Kitchen Scoop Blog

The first whole turkey I cooked, 24 years ago, was a complete disaster. Oh, it wasn’t that it wasn’t thawed or that I didn’t cook it long enough. But I failed to take the little plastic bag out of the cavity that contained the neck, gizzards, etc.

Yes, I roasted the plastic bag inside the cavity. It was not until the bird was fully roasted and I took it out of the oven that I saw the edge of the bag in the cavity. While it was roasting, I kept smelling a faint burning plastic odor, but wrote it off to my “new” oven.

I was afraid I’d poison the whole family if I served it -- who knew what kind of toxins I cooked into the bird! What’s your favorite Thanksgiving flop story? And by the way, here's a broccoli casserole recipe that's sure to work. It can be done way ahead and frozen, too!

There’s a three-pound (!) bag of cranberries in my refrigerator right this minute, just waiting to jump into the pot! I adore fresh cranberry sauce, and I’ve been experimenting with it for years. I’ve made both raw cranberry relishes and cooked sauces featuring unexpected ingredients like sour cream, dried cherries and even jalapenos.

I’m such a cranberry enthusiast that most of my friends have come to expect my little red jars showing up on their doorsteps this time of year. There’s only so much cranberry sauce that one family can absorb!

I just counted and there are more than a dozen recipes for cranberry sauce in my “holiday” file. But in all the years, this recipe – Cranberry Sauce with Port and Figs from the November 2001 issue of Bon Appetit -- is probably my favorite. It’s quick and easy to make and never fails to earn a place at my Thanksgiving table. Try it and let me know what you think.

So do you make your own cranberry sauce, too? What’s your favorite recipe?

Guest Blogger Debbie Moose says:

It was the usual trip to the supermarket. Going through the checkout line. The cashier swiped my six-pack of Belgian ale with barely a glance at me and mashed a button. On the display appeared these words:

“Cashier has bypassed age validation.”

Translation: You’re obviously so old that not only do you not need to show an ID, you should probably be drinking more. Forget about the first time a bag boy called you “ma’am” -- bypassing age validation is the sure sign that you’re closer to the retirement home than you are to the dorm room.

Here are some other supermarket signs that you’re over 50:

• Among the impulse-buy items at the checkout, you’re more likely to grab dental floss than Skittles. To keep in your car.

We get really excited when our Desperation Dinners newspaper readers “redo” our recipes. Why?

For starters, it lets us know we’re not working in a vacuum – that folks out there really are using our recipes. It makes us try harder to get them right – to make these recipes the best they can be. But try as we might, and as hard as we might work on them, recipes at their best really are a collective effort. (Most of them, anyway.)

So when Anne Marshall, a Desperation Dinners reader from Statesville, N.C., wrote to us about her “redo” of our Faux Maque Choux, a Cajun-style corn and tomato stew, we felt the need to pass along the results of her efforts:

When my daughter’s dear high school friend Jeanine Mason won a spot as a finalist on the Fox hit “So You Think You Can Dance” last season, our entire family quickly got addicted to the competition. We first tuned in out of curiosity and to support Jeanine. I never expected to actually enjoy the show – or learn so much about the intricacies of the various dances.

All of the show’s young contestants made dance seem so appealing – and much to my husband’s dismay -- I developed an urge to take dancing lessons. (Would my aging hips still swivel enough to tango?)

Enter our month-long sojourn to Buenos Aires – the birthplace of tango. We studied Spanish in the mornings, and armed with suggestions from our tutors, each afternoon we set out to absorb the city’s rich cultural heritage. We’d often stumble onto street bands playing mournful tango melodies and dancers twirling on the sidewalks for tips. It was only a matter of time until we came face to face with the tango ourselves.

What on earth is an edamame? That’s what I wondered the first time I saw edamame, (pronounced ed-ah-MAH-may), listed on a Japanese restaurant menu. Well, they’re green soybeans picked before they ripen with a sweet, fresh taste. Since my first sighting in that sushi restaurant about six years ago, edamame has moved more into the mainstream.

Thanks to the glories of frozen vegetables and the younger generation of Americans who are obsessed with healthy foods, edamame can now be found in plastic bags in my regular supermarket’s frozen food section.

And I can choose edamame either shelled for use in cooking or still in the pods. Edamame in the pods are usually served as an appetizer or snack, boiled or steamed and lightly salted, and usually served slightly warm or at room temperature. The correct way to eat them is to squeeze the beans directly into your mouth and leave the pods behind.

Welcome to my kitchen table! Beverly and I have been sitting down with a “cuppa” coffee and catching up for more than 15 years. It doesn’t matter that we live 800 miles apart, we still pour a cup of coffee and carve out some time to chat. (Mostly over the phone, but it’s amazing with the internet what “kinds” of conversations you can actually have!)

I’d love to invite you to join me.

Starting today, we’re creating a new blog category exclusively for the kinds of things I talk about with my friends over coffee -- everything from my latest food craving or rumor, selling a home in today’s market and my way-too empty nest to the latest recipe I’ve conjured up.

My hope is you’ll also have ideas and passions to bring to the table so that our conversations get richer as time goes by.

Today’s Kitchen Scoop Home Page features something new – our very first sponsorship in the form of an ad featuring Rita Monti dinnerware. We thought perhaps you, our readers, might wonder what’s up with that?

We wish we could say we’re soon retiring to Southern Italy with our new-found riches from the proceeds of Internet sponsorships. Sadly, we’ll have to settle for dreaming and eating supper on one of Rita’s Italian dinner plates!

Humor aside, like most full-time bloggers we need a few quality sponsors on our Web pages in order to deliver the commentary, recipes, reviews and photographs at the level we hope you’ve come to expect from us. But don’t worry. Our standards are extremely high, and we promise not to crowd our pages with products we aren’t proud to stand beside. (And if something on Kitchen Scoop is sponsored, we’ll tell you it’s sponsored. See our Terms and Privacy Page for more details.)

That said, we hope you’ll click on Rita’s ad, visit her Web site and take advantage of the exclusive discount she’s offering Kitchen Scoop readers. (Remember to enter the coupon code “Scoop” at checkout.) Guess what we're buying our foodie friends for Christmas this year?!

Does it seem like all of YOUR friends are training for marathons too? While part of me is proud to call these people friends, a bigger part of me thinks they’ve lost their minds. Running 26 miles in one stretch, without ever having done it before? What on Earth could the motivation be? And that’s really the part of this marathon thing that intrigues me. Most of my newbie marathon-ing friends go from sedentary slouches to road runners with absolutely no warning.

But why do they do it? I guess I wouldn’t mind being able to say I’d finished a marathon, and I surely wouldn’t mind the weight that no doubt would fall off during training. But it’s hard for me to fathom, as I sit here in my cozy bed typing away at record speed, actually committing the time, energy and pain (no doubt) that a marathon would require.

“It never rains in California, but girl, don’t they warn ya? It pours, man, it pours!”
---Albert Hammond, et. al

Last month when the California Walnut Commission invited me out to the annual walnut harvest, I can’t tell you how excited I was to be heading to sunny California in October. I mean, who doesn’t love California at harvest time?

As my luck would have it, the weather featured torrential downpours the entire time I was there. Of course I didn’t bring rain gear and had to borrow a plastic poncho from our hosts. But more disappointing than my fashion faux pas was that we were not able to see the actual harvest. The orchards were too wet.

Everything, including the transformer-like “shaker,” was waiting on the rain to stop. (Walnuts in California are harvested from October through November.)