Chicken Paprika

Sure, why wouldn't you walk
that distance for chicken?

This is a valued and cherished family recipe that the Polish contingent of my mom's ancestry almost certainly stole from a famous Hungarian dish called Chicken Paprikash. Why would these old-timey Polish beet farmers (I assume) steal (I assume) a recipe from a country that's like 150 miles away (I google)? Well, apparently the two countries have pretty good relations, and a polish general even became a Hungarian hero after he defended Transylvania in a war. I'm not kidding. To paraphrase, Hungarians and Polish people like each other and probably shared bits of culture and cuisine because a long time ago a Polish man helped defend Hungary's treasured natural supply of vampires. Apparently the Hungarians were so incredibly thankful that they entrusted to Poland the recipe for Chicken Paprikash, a dish which contains no garlic whatsoever. They probably also gave the Polish their advanced neck washing technology, and their relaxing method of self massage via meat tenderizer. My family's Chicken Paprika recipe is a little different than a traditional Chicken Paprikash, but it is similar in a number a key ways, such as its inability to protect you against the undead.

Ingredients:
2 lb. Chicken Breast (You're looking for boneless, skinless chicken cutlets here. You can butcher them yourselves, or buy them pre-butchered from a butcher, or the butcher shop of a supermarket. Butcher butcher butcher.)
2 cups Flour
3 standard-issue Onions
1 lb. Carrots
2 cups Vegetable Stock
1/4 cup Vegetable Oil
1/2 tsp Black Pepper
Paprika (Traditional chicken paprikash tends to use sweet paprika. My mom's recipe calls for whatever paprika you get at the store. I use smoked paprika because I like that flavor. And so the evolution of cuisine continues.)
Salt

So I'm going to get the religious jargon out of the way right off the bat. It's currently the Jewish holiday of Passover, where religious Jews eschew such fancy modern things as...the vast majority of all foodstuffs, and instead eat flavorless crackers called matzoh, because nothing says "festivity" like "flavorless crackers." This is a dish that my family traditionally has on Passover, but regular old flour isn't so much allowed. So if you're in the same religious boat as me, replace the flour with finely ground flavorless crackers, and be on your merry way. Regardless of what floury substance you're using, combine it with a gentleman's pinch of both salt and pepper, along with a teaspoon of paprika. Toss your chicken in the seasoned flour mixture to give it a loose coating and a false sense of security before you unceremoniously toss it in to a pot with your hot oil in it over medium heat. Cook it for a couple minutes on each side, without fussing too much with it, so that it develops some nice browning. Work in batches if you have to, because it's better to wait an extra 10 minutes for delicious food than to have your food come out like hot garbage. That's an ancient Polish-Hungarian saying. Well, the original saying was more about leaving your windows unlocked at night, and not keeping wooden stakes around the house, but I'm sure this is what they meant.

Ok, we may have different definitions on what constitutes a
"bite-sized" chunk of carrot

While this is all going down, thinly slice your onions, peel your carrots, and chop them (The carrots) in to bite-sized chunks. Once your chicken is properly browned, take it out of the pot and toss your onions in to replace it along with another average-sized human's pinch of salt. Let that cook down for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. While they're cooking, combine your vegetable stock with...just a bunch of paprika. I think the actual recipe may call for something like 1.5 tablespoons, but when I've watched my mom make it she usually opens up the jar of paprika and just glops out about half the container. What's the worst that will happen? People will complain that your chicken paprika has too much paprika? Then knew what they were getting in to. Once your onions are soft and weak, like unsuspecting villagers, throw everybody in the pot. Your paprika stock, your chicken, your carrots. Everybody. Bring that whole mess up to a boil then cover it, reduce the heat to low, and simmer that sucker for 45 minutes. Once you're done, dump that pot of deliciousness into a pan and bake it, uncovered, at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. And that's it! Enjoy it on a picnic, at a passover seder, or while mourning the loss of another beloved neighbor or friend who mysteriously disappeared from the village last night. The choice is yours!

Smoked Fish Salad

Just like a narcissistic hoarder mermaid, we're gonna betray
this little guy. Fortunately, he'll taste delicious.

Well, it's a new year out there. From what I've seen so far it's mostly like the old year, but you can never be too sure. I'm only like halfway through testing out laws of physics, so there could be some fun new surprises in 2018. But I digress. Like I said, it's a new year, so I figured that it's a good time to make some old-world food that somehow stood the test of time. Specifically, I'm making a smoked whitefish salad, which is an absurdly tasty thing to eat with bread, crackers, or vegetables, plus is full of protein so it'll help you survive the harsh winter you'd experience in a frozen wasteland like Siberia or Chicago. You can technically still buy this stuff nowadays in delis and whatnot, but it's usually full of sugar. Which normally I don't have a problem with, but we're talking fish and (apparently) that's where I draw the line.

Ingredients:

1 lb. Whole Smoked Fish (I bought smoked chubs, because that's the flavor I grew up with. You've got some leeway here, but stick in that general vicinity. Pretty much any fish you could reasonably expect to catch on a midwestern fishing trip.)
2 Ribs of Celery
3 TBSP Mayonnaise
2 TBSP Sour Cream
1.5 TBSP Fresh Dill
1 TBSP Prepared Horseradish (It's important to help your horseradish prepare for what's coming next)
1 tsp Worcestershire Sauce
Juice from 1/2 a Lemon
Salt 
Black Pepper
Chives

The first thing you're gonna need to do is remove the meat from your fish. Ideally you should have started this some time back in 2017, because it'll take a while. It's not that it's particularly hard to get at the meat. It's that there are, at a conservative estimate, 37,000 tiny little bones that are going to try and come along for the ride. There aren't any good ways to help with this, but there are a couple of methods to try and help minimize the horror. One option is to kind of flake the fish off of the bones with a couple of forks. Prayer and shouting angrily are other, equally effective methods. Long story short, even after you carefully remove the fish from the bones, you're probably going to want to go over them between one and seven times, just to double (septuple) check that you're completely bone free. The bad news is that if you were to look at a clock you'd note that this entire process has taken forever. The good news is that it's pretty much antarctica outside, so where else did you have to be exactly?

This fish smoked 3 packs a day for the sake of flavor.
Let's not let that sacrifice be in vain. 

Once your fish is boneless, lightly mash it into chunks with a fork or other implement of culinary destruction. Then choppity chop up your celery in to tiny bits and toss it in there along with your chopped dill, your mayo, sour cream, horseradish, worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice. Mix the whole thing into a homogenous fish glop, and salt and pepper it to taste. Cover it up and toss it in your fridge for at least a couple hours so that all of the flavors get to know each other. This is important. Flavors that don't know each other, who awkwardly stand at either end of the dance floor staring at the ground can ruin an otherwise awesome dish. When you're serving this (by which I mean eating it on the couch while watching Netflix), take it out of the fridge, top it off with some fresh chopped chives, and slather it up on anything you've got lying around. Crackers, cucumbers, the flesh of those too weak to make it through the winter. This will make anything taste smoky, and salty, and awesome. So enjoy the winter! There's only like 3 and a half months left.

Eggnog Milkshake

Desolate winter snowscapes: the cause of adding booze to
things for roughly 1000 years.

Eggnog, it's commonly believed, was derived from a British drink popular in the middle ages called Posset. It is a classic British recipe consisting of taking stuff that doesn't have alcohol in it, and throwing some alcohol in it because it was Britain and the middle ages, and life wasn't especially worth living unless you were drunk enough to forget those things. Some people have theorized that alcohol was added in to preserve the drink and prevent people from getting sick. This is technically possible, but seems to be crediting a fair amount of scientific and medical knowledge to a group of people who literally used to bore holes in to each other's skulls to try and cure migraines. A more likely scenario is that alcohol was added to proto-eggnog in order to give people something to look forward to during the year so that they could better cope with the constant ridiculous insanity of their daily lives. It's used for pretty much the same purpose today. Adding ice cream and making it into a milkshake helps too.

Ingredients:

1 Cup Eggnog

1 Cup Vanilla Ice Cream (You want to get a decent vanilla ice cream here. The sort of vanilla that makes you think "delicious" instead of "boring.")

1/2 Cup Heavy Cream

1.5 TBSP Sugar

1/4 tsp Allspice

Cinnamon

Nutmeg

Whiskey!

So the first thing you're gonna need to do is find some eggnog. You can make it yourself, steal it, or buy it from a store. Homemade stuff will probably have a somewhat richer flavor and consistency, but we're mixing this with spices and ice cream, so it doesn't make that much of a difference. Though I've heard that eggnog won is twice as sweet as eggnog earned, so if you see any contests with an eggnog prize they might be worth entering. In any case, take your eggnog and toss in your allspice and cinnamon. If you want the best cinnamon flavor you can get, take some cinnamon sticks and throw them in a saucepan with your nog while heating it (Gently heating it. It's got dairy and eggs in it, neither of which you want curdling) for 20-30 minutes, and then let the mixture cool completely. If you have better things to do than spend upwards of an hour teasing out the the best flavor from your cinnamon, just add in half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and call it a day. Sure, it won't taste quite as deliciously cinnamon-y, but again: we're mixing this with ice cream and whiskey. Take your spiced nog and throw it in your fridge while you whip up your cream. 

Alcohol, ice cream, and eggnog. That'll hold you over until
it's warm outside again.

Take your cream, sugar, and a small sprinkling of nutmeg, and whip that nonsense together until it forms a thick and delicious cream. This should take about 5 minutes, or roughly until your arm has wanted to fall of for a minute and a half. Now it's time to talk about whiskey. Traditionally (at least in the USA), bourbon is added to eggnog. Personally, I think that Irish Whiskey has a much better flavor for a drink like this, but feel free to experiment. There are no wrong answers with whiskey (there are so many wrong answers with whiskey. Evan Williams happens to be one.) As for how much of it to use, you can really add in as much or as little as you'd like. It's just about personal taste and your specific level of alcoholism and depression. Personally, I like it when the whiskey is one flavor that melds with the other flavors in the eggnog to make something new and awesome. That's about 2 TBSP of whiskey in this recipe. But if you drink eggnog more to forget the pains of all the times that Santa wronged you than to drink delicious drinks, feel free to up that to 2 liters, or whatever amount of whiskey soothes the violent raging storm in your soul. Then add your whipped cream on top and maybe some sprinkles because sprinkles are fun, especially when alcohol is involved, and maybe I've already had a few. Enjoy! 

Spiced Hot Chocolate

There's nothing like a pyramid for some good old-fashioned
religious ceremony, sacrifice, and chocolate

Chocolate is pretty ubiquitous. You pretty much can't go to any store without finding enough of the stuff to choke an oompa-loompa to death. This wasn't always the case. The Aztecs used to use cocoa beans as a currency, and would drink a bitter hot chocolate mixed with chiles, spices, and vanilla for religious events which, since they were Aztecs, meant weddings and human sacrifices. Fun times. Then the Spanish came "liberated" Mesoamerica from its owners and "civilized" the inhabitants by introducing modern inventions like steel and gunpowder, often at very rapid rates. They brought chocolate back with them to Spain where it slowly gained popularity despite tasting like hot garbage because nobody had thought to add milk or sugar to it yet. The Spanish did make some changes to the recipe though. They added whale vomit. Seriously, they totally did. Sure, the Aztecs had just lost an empire, but watching the Spanish choke that down had to have brought some smiles to their faces.

Ingredients:

2 cups Whole Milk

1.25 cups Heavy Cream

1/2 cup Sugar

6 oz. Dark Chocolate (I used chocolate chips, but bars or whatever are fine. Just break them up into small chunks before using them)

5 Cardamom Pods

2 Star Anise Pods

2 Cinnamon Sticks

1 Serrano Pepper

1/4 tsp Allspice

1/4 tsp Vanilla Extract

1/8 tsp Ground Ginger

Nutmeg

Salt

So this is kind of a blending of some modern hot chocolate sensibilities combined with some flavors reminiscent of the original, more human-sacrificy version. Spices and flavor galore, but also creaminess and some sweetness, and probably no whale vomit. So get started by slicing your serrano pepper in half and removing the seeds. Then throw it in a pot along with your milk and 1/4 cup of your cream. Add in your cardamom, anise, vanilla, cinnamon, half your allspice, and half of your sugar and crank that sucker up to medium. Now it's times to deal with the nutmeg. Nutmeg is one of those things that tastes awesome as long as you don't use enough of it for anybody to be able to tell that it's in there. Otherwise it just kind of tries to overpower everything else and ruins the whole party, kind of like you when you're drunk. So add a tiny little sprinkling of nutmeg to your milk. Just enough that you can see it floating there before you stir it together. Once your sugar is dissolved, turn the heat off and let that sucker sit for about 20 minutes or so. We in the "sitting around and doing nothing for 20 minutes" game call this "steeping." While you're steeping, feel free to start making your whipped cream. Take a bowl and toss in your remaining cream, sugar, and allspice, along with your ginger. Then take a whisk and stir it around until if forms whipped cream and your arm hurts bad enough that you wish you could just take it out on somebody by sacrificing them to the gods. Careful though. If you whip your cream too much it will turn in to butter, which totally sounds like a punishment from the gods for insufficient sacrifices to me. 

Sure, you don't have to put in so much whipped cream that
it starts to drip down the side. Joy isn't mandatory.

Once your whipped cream is made and you're good and steeped, turn your heat back up to medium and add your chocolate in to the milk and spice mixture along with an oompa-loompa sized pinch of salt. Stir that sucker pretty continuously until your chocolate melts and the whole thing looks and smells incredible. Turn off the heat and strain out the various peppers and pods from the liquid. Or don't bother with any straining, and just be careful when you drink it. Either way. Just don't blame me if a small liquorice-flavored starfish gets lodged in your esophagus. Anyhow, put your chocolatey goodness into a cup, top it off with your whipped cream, and enjoy! It's sweet, but not too sweet, and just kind of awesome in every way. You're welcome. This recipe should make two good sized cups of hot chocolate, which is perfect because it's totally a drink that you should share with a friend or loved one. And if you don't have a friend or loved one, now you have an extra cup of hot chocolate to drown your lonely lonely sorrows in. Happy Holidays!

Mulled Wine

Any work of fiction that has castles and horses
counts as medieval Europe. That's the law.

Well, it's official. There's snow on the ground in Chicago. I know that's not much of a shocker. It's kind of like saying that water is wet, or that a Oscar winning movie is disappointing, but it's still pretty momentous for me. I spent six years living in LA, where they think that snow is a myth believed only by credulous savages who haven't even done a juice cleanse this month. Seeing snowfall again has been calming, good for my soul, and cold. Like, really cold. Literally freezing. So now it's time to come up with ways to warm myself up and pretend like I'm somewhere else, anywhere else, where I don't have to shovel anything and my face doesn't hurt from being outside. Medieval Europe sounds about right. Nothing says "comfort and tranquility" like a drink popularized when people regularly died from getting run over by a horse.

Ingredients:

1 bottle Red Wine (I used a cabernet sauvignon that has a fair amount of sweetness in it, but follow your alcoholic heart and/or liver! If you're using something aggressively dry though, add in a tablespoon of honey to the rest of the ingredients)
12 Cloves
6 Cardamom Pods
4 Cinnamon Sticks
1/2 an Orange
Ginger

So mulled wine, as far as I can tell, was developed by the Romans back when they were conquering all the parts of the world that they were aware of. They liked wine, and brought it with them to the north because what sober person is going to go to war in the snow while wearing sandals? It seems like every European country has their own fiercely exclusive version of mulled wine, most of which are almost exactly the same. This is an amalgamation of what seemed best from all of those versions. So the first thing to do is open your bottle of wine and carelessly dump it in a pot. Then peel some ginger and slice off 2 1/2 inch thick wedges. If you like things more or less gingery I won't stop you from messing with this amount, just remember that this is about a balance of flavors, and that you've ruined it all and made an inferior version for yourself. Next slice the peel off of your orange half. Try to get as little of the white pith in with your peel as possible, because it (the pith) is bitter, and who needs that in their life? Toss your peel into the wine along with your ginger. Now for the rest of your ingredients you've got some options. You can just throw them in, but then you'll have to deal with the annoyance of straining them out later. Another way to go is to toss them in a spice bag or some cheesecloth, tie it off, and then just toss the resulting spice sack in your wine. Either way, crank your heat all the way up to a gentleman's...low.

Seriously, if I didn't have work I'd just sit home and sip
this all day. I considered calling in sick.

So here's the thing about alcohol. It evaporates pretty easily, which is exactly what it's going to do if you heat up your mulled wine too much. But you need the heat to extract flavor our of your spices and whatnot. It's a fine balancing act that's kind of a pain for a couple minutes, but totally worth it in the end. Let your wine stew for about 20 minutes, being careful not to let it boil. If you've got to take it off of the fire for a couple minutes here and there to achieve that, then so be it. Sure, you probably have other things you could be doing, but let's be honest: you weren't going to use that time productively anyway, and it's totally worth 20 minutes of your time to make a warm, delicious, alcoholic drink that kind of effervesces on your tongue with a crazy and awesome balance of spices. After that it's pretty simple. Pour it in to a cup, with optional garnishes like a cinnamon stick or a twist of orange peel, and then sip it slowly while brooding in your castle and contemplating the state of your fiefdom. Enjoy, and tune in next week when we continue Drinkcember with even more beverage goodness!

Whole Wheat French Bread

Artist's depiction: The French Revolution

The French have given us a great many things over the years. Canning, the guillotine, cartoon skunks that borderline sexually assault cats. The list goes on and on. But as much as we in our modern society enjoy of all of these French wonders (like eating snails, and defending the eating of snails), none of them are quite as iconic and delicious as french bread. Which makes sense. What's not to love? It's a stick of delicious crusty bread that you can choose to eat immediately, save for later, or brandish as a weapon. That's pretty much the American dream right there. Which makes this the second time that the French have helped facilitate it, and this time Benjamin Franklin didn't even need to get syphilis.

Ingredients:

3 cups Whole Wheat Flour
1.25 cups Warm Water (Most internet sources say your warm water should be about 110 degrees. That's great if you want to set up a candy thermometer in a pot of water and cook it while meticulously watching it to make sure you reach your ideal temperature. Or you could use hot water from the faucet, which on average is between 105 and 115 degrees. Your call)
1 TBSP Honey
1/4 oz. Active Dry Yeast (That's one packet. Or about 2.25 teaspoons for the packetless among you)
Salt
Oil
Corn Meal
More flour. All the flour.
An optional Egg White

So, at this point we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that this is indeed a whole wheat recipe. *Gasp. I know. Sure, the name of the post could have warned you about this and saved you some shock, but let's not get bogged down on who should have read what and when. The fact is that while modern french bread is probably rooted in Napoleon's regulation of the baking industry, the reason that he did that was to prevent the dissatisfaction the lower classes previously had about being not being allowed white flour. Also I have a giant bag of whole wheat flour I need to use up. So shut it. Anyway, stir together your yeast, water, and honey, and let them sit together for about 10 minutes. When you come back to check on them, they should be kind of frothy. It's actually pretty cool to watch this happen, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you have better things to do for 10 minutes than watch a bunch of yeast belching. Most (Seemingly all) online recipes use the exact same phrase for the next part. "In a stand mixer with a dough hook attachment..." Yeah, we're not doing that. You know what they had before stand mixers? Hands. That's what. You know what they had before "dough hook attachments?" Big wooden spoons that they also used to hit slackers with. It was a magical time. Once you're done fantasizing about all of the people you'd hit with a wooden spoon if it was socially acceptable, stir two big pinches of salt into your gassy yeast, followed by your 3 cups of flour. Stir the crap out of it until it forms into a dough that doesn't cling to the sides of your bowl. If you need to, add more flour to achieve this.

Best served as far away from people eating snails as possible

Now you need to knead your dough (That sentence was even more ridiculous before revisions). Flour some flat surface in your home that you don't mind getting covered in flour, and plop your dough ball down on it. Press it down, stretch it, and fold it in half. Repeat, adding more flour as necessary, for about 8 minutes, or until your hand starts to hurt and your brain goes numb. Throw it in a greased up bowl and store it in a warm place so the dough can rise. Give it at least an hour for this, then punch it down so that it doesn't get snooty from all of the gas it created (a lot of the issues that people have with the French comes from them having not been properly punched down) and form it into a log. Throw some corn meal down on a baking pan and plop your dough log onto it. If you want to get fancy, take a sharp knife and slice the top of it diagonally 3 or four times (evenly spaced out). Let it sit for about 10 more minutes to puff up a little bit more before throwing it in the oven. If you want to get even fancier, brush some egg white over the top of the dough. In any case, after your 10 minutes, throw that sucker in a 375 degree oven for about 30 minutes. If you want to get your bread extra crusty, throw a couple ice cubes in the oven right before you close it. They say that when french bread is done it should sound hollow. I don't know if that's true, but I do know that if you grab bread out of a 375 degree oven to see how it "sounds," you'll probably burn your hands and/or ears. Happy baking!

Mint Julep

This bridge connecting with Indiana is one of Louisville's top
attractions. That's right, their "attraction" is a way to leave

You know how it is. It's some time around midnight and you're driving around with a friend trying to figure out what to do between the hours when normal people go to sleep, and when you go to sleep. And eventually, after some hemming and hawing, you settle on the obvious choice. You drive to Kentucky. At least that's what happened to me earlier this week. In my defense, I wanted to do it and you're not the boss of me. I learned some valuable things along the way. One is that Indiana is boring and goes on forever. Seriously...think about it. One of their main attractions is that you can go hang out with the Amish. I have nothing against the Amish, but if they're your main tourist attraction then you've obviously collectively given up as a State. The main point of all of this is that two days ago I was in Kentucky, the current home of bourbon, horse racing, and apparently not much else. But who says I need anything else? Also, I didn't see any horse races.

Ingredients:

Approximately 10 Mint leaves (Spearmint is traditional, but that's mostly just because it's pretty common in the south. Use whatever mint makes you happy.)

Bourbon

Superfine Sugar (You want the sugar to dissolve as much as possible in the bourbon. Some people use simply syrup or powdered sugar, but you can't really muddle your mint with those. Which is a problem for me. And now for you.)

Ice

The first thing you're going to do is get a weirdly specific history lesson. Because the Mint Julep has a couple weird little traditions around it, most of which I'm ignoring because I don't own silver cups. Oh, one of those traditions is that they're served in silver cups. Or sometimes pewter cups. I also don't have pewter cups. Essentially, a Julep was a kind of medicinal drink back in the day when doctors were like 5 times as fun, but only 1/2 as effective as they are now. It was said to be "restorative," which is late-19th-century-speak for "fun," and people would often start their day with one. It can technically be made with any liquor, but since it became the official drink of the Kentucky Derby, bourbon has been the most common base. Why is it the official drink of the Kentucky Derby? Well, Kentucky is crazy hot and humid in the summer, and drinking some icy mint-based drinks had to help with that. And after drinking enough bourbon, maybe it wasn't as boring to watch horses run in a circle. 

Of course the glass isn't full. I had to taste it.
For....quality assurance. Yeah, that holds up.

Anyway, step one is to toss your mint and sugar in the bottom of a cup and muddle them a bit. Muddling, for those of you who don't have mounds of useless knowledge stacked up in your brain next to a carton of commercial jingles from the 90s, is essentially pressing firmly down on fresh ingredients in a glass so that the flavors get released and can seep into the drink better. The sugar will help with this. The tiny sugar crystals will tear into the mint just slightly. Then pack your glass full of crushed ice if you can get it, or regular ice if, like me, crushed ice only happens to you at fancy cocktail parties and dinners that you're only able to attend because you won a raffle (That actually happened to me). Anyhow, add in your bourbon until it's about 3/4 of the way full and stir to combine. Top the rest of it off with ice, and enjoy living the life of a southern gentleman. Except you can't afford things like horses. Maybe you can afford glue. Go drink your bourbon and do some arts and crafts.

Matzah Pizza

Here we have Matzah, in its natural habitat. Notice how the
ridges camouflage it, helping the matzah to better elude flavor.

For the...less semitic of my readers, saddle up because this is gonna, without a doubt, be the most jewish-y post I've ever posted. Because, as you may-or-may-not be aware, we're currently deep within the bowels of the Jewish holiday known as "Passover." And, as you may-or-may-not-but-I'm-betting-on-not be aware, one of the key elements of this holiday is eschewing a vast array of foods, including leavened breads. Another is drinking large amounts of wine, which is pretty much the only way to get through a week without leavened bread. What does this all mean, practically? Well, for starters, it means that you should be nice to your Jewish co-workers this week, because they're cranky. It also means that for the more observant Jewish people out there, there's pretty much nothing to eat, so you have to make due with weird facsimiles of real food. Which brings us to Matzah Pizza.

Ingredients:

2 standard-issue Matzahs (A Matzah is an unleavened wheat cracker. Essentially, it's big cracker that has slightly less flavor and nutritional value than the box it comes in. Any supermarket with a kosher section likely has them.)
4 TBSP Marinara Sauce
4 oz. Cheese (What kind of cheese? That's a whole pit of nonsense and terror we'll get into later. But the short answer is, Mozzarella if you can get it)
1/4 tsp Red Pepper Flakes
1/4 tsp Dried Oregano
1/4 tsp Garlic Powder
1 average-sized human's pinch of Salt

The first thing you're gonna need to do is abandon all hope of this thing you're making looking or tasting like pizza. Unless you live in California, in which case this will probably be the most authentic and delicious pizza you've ever had in your life. Take one of your matzahs and slather it up with half of your marinara. Fun fact: because of all of the dietary restrictions involved in Passover, many people won't eat any processed foods that haven't come from a factory specifically monitored to make sure that it's Passover compliant. Another fun fact is that pretty much all of the companies that make food specifically for Passover have absolutely no idea what they're doing when it comes to the making food part. Which is why you'll see a bottle that says something like "Spicy Tomato and Basil Marinara" and take it home, only to realize that it's essentially plain tomato juice with sugar added in for some reason. Anyway, back to our Matzah, which we just spread "marinara" on top of. Take half of your red pepper, oregano, and garlic, and add them on top of the marinara to help make up for its many flaws.

"Pizza cheese." Because who doesn't put a weird combination
of cheddar and mozzarella cheeses on their pizza?

Now we're up to cheese. Which often suffers from the same Passover-related maladies as things like marinara. If you're lucky, you'll be able to find actual cheese, with standard names like "mozzarella," "cheddar," or "whiz." But, often times you'll have to suffer through weird pseudo-cheese blends like "fancy shreds" or "pizza cheese." I prefer "pizza cheese" over the various shreds, because they're at least confident enough that they won't be sued for putting cheese in the name. Add 1 oz. of it on to your marinara. Next, add your second matzah on top of the cheese, and start repeating this process. Because matzah is horrible stuff, and if you want it to have enough sauce to be flavorful, it'll lose all structural integrity, so we need layers. Or pacts with your friendly neighborhood deity. Or both. Anyhow, slather up your second matzah with the rest of your garlic, oregano, and red pepper, along with your salt for good measure. Add on the rest of your cheese, and toss that sucker in a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes. And that's it! Aren't you glad you got sucked into the terrifying world of Jewish cookery during Passover? Me neither

Lokshen Milk

Welcome to the exciting, fast-paced world of eating way too
much dairy. Currently unincorporated

Everyone grew up eating something. For some people that something was unreasonably large amounts of fast food. For others it was cheap ingredients, coerced against their natures into delicious home-cooked meals designed to stretch a struggling family’s income. And for some it was...I don't know…chicken? What do nondescript people eat? I'm sticking with chicken. Chicken and asparagus. Some people ate chicken and asparagus. Today however, we’re focusing on the second category of food, and specifically on a dish that I remember fondly from my youth. It’s easy to make, tastes good, and is a great way to feed a family for about two dollars and some change. And the recipe has been in my family for generations. Two generations, as far as I know, but it still counts.

Ingredients:

½ gallon Milk
½ lb. Pasta (traditionally, growing up, my family was fairly specific about the pasta used. Upon growing up I've come to realize that it doesn't really matter, and my mother won't actually barge into my apartment and stop me from using the “wrong noodles.” Because I won't buzz her up.)
1.5 TBSP Butter
Salt

The first thing you're gonna need to do is channel your inner poor immigrant of vaguely eastern-European descent. Got it? Cool, let’s get started. The name Lokshen Milk, loosely translated, means noodle milk. Which sounds super gross, especially given the propensity these days for weird alternative forms of milk. But what it actually is, essentially, is a soup. Maybe even a stew, depending on the proportions of the ingredients (which I guess is technically true of most things), but I'm gonna play it safe and stick with the soup version. Anyhow, take your pasta and throw it in some boiling water until it's al dente (a curious Italian phrase I may have mocked at one time or another, that means “to the tooth.” Which essentially means that it [the pasta] is cooked, but still offers resistance when bitten. Like a sleeping person on a beach).

It looks exactly like what it is. A bowl full of milk and pasta.
It tastes awesome though.

Once your pasta is cooked to my liking, drain it and then throw it right back into the pot again. Add in your butter and milk, along with salt to taste, and bring that sucker up to...well, not quite a boil. Boiling milk is generally frowned upon. People say it burns super easily and that it kills the nutrients. This may be true. What's definitely true is that it makes a crazy mess. So bring your milk up to just under a boil. Then serve it up to your squalling family by the bowlful. And I know that some of you are undoubtedly sitting with your hands eagerly raised, begging to ask how a giant bowl of milk, butter, pasta, and salt can possibly be healthy for you. Well, I promised it'd be cheap, easy, and delicious. I also may have promised through insinuation that it wouldn't be chicken and asparagus. I never said anything about healthy.

Peppermint Scnogg

Dramatization

Some of you may have noticed that I didn't post anything last week. This may or may not have to do with the Cubs being in the World Series for the first time in generations. All we know for sure is that during the unscheduled break, Halloween happened. Which means that, legally speaking, it's now the Christmas Season. You can tell from how I was totally able to go buy Eggnog at the supermarket. That's one of the main characteristics of the Christmas Season. The others are trees smothered in pounds of tinsel, popcorn strung up and hung as a warning to the others, and people in weird hats asking you for money. And what better way to celebrate a new season (or month, or day) than with booze?

Ingredients:

3 Parts Eggnog
1 Part Peppermint Schnapps (Sure, you could totally buy this from the store like some sort of fancyman who likes spending more money on less quality. Or you could be a man and make it yourself)
Mini Chocolate Chips

The first thing you're gonna need to do is find or steal some holiday cheer. Because it's barely even November, and we're gonna be stuck with obnoxious music and displays in our stores for a long time. Once you're done storing up cheer for the barren winter months, go get some eggnog. I'm experimenting with some eggnog recipes, and may end up posting one in a week or two, but for now anything you find in the store is fine. Within reason. Don't get some weird unmarked carton that has "nog" scrawled on it in crayon. Also don't get some weirdly flavored, artisan, vegan, cruelty-free, fair-trade, bespoke "egg"nog that costs 12 dollars per ounce. Just regular eggnog, like a normal person would.

Santa hat I wore through Ireland added for nostalgia purposes

Take your aggressively neutral nog and mix it with peppermint schnapps. The amounts don't really matter. It all depends on how many people you're serving, or on how sad and alone you are. The important thing is the proportions. For every 1 part of schnapps, add in 3 parts of eggnog. Mix it together and pour it into some glasses. Top it with mini chocolate chips to make it look all pretty and delicious. Because we're full of holiday cheer, and so we're gonna be festive and decorative, you hear? Or else I'm gonna turn this car around and nobody gets to go to Santa's village. It's gonna be a long couple months.

BBQ Chicken Tacos

Not pictured: tequila shots

Recently, a tier-3 vassal of some idiot politician made some dumb comment about lax immigration control leading to "a taco truck on every corner." Practically nobody has heard of this random flunky, including key members of his immediate family. For all intents and purposes, his opinion doesn't really matter. So naturally, it's all anybody has been talking about for a week. Because the news sells ads based on people watching, and they're more likely to watch when they're scared or outraged. So if there's nothing to scare or outrage people, it's time to make something that'll scare and outrage them. It's not uncommon, during a particularly slow news week, to see Anderson Cooper killing penguins at the the zoo. But I digress. The point is, now I have an excuse to make delicious delicious tacos. Also, yadda yadda xenophobia. Tacos!

Ingredients:

2.5 lb Chicken Breasts
28 oz Crushed Tomatoes (This is gonna get cooked down with a lot of big flavors for a while, so you don't need to splurge on the best brand you can find. But it's probably still best to avoid products with names like "Big Jim's Sack of Backyard Tomaters.")
2 TBSP Worcestershire Sauce 
1.5 TBSP Brown Sugar
1/2 TBSP Balsamic Vinegar
1/2 TSBP Apple Cider Vinegar
2 tsp Chili Powder
1 tsp Onion Powder
1 tsp Dijon Mustard
1 tsp Hot Sauce
1 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Garlic Powder 
2 Limes
Corn Tortillas
Avocado
Red Onion
Cilantro

The first thing you're gonna need to do check and see if you have a "slow-cooker," which is the network-television-nonsense way of saying crockpot. If you don't, you can still make this recipe, but life will just suck a little bit more for you. Even more so than it does now, which is probably a fair amount because you don't have a crockpot. Take your crushed tomatoes, and throw them in the crockpot (or, if you're one of the uninitiated crockless, a dumb old regular pot) along with the chicken, worcestershire, brown sugar, vinegar, chili powder, onion powder, hot sauce, salt, and garlic powder. That's pretty much everything. That's how you know it's gonna be a good recipe. When youp pretty much just shove everything together at once, flourish your hands like a terrible birthday magician, and say "cook!" Set your crockpot to high, cover it, and let it cook for 4 hours. Or, if you're using an analog pot, set it over low heat, cover it, and let it cook for 4.5 hours. Normally when there's some down time in a recipe, we use it preparing the next bit of cookery. But this is a 4 hour break. So go do something that takes almost 4 hours. Binge watch a TV show, go to the DMV, or watch the first 10 minutes of a Zack Snyder movie. Everybody meet back here in about 4 hours. On your mark...set...GO!

Not pictured: more tequila shots. All the tequila shots.
See you all on "why god, why?" Wednesday!

Welcome back! You're just in time for the fun part, and by "fun" I mean...cathartic, I guess. Take the lid off of your pot, grab a couple forks, and shred the bejeezus out of your chicken. It should be crazy tender and just kind of fall apart, but stab it repeatedly with your forks and rip it asunder just for good measure. Then add in the juice from your limes, stir that nonsense together, cover it with a lid again, and let it sit for another 10 minutes. Use this time (see, I told you) to chop your remaining vegetation, and to heat up your tortillas. Chop your avocado into slices, and chop your onion into itty bitty onion bits. Then set a pan over low heat, and toast your tortillas on both sides. If you like things extra delicious, add a little bit of oil to the pan before you do this. You're not deep frying them or anything, so just barely coat the pan. After about 30-60 seconds on each side, they should be fine. Then take your tortillas, stack them 2 deep so they don't just fall apart, add some meat, avocado, red onion, and a little bit of cilantro on them, fold and consume. You may have noticed you have a lot of chicken. That's because it's taco tuesday, not a day for the solitary eating of one taco, but a day for the mass gorging on tacos by the populace at large. So gather or hire some friends, get everybody together, and eat awesome food. Or just eat them all yourself. The important thing is, even though I still don't know the name of the guy who started all of this controversy in the first place., we managed to turn nothing into a massive public debate, thus saving the lives of all the cats living in Brian Williams' neighborhood. Also, tacos!

Matzah Balls

They bled yer mama, bled yer papa, but they won't bleed you

Matzah Balls are kind of interesting. They're, by Hollywood's dumb standards anyway, the quintessential Jewish foodstuff. They taste awesome, aren't particularly hard to make, and still, pretty much the only time any of us has any is when we're at a jewish holiday meal in the certified home of a genuine Jewish grandmother. And I, for one, am sick and tired of hiding in their attics hoping for a scraps (The creepiest thing I've typed on this blog to date, ladies and gentlemen. Let's see if we can beat that record.)

Ingredients:

1 Cup Matzah Meal (For the "differently Jewish" among you, Matzah is a terrible terrible cracker Jews consume for religious reasons during Passover. Matzah Meal is what happens if you crush it into itty bitty pieces over and over, so that you never have to see its stupid matzah face again.)
4 Eggs
2.5 TBSP Schmaltz (As I've mentioned before, schmaltz is rendered chicken fat. For an inauthentic version of how to achieve this, demonstrated by a woman who is clearly writing a novel in her free time in which she murders absolutely everybody she knows, click here!)
1 tsp Salt
1 tsp Ground Ginger
1 Average Sized Human's pinch of White Pepper
Chicken Stock!
Water!

The first thing you're gonna need to do is channel your inner Jewish grandmother. This mostly involves hinting to every relative you have that they really should call and visit more often unless of course they want you to sit alone and forgotten in your big empty house, and dropping the hint that they'll die of a wasting sickness if they don't start eating more. Also some light housework. Once it's all done, collect your eggs together, tearfully explain to them what they're about to go through, and then beat them until their insides are all mixed together. Add in your matzah meal, schmaltz, salt, ginger, and pepper, and stir to combine. Then cover that weird glop, shove it in the fridge, and let it think about what it's done for at least 15 minutes.

Not pictured: thousands of years of persecution, soup

While your gunk is in the fridge getting to know itself, heat up a pot full of chicken stock until it boils. Fill up a cup with water, and set it to the side. Take your matzah sludge out of the fridge (Assuming it's been at least as long as I told you to wait. Don't be using that statement as an excuse to ignore my instructions and still blame me for your inevitable demise. I'm looking at you, the entire nation of Zambia). Dip your hands into the water that you totally didn't forget to set aside, and form your matzah goop into balls about the size of a golf ball. Let them sit for a minute to get a false sense of security, and then dump those suckers right into your boiling chicken stock. Cover them and let them boil for about an hour, when they've doubled in size, are soft and fluffy throughout, and are no longer calling out for help or whistling. And that's it! Serve them in delicious soup if you're authentic. Serve them on their own if you're trying way too hard. The point is, you're not gonna have any leftovers. Also, regardless of who you are, you're like one eight more Jewish now. You're welcome.

Chicago Pizza

Chicago: City of broad shoulders and thick pizzas

Let's get one thing clear. This post isn't about bashing New York pizza as inferior. That said, this will be the best pizza you've ever had. Also, New York pizza is terrible. Well, at least it is now. Because when I say "New York pizza," I'm not talking about what New York pizza used to be, which most of us would just call regular pizza. I'm talking about the nonsense that's popped up more recently where New Yorkers, feeling threatened by the thick slab of awesome that is Chicago Pizza, started taking pride in getting their crust as thin as humanly possible, to the point where you're pretty much just eating a cheesy cracker. The point is, there is absolutely nothing wrong with regular pizza. But there's something incredible about Chicago style pizza, which is full of flavor and weighs more than you do. And also, modern New York cracker pizza is an abomination to the pizza lord. Their time will come.

Ingredients;

3 cups Flour

1 cup warm Water (if you can't find warm water at your local supermarket, but some regular water and throw fire at it)

32 oz. Tomato Sauce

10 oz. Mozzarella

10 oz. Spicy Sausage (If, like me, you fall into the religious Jew category of life, or if you fall into the vegetarian category, use vegetarian sausage. If, like me, you've discovered that vegetarian sausage sucks, make your own using fake ground meat, spices, butter, flour, tomato sauce, and fire.)

1/4 cup Vegetable Oil

1/4 cup Olive Oil 

1/4 cup softened Butter

1/4 cup Corn Meal (Chicago Pizza is very 1/4 cup-centric. This dates back decades to the Bears inability to get a decent quarterback. It's a sad story, but it makes for good pizza. I'm gonna call it worth it)

2 tsp Salt
1 packet of Instant Yeast

More Olive Oil!
A cast iron skillet!

The first thing you're gonna need to do is channel your inner Chicagoan. For me, that's not a problem, since my inner Chicagoan happens to also be my outer Chicagoan. So much so that I hunted down a Packers bar out here in LA, and watched a Bears/Packers game there dressed in an array of Bears gear. For the rest of you, just fake it and commit hard. Once you've got that down, mix your Yeast and your Water, and let them sit for a couple minutes to get to know each other. If necessary, play some smooth jazz. Then mix in your Vegetable and Olive oils and whisk until it all looks homogenous. Add in your Corn Meal and your Flour, and get ready for some fun. In case you were wondering, by "fun" I meant "kneading. All of the kneading. All that there could be." Some swanky recipes will tell you to use a "stand mixer," with a "bread hook," to make this part easier on your hands. But since I happen to be a man, and not some sort of nonsensical hipster boychild, we're doing this by hand. Also, I don't own any of those things. Mix your dough until it starts to form a goopy ball of dough in the middle of your bowl (By the way, you should have been mixing these things in a bowl, not just throwing them down on an increasingly messy table) then start to knead the crap out of it. Take the heel of your hand, and press it into your dough mound. Then stretch it over itself. After about 2 minutes, add in your Butter, and then continue until your arm hurts, and you wish you'd never read this blog in the first place. About 5 minutes, all things considered.

I warned you. The best pizza you've ever had. Chicago
pizza: anything less would be uncivilized.

Take your dough ball, and put it in bowl you rubbed down with Olive Oil. Let it sit there for about 40 minutes to rise. Once it rises, punch it down to teach it a valuable life-lesson. Then let it rise again just to give it hope for a better tomorrow. Now it's time to assemble this pizza. Rub some Olive Oil on your cast iron skillet, and plop your dough ball down in the middle. Gently press it down and out towards the edge of the pan, and eventually up the sides of it, forming a thin layer. It will try to spring back down into the pan like a jerk. Keep pulling it back up the sides of the pan. Be persistent, and break its will. Then spread out your sausage in a layer along the bottom. Top it with a layer of your Mozzarella, and finally a layer of Tomato Sauce. Take that whole pan full of awesome and throw it into a 425 degree oven for 40-60 minutes, until the crust gets golden and awesome looking. Once it's ready, try your best to let it cool slightly before digging in. Fail at this, and give yourself consolation points for not just shoving yourself face-first into the pizza, disfiguring burns be-damned. Fail at this too. Enjoy!

Cholent

Kishke likes to spread out in the hot-tub, making
everybody pretty uncomfortable

There's a traditional dish that people of the Jewish persuasion have historically eaten on the Sabbath. It's called Cholent, and essentially is a thick stew that cooks for ever and ever until your apartment smells incredible. But you can't eat it yet, because it's 3 AM, and you have guests coming tomorrow for lunch. So it sits there, taunting you as you count down the hours until you can finally eat it. Your guests arrive (probably at least 9 hours later, unless you're hosting some super weird night-lunches like a serial killer), and you pretty much dispense with pleasantries. Or conversation. Or waiting for them to get in the door. You saw them walking up, that's good enough. It's time to eat! Preferably all in one go because for some reason, no matter how good it is, it always tastes terrible reheated. So find, kidnap, or rent some friends and family members for this one. Because we're eating a giant pot of awesomeness, in its entirety. Or else we're suffering the sophie's choice of throwing out perfectly good food, or eating a terrible reheated mess that'll only serve to remind you how incredible it was when you made it, and how much it isn't that now. In the spirit of all vaguely traditional vaguely ethnic cuisine, to be truly authentic your recipe has to have some pedigree. I adapted mine from my mother, who I'm pretty sure made it up on her own. And now it's, at least to some degree, yours. That's 3 levels of being passed down. If it doesn't taste authentic enough, pass along the recipe to somebody else real quick to give it a boost.

Ingredients:

1 lb Beef Shank
4 standard issue White Potatoes
1 standard issue Onion
1 Cup Barley
1 24 oz. jar of Marinara
1 tsp Salt (For those of you unfamiliar with how meat becomes Kosher, part of the process is slathering it in salt. Some butchers/brands' final products are salty, some aren't. If you're using Kosher meat, use your best judgement. Then frantically adjust the seasoning when your guests arrive and you finally taste your food and discover your mistake, despite the fact that we both know it's kinda too late)
1/2 tsp Garlic Powder
1/2 tsp Black Pepper
1/4 tsp Cayenne Pepper
1 entire Kishke
An unspecified amount of Water
An awesome kitchen gadget that modern technology tries hard to ruin 

The first thing you're gonna need to do is find or steal a Crock Pot. Or slow cooker. Or whatever. When browsing through your local mega-mart or neighbors' houses, don't be fooled by fancy expensive slow cookers. They have digital displays, and whistles, and bells, and hooks, and timers, and they pretty much always suck. Badly. For my money, the super cheap ones with one pot, one knob, and a whole lot of sucking it up and being a man, are the best option. They give you a couple different temperature settings, and they do their very simple job very well. Once you've "acquired" an acceptable cooking vessel, it's time to throw everything inside of it. That's pretty much it. Choppity chop the onion into itty bits, and regularly chop the potatoes into larger, recognizably potato-ish, chunks. And toss them in the pot along with your barley, spices, and marinara. Then add in water until the whole mess is just barely covered. Stir it all together, and lay your Kishke (link repeated for those too lazy to click the first time) right across the top, like a sloppy drunk collapsed in an air duct.

What it lacks in variety of color, it more than makes up
for in sheer unrelenting awesome

Now it's time to turn your slow cooker on to the Low setting, cover it, and leave it for a LONG time. Like 24 hours long. Your patience will be rewarded. For those of you who started cooking before reading all the way down here, well you're in a hard situation. But, if you turn it on High for about 6 hours, and then turn it to Low for another 2, you should get a reasonably awesome result. Take the lid off of it, and just kind of bask in the warmth and deliciousness of it all. Stir everything together into the most delicious glop ever, and then serve it immediately to the friends and family you coerced a couple paragraphs ago. This is a whole pot of food. There will be leftovers. This cannot stand. You'll be on a crazy high from delicious food. You'll be doubting the warnings I gave you about trying to reheat it, and the ensuing crappiness. You will pay for your mistrust 1000 times over. Don't be that guy. Your only option is to splork the rest of it down your gullet. Bonus points if your guests haven't left yet, and they watch you with an odd mix of revulsion and intense fascination.

Pumpkin Pie

Alice's Restaurant is one of many traditional
Thanksgiving songs passed down from the
pilgrims to Arlo Guthrie, and then to us.

Well, we finally made it to the week of Thanksgiving. We made it through endless buzzfeed-style lists about things like "the best 450 ways to cook a Thanksgiving turkey," and "700 Thanksgiving Entrees that aren't turkey." And we've made it through the Christmas decorations in the stores which, by law, is blasphemy. I'm pretty sure you can be prosecuted for treason in the US for putting up Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving, but here these corporate jerks are, bold as brass, just flouting it in our faces like some sort of delicious pie. Not in my America. In my America, delicious pie is made out of actual pie, not out of department stores selling you things. It's made out of pumpkin, and spices, and it's so good that it makes all of the "pumpkin spice" everything that you've been guzzling down since the beginning of October taste hollow and meaningless. It's the flavor you finish off Thanksgiving with, and some things you just don't mess with. Don't even get me started about Black Friday.

Ingredients:

1 Can of Pumpkin (You technically can replace this with an actual pumpkin. It's kind of hard to work with, it doesn't taste much better, and it's a huge pain to get the texture right, but if you're the type of insecure person who needs to lord over everybody else how your pumpkin pie is more pumpkinny than theirs, go for it.)
2 Eggs
Approximately 3/4 Cup Soy Milk (Why soy milk? Because my pie is dairy free. Got a problem with that? Then use regular milk. What do I care?)
1/2 Cup of standard issue Sugar
1/3 Cup Dark Brown Sugar
1 tsp Ground Cinnamon
1/2 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Ground Ginger
1/4 tsp Ground Cloves
An average human sized pinch of Ground Nutmeg
1 Pie Crust (If you want to go traditional, just use regular pie crust. You can buy it in the store, or make your own. If you want to get funky, make a gingersnap crust. How? Take the graham cracker crust from my cheesecake recipe, and replace the graham crackers with crushed gingersnaps. You're welcome.)

The first thing you're gonna need to do is punch Christmas in the throat. It's started stretching all the way through November, and it frankly needs to learn to wait its turn. That's the lesson here. If you're a holiday, and you don't wait your turn, you get punched in the throat (I'm looking at you Valentine's Day). Once your holidays are straightened out, and have stopped acting like jerks, pour your Pumpkin, Eggs, Salt, Sugar, Brown Sugar, Cinnamon, Ginger, Cloves, and Nutmeg into a bowl and stir them together to combine. Did you catch that? That's all of the ingredients, except for the Soy Milk and the Pie Crust. And when I say "stir to combine" I don't mean "gently twirl a spoon into the pumpkin mixture with your dainty fingers." I mean stir. Until you can't point out any specific ingredients in the mix, and the whole thing looks homogenous. Then slowly stir in your Soy Milk, until your mixture is just liquidy enough to start making you nervous about whether it's still gonna turn into pie.

You ate twice your bodyweight in turkey and stuffing, and
you swore you'd never eat anything again. Then pie happened.

Now it's time to be terrified that something will go horribly wrong! Will it? Who knows? Because now it's time to pour your filling into your crust, throw the whole thing into a 350 degree oven, and let it sit for an hour. Without opening the oven and checking on it. Seriously, opening the oven will lower the heat which will change the cooking. So leave the oven shut and try not to think about all of the things that could be happening in there. After an hour, open your oven and check on it. It should be firmed up all around the edges, and just a tiny bit jiggly in the center. If it's not, it could be for a number of reasons, including the fact that you didn't listen and you opened your oven early to check on it. If despite your best efforts, you've got a puddle instead of "slightly jiggly," put it back in for another 15 minutes. Then let the pie cool for 2 hours, and then refrigerate it for another 2 hours. Because as awesome as it smells right now, it'll taste so much better once it's properly cooled. Trust me, your patience will be rewarded. Then slice it, top it with some whipped cream, and serve it. To yourself, and the other loyalists who haven't abandoned you in the name of shopping. Everybody else can put terrible nonsense pie into their mouths. The good stuff is reserved for the real Americans.

Stuffing

It's like an Escher of stuffing ingredients

As a child, we never really stuffed the turkey on Thanksgiving. Shoving bread goop up inside that bird's gross butt always seemed like a silly idea compared to concepts like stuffing aromatic herbs and vegetables up that bird's gross butt. You know, to actually produce some flavor. So when I'm talking about stuffing, I'm talking about what some people out there mistakenly refer to as "dressing." It's pretty traditional thanksgiving fare, and is often corrupted and mangled beyond recognition with nuts, berries, cornbread, and other heathen traps for the unwary. But in my mind, real stuffing is relatively simple. It's pretty much an intensely good herb and bread casserole, and since mine doesn't roast inside the grossest part of a turkey, even the vegetarians at your table will love it. Which is a nice change of pace from what they'll be feeling while eating their disgusting soy-turkey-substitute.

Ingredients:

1 lb loaf of Challah Bread 

3 Cups of Vegetable Stock

3 Eggs

1 Standard Issue Onion

5 stalks of Celery

1 TBSP Olive Oil

3 tsp of ground Thyme

1 tsp of rubbed Sage

1/2 tsp Black Pepper

An unspecified amount of Salt

The origins of this recipe are definitely my mother's. Years ago I asked her how she made stuffing, and she told me. Every year since then I've forgotten some parts and filled in the blanks myself instead of asking her again, because I can't be bothered to make multiple phone calls for the same recipe in one short lifetime. What am I, made of phone calls? I don't know exactly how close I am to the original, but I do know that what I've ended up with after all of this time tastes like my childhood memories of thanksgiving (Savory, delicious, kind of wistful, and possibly completely idealized. Who knows what it was really like?) and that's good enough for me. And now it's good enough for you. 

The first thing you're gonna need to do is to chop up your Celery and Onion, sauté them in your oil along with an AHSPS (Average human sized pinch of salt), your Black Pepper, and 1 tsp of your Thyme. Cook that hot mess over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for about 6 minutes. You want the onions and celery to be somewhat softened, but not cooked all of the way through. If you aren't sure about this, taste them, either by taking a spoon, removing a little bit, and blowing on a it until it's cool enough for your delicate mouth to handle, or by reaching into your hot pan with your hands and stuffing some onion and celery directly into your mouth and dealing with it. You know, like a man (I say things like this a lot, but in this case I totally did this).

All the delicious awesomeness of stuffing, none of the
turkey rectums

Once your vegetation is done, tear your Bread into roughly 1 inch chunks. If you've forgotten your culinary ruler and protractor, again, use your best judgement. And see me after class. Then take your Eggs, and lightly beat them until they submit to your authority by having their yolks and whites mingle together. In fear. Put your bread chunks into a bowl, and add the rest of your ingredients along with another AHSPS. Mix it all together gently. Sure, you want it mixed and you want your bread to absorb the moisture. But you don't want to squish it down too much or you'll end up with super dense stuffing. You know who eats super dense stuffing? Communists. That's why they don't have thanksgiving. Who would be thankful for that nonsense? Nobody, that's who. Take your bread gunk, shove it up in a baking dish if some kind, and then throw it in a 350 degree oven for an hour. Then take it out and eat it in front of your guests, offering bites only to those who brought suitable tribute (Alcohol). If anybody argues, challenge them to a contest to prove true ownership of the stuffing, using the traditional holiday weapons (Guilt. And alcohol). And if anybody tries to leave your meal early to line up for Black Friday shopping, hit them with the turkey carcass and disown them. Seriously.