Archives - Weekly Update

We are arriving in your inboxes early as we get ready to head out for the long weekend. We are grateful to you, our readers! We love what we do, and we love sharing it with you.

I am hosting dinner here and making our traditional menu with the turkey recipe that I created in 1992...and have made every year since then! I have shared it with friends, and at least two caterers have asked for the recipe. I have adapted the cornbread sweet potato stuffing from DEAN FEARING’S SOUTHWEST CUISINE, which amusingly I picked up as a galley when I worked at Mademoiselle magazine. It’s now out of print, but I still have my food-stained copy.

A late Thanksgiving (falling on the 28th is the latest it can be) had me confused last weekend. I was all set for baking cornbread and getting ready for Turkey Day when I realized that I had another week to get prepared. So I slowed down...as in, I have not even written out a menu or a shopping list.

I am eyeing up the short window between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I have not made any more headway on lists for shopping, baking or entertaining there either. I will be cramming like the night before finals on all of it.

When I interviewed Susan Rieger about her novel, LIKE MOTHER, LIKE MOTHER, we talked about how the media landscape has changed over the past couple of decades and how we gather news on every topic in bits and bytes. There are times when we both miss the experience of settling in with a favorite magazine and turning the pages. I joke that by the time I watch the evening news, I already have read online about most of what is be reported. It got me thinking about the effect of this, as well as social media, on young people.

When we left off last week, I was trying to figure out how to spend the extra hour that Standard Time brought. I confess that I slept. Then I spent a whirlwind couple of hours cooking, making a double helping of butternut squash soup, as well as pumpkin muffins. And I roasted a batch of poblano chili peppers. I am not sure where this fever to cook and bake came from! Did I feel like November meant that it was time to gear up for the holidays with kitchen time?

Long-time readers know that this is my favorite weekend of the year. Why? Because we will get an extra hour to do with it what we want --- the hour that we lost back in March. And I have so many ways to spend this hour. Yes, I know that it will be dark earlier in the evening, and the shorter days of daylight are on the horizon. But for this weekend, there will be 60 minutes that I did not have since this weekend last year.