut-Out Sugar Cookie post of the other day, Marissa asked me to bring her and her roommates, Kaley, Petra, Page, and Kelsey, a batch of decorated cookies. But as I said in the post, I don’t enjoy making those darn things, so the answer is “No!” But lemon bars, that’s another matter, these come together in moments, so girls, we, and these luscious lemon bars, are on our way down south…. see you soon! xoxo
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Nancy, Zada, and I have been having a fun couple of days catching up, swimming (Zada), watching Disney videos (Zada and us mom’s too, sometimes), and just hanging out.  Nancy and her husband, Ethan, have lived on a sailboat in Southern California for the past 15 years! They began a grand sailing adventure with Zada in December 2008.  The boat and Ethan are currently in San Carlos, Mexico, and the girls will be joining him on Thursday to continue their trip. They’ve been state-side for the past couple of months waiting out the hurricane season. The next ports of call are the South Pacific and New Zealand!  You too can follow their grand adventures on their blog which is on my blogroll at the right under “Super Non-Cooking Stuff” – “Sailing with Smith & Jones”.  That’s my name for their site because it’s Ethan Smith and Nancy Jones, and I just adored the old TV show, Alias Smith and Jones... remember that?  In their honor for dinner tonight – as in “Smith and Jones” we have … East and West…
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Like most moms, I’ve been making cut-out cookies for years and years, with or without the “help” of my kids.  Here’s the annual routine – as I make the dough, they are chomping at the bit to help cut out the cookies while the dough chills.  We cut them out together and while the cookies bake, the kids just can’t wait until the cookies are cool enough to frost and decorate.  They rush into the kitchen, happy and excited as can be, decorate about 6 cookies each, destroying the kitchen in the process, and then are bored of the process and run off to play while I am stuck decorating the remaining 5 dozen cookies and cleaning up sprinkles from every corner of the kitchen for months to come.  Sound familiar!?!  It’s a wonder I ever decided to teach kids to cook after this yearly event.  The other problem I used to have with cut-out sugar cookies is that they would spread out on the pan while baking, losing much of their original shape.  It was often hard to tell a Santa from a snowman!  After research, trial, and error, I finally came up with two solutions.  First, instead of using flour to dust on the work surface and the top of the dough, use granulated sugar.  All that flour that gets incorporated into the dough when rolling and re-rolling throws off the composition of the dough and causes it to spread.  Next, chill the cut-out cookies before baking to firm up the butter in the dough – problem solved.  Now Santa looks like Santa and a star actually has defined points at its ends. Another tip; if your circle of dough is too large to loosen from the counter with a pastry scraper (also called a bench knife), the bottom of a tart pan does a wonderful job of getting to the center of the dough to get it unstuck from the counter.

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When my kids were little, like a lot of kids, they would ask for “basghetti”  for dinner all the time.  I would brown up some ground beef, onion, and garlic then season the meat mixture and add a couple of cans of tomatoes, then toss in cooked spaghetti noodles and call it a day.  As they got older, they would request it with meatballs. Being a good Irish girl, I wasn’t exactly an expert at Italian meatballs, so I would try to brown the ground beef orbs in a frying pan. Inevitably the result was a broken-up mess of over or undercooked meat that did not resemble balls of any sort. Finally, I got wise and decided to bake them instead, and voila, perfect meatballs! Over the years, I’ve perfected the recipe to its current state and my grown kids still ask for it by its name – ” can we have basghetti, please!” We have house guests this week, one of them is a darling 4 1/2-year-old named Zada.  Zada is the daughter of my long-time (24+ years) friend, Nancy, and more on Nancy and Zada in the days to come.
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These unique and pretty Christmas cookies are from the December 2005 edition of Gourmet Magazine. Speaking of Gourmet, its final issue is this month, November 2009. After 68 years, like so many other publications, it is now a thing of the past. What led to Gourmet’s demise? Even with nearly 1 million subscribers, who looked forward to the fantastic articles, recipes, and pictures each month, the magazine fell victim to a decline in ad sales due to popular television food shows and online recipe sites, like its own Epicurious.com, taking up its former advertising revenue.  Upon the announcement, on October 5, 2009, The Wall Street Journal said it was “like a giant soufflé falling.”  I have to agree, Gourmet was the first food magazine I subscribed to, some 27 years ago.  I kept every one of those issues until just a couple of summers ago, when I donated some 300 issues of Gourmet and nearly 1000 issues of Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Saveur, Cook’s Illustrated, Cooking Light, and Martha Stewart Living to the Culinary Program at Scottsdale Community College.  It took two trips in my SUV because of the extreme weight and mass! Gourmet was the granddaddy of them all and it will be sadly missed by foodies worldwide.
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Ramen and Broccoli Salad – there are so many versions of this salad around, that I was wondering if I should even post my take on it. But after looking at some of the others, I decided mine did have something unique – the dressing. You can either make this dressing as per the recipe or if you want your own Nihongo (that’s how the Japanese call themselves) on it, opt for some Japanese sauces instead. Nonetheless, back to our recipe for now.

Most of the others call for between 3/4 to one full cup of oil and between 1/2 to 3/4 cup of sugar. That’s a whole lot of fat and calories ruining a big bowl of healthy vegetables!

This still is not a diet “worthy” recipe; what with the bacon, mayo, and the sodium in the ramen flavor packet, but an improvement just the same. Add cooked shrimp, grilled flank steak, or shredded chicken to easily make this into a main course salad.
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My three-week cooking class series at Les Gourmettes Cooking School is only a little more than a week away and the theme for the first class of the session is “Holiday Open House”.  That seemed all good until I took a look at the menu (that I developed in the summer and haven’t thought about or looked at since) and saw that it includes Assorted Christmas Cookies. Time to get busy and get some cookies baked and into the freezer! I’ll be making a double batch so I can get my own Christmas baking out of the way at the same time, see there’s an upside to everything! Baking is not my favorite thing, so all the cookie recipes will be coming from elsewhere, such as this one from the 2004 December issue of Bon Appetit.
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Nothing is more comforting than a big bowl of hearty soup and a slice of warm crusty bread. This chunky soup has a long list of ingredients but actually comes together quickly.  Especially if you use the leftover wild and brown rice (from the Rack of Lamb dinner post on October 2 on this site) and meat from a rotisserie chicken.  As usual, I use Costco’s rotisserie chicken, which yields about 1 3/4 pounds of meat, after discarding the skin and bones. Chop up the dark meat for the soup and refrigerate the breast meat for salads or sandwiches for another day.  The chicken Andouille sausage used here was found at Trader Joe’s but any cooked sausage you prefer (such as kielbasa) is fine.  Although the sausage is fully cooked, it is sautéed with the vegetables to lend them more flavor before the liquid is added to the pot.  Today was my first opportunity to use my new “Elite” Cuisinart, and I must say, it was amazing, can’t wait to really put it to the test with a big ol’ day of cooking! With the holidays fast approaching, that will be very soon!  Speaking of the holidays, this would be a perfect soup to make with leftover turkey meat and turkey stock made from the turkey carcass from Thanksgiving, so keep it in mind.

1 3/4 pounds of meat from one Costco rotisserie chicken; breast meat on the left, dark meat on the right

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