Frankensoup

It's funny. And super dark if you think about it too hard

This weekend, everybody was talking about the Superbowl. Love it, hate it, or act warmly to it at social gatherings but then devastatingly leave it off of your holiday card list, the point is that it was on the minds of the people. Or at least the people who survived the cold, because last week was home to some fun new experiences for me, such as Chicago being colder than Antarctica. Given that nobody I know has access to roaring wood fires and teams of sled dogs, we all had to bear the elements as best we could in less traditional ways. Some people clung to their folding chairs, desperately waiting for neighbors to shovel out parking spots so that they could gleefully "claim dibs" on public property that they in no way own. Some people threw pots of boiling water outside at the snow, I'm guessing in some vain attempt to communally work towards raising the temperature. Me, I huddled for warmth in my apartment, desperately throwing blankets and clothing in front of drafty windows and turning the dwindling contents of my kitchen into increasingly interesting soups which I cooked and ate for every meal. When the winds of winter howl and the cold nights come, nothing warms you up as well and for as long as a good hot bowl of soup. Except maybe someone setting you on fire over a parking spot.

Ingredients:

1 standard-issue Onion
4 ribs Celery
3 large Carrots
2 Turnips
1 Parsnip
8 oz. Cremini Mushrooms
2 cloves Garlic
1 Lime
6 threads of Saffron
6 Hot Dogs
1/3 cup Coconut Milk
1/2 cup Peanut Butter (Creamy peanut butter, ideally. Crunchy peanut butter is great, but not so much for cooking with. The "butter" part absorbs in to your food, and then you're left with weird soggy peanut chunks. If a friend tells you to do that, they were never your real friend anyway)
2 tsp Sriracha
1.5 tsp Cumin
1/2 tsp Black Pepper
Oil for sauteing
Salt
Water

Yes, that is a big old list of ingredients. No, I wouldn't have thought to put some of them together. But when you're pretty sure that the only things alive outside are polar bears and the sentient snowmen from Frozen, you don't plan a trip to the market to get groceries. The market is gone. The bears ate the groceries. You make due with what you have on hand, and you make it work. And it totally ended up working. So let's get started with step one, which is to peel your onion and carrots and chop them into bite-sized bits. Now it's time for the exciting part: heating up a TBSP of oil in a pot over medium heat. Because the cold seeps in wherever it can, and if you're exposed enough to be chopping, you're probably going to need a minimum of one fire to stave off hypothermia. (If your landlord complains about the many fires you've lit around the place, just remind them that when the temperature drops below -15, we're legally in The Purge and you can do what you like). Toss your onion, carrots, and celery in the pot along with a pinch of salt, and saute them for 5 minutes, occasionally stirring and muttering under your breath about the cold. Take this time to clean your mushrooms and celery, to chop them up along with your hot dogs, and to contemplate a violent incursion into your neighbors' apartments to claim their blankets and foodstuffs as your own. Go back to your fire to warm up, and while you're there toss your hot dog bits, mushrooms, and celery into the pot along with another pinch of salt. Let that all cook together for 3 minutes before chopping up your garlic and adding it in to the party. Peel your turnips and parsnip, chop them in to medium-sized chunks, and throw them into your sauteing vegetables, along with your cumin, black pepper, saffron, and a medium-sized bear's pinch of salt. Stir that nonsense as it cooks for about a minute, ostensibly to let the flavors blend or something, but really just as an excuse to stand near the fire.

Not pictured: the three pairs of socks, two pairs of pants,
and flannel shirt I was wearing while eating this soup.

Now it's time to cover your food in a deluge of water, completely submerging everything underneath an inch of water, and in no way providing a perfect analog for the walls of your apartment which are closing in on you more and more as time goes by. Add in your sriracha, coconut milk, and peanut butter, and crank your heat up to high. Stir to combine everything together into beautiful homogeneity, and then taste it, adding in salt to your particular tastes. Let your burgeoning soup come to a boil before throwing a lid on it, turning the heat down to low, and cooking it at a simmer for about 25 minutes, so go find something to do. When you get back from setting more fires and pillaging the neighbors, turn the heat off, then add in the juice from your lime, and serve up your soup. It's hearty, tangy, spicy, and a whole lot of delicious. It tastes good enough that you'll almost forget the unspeakable things that you had to do to get that space heater from the people in apartment 3-F. Also, in addition to the deliciousness and the easing of your haunted mind, it will keep you warm and nourished so that you can survive the cold and fend off invaders. Happy apocalypse!

Blizzard Ramen with Meatballs

This is what it looks like when the plow has been by a couple
times, but it's still gonna keep snowing all night

Sometimes in life you get thrown a curveball. Sometimes that curveball is actually billions of snowflakes (actually more like quintillions, but billions is easier to wrap your head around) falling and covering everything in your immediate geographic area with a cold blanket of beauty and traffic collisions. Sometimes you spend hours cleaning off of your car and driving through treacherous conditions just to get to the store, only to find out that the store wasn't dumb enough to open in this weather. The point is, sometimes you have to make due with whatever disparate ingredients you have lying around, and try to make something tasty and nutritious. Or at least tasty and not poisonous. Or at least tasty and not immediately poisonous. Listen, tasty is the important part. Survive until the end of the snow and then you can go get all of the fancy medical attention you want.

Ingredients:

1 lb. Ground Beef
2 packs Ramen Noodle Soup
3 cups Water
1 cup assorted Frozen Vegetables
1 cup Seasoned Breadrumbs
1 Egg
1/2 an Onion
2 tsp Grated Ginger
2 tsp Soy Sauce
1 tsp Garlic Powder
1/2 tsp Onion Powder
1/2 tsp Toasted Sesame Oil
1/8 tsp Hot Sauce
1/8 tsp Crushed Red Pepper
Salt
Oil

Now, I know that's a daunting list of ingredients. It's in the double digits, and the world is ending outside, and you don't want to deal with this. You'd rather just order a pizza. There is no pizza. The pizza place exists outside of your apartment, a place that may-or-may-not even still exist at this point. And most of these ingredients are just spices anyway, so deal with it. Take a bowl and mix together your ground beef with your breadcrumbs, egg, onion powder, hot sauce, sesame oil, and half of your ginger, soy sauce, and garlic powder. Got all of that? Good. Once your hands are covered in meat goop, wash them off, using some form of witchcraft or yoga to actually turn on the faucet without touching it with your gross meat hands. Then thinly slice your onion half and sauté it in some oil along with a standard human's pinch of salt over medium heat until the onions start to soften and turn a little translucent. Form your meat goop into golf-ball sized balls and then crank the heat on your pan up to medium-high, and toss in your meatballs. Or gently place them in if you're a wuss who doesn't like grease burns. Don't stir them around a whole bunch. Give them time to brown before turning them and repeating on as many sides as time and geometry will allow you.

There's nothing quite like eating way too much food from the
comfort of your couch while watching the olympics

While your meatballs and onions are doing their thing, stir the seasoning packets from your ramen in to your water along with another pinch of salt, your crushed red pepper and the rest of your ginger, soy sauce, and garlic powder. Once your meatballs are sufficiently browned, add in this spiced murky water along with your frozen vegetables and use a wooden spoon to scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of your pan. Bring the whole mess to a boil, then cover it and reduce it to a simmer for 10 minutes. If you live in a standard apartment building, it's about now that your neighbors will start sensing the presence of food, or some reasonable facsimile thereof, and start wandering the halls in a zombielike trance, trying to find its source. Don't be fooled into letting them in to your home. It's totally a trap. You might not all make it through this winter alive, and you want to make sure that you don't get killed and eaten. Anyhow, after your 10 minutes are up, take the solid bricks of noodles from your ramen and break them up into about 4 pieces each. Add them in to your pan and stir until they're tender. And that's it! You have food to make it through the storm possibly. Happy shoveling!

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!

Cinnamon Schnapps

Trained actor depicted. Don't actually buy
store-bought schnapps

Well, it's official. The weather is finally starting to get colder. As of today that is, because it was 60 stupid degrees in Chicago yesterday. In December. And don't get me wrong, 60 degrees feels nice. But one of the main reasons I left LA, aside from getting away from the unnecessary levels of cilantro on everything and the overpowering stench of palm trees, was to maybe see snow again at some point in my life. You know, in person and not just added into a movie with CGI. So far that plan hasn't really worked out. Last year's winter in Chicago was pretty tame, and the only real snowfall came when I was out of town (because apparently I wronged the god of irony), but I've got high hopes for this year. Of course I've also been enduring an endless stream of possibly well-meaning acquaintances and doom-sayers taunting me about how this will be my first real winter in years, and how I'm obviously going to freeze to death because I'm no longer acclimated to the cold. Fortunately some delicious cinnamon schnapps really helps me make it through the long nights of dealing with those idiots.

Ingredients:

1 bottle Vodka

at least 10 Cinnamon Sticks

Water

Sugar

The first thing you're gonna need to do is buy some vodka. Now some of you may have discerned my personal feelings on things like vodka in general, but we're flavoring this sucker. I wasn't about to waste some good whisky on this, and anyway we need alcohol without any strong flavor of its own. So now we need to actually choose which vodka to buy, and there are a dauntingly high number of vodka brands at astonishingly different price points. From what I've been able to gather, Vodka is the main export of pretty much every eastern european nation, which explains a lot really. Again, we're flavoring this, so don't go crazy expensive with it. Just avoid any obvious garbage brands with names like "Alex's Upscale and Legitimate Vodka Product." You should be paying roughly 12-18 dollars for a bottle, so let that be your guide. Once you've picked out your vodka, pour out a shot of it and either consume it or throw it down the drain to try and get your drain-goblins good and drunk. Either way, fill up that empty space in your bottle with about 7 cinnamon sticks. Close the bottle back up and let it sit for a week, shaking it up every day or two. 

Seriously, which of these would you rather drink? I rest my
case. Regular vodka is for suckers. 

Now you've got cinnamon vodka, which is already better than regular vodka in pretty much every perceivable way, but we're not quite done yet. Take equal amounts of sugar and water and bring them to a boil along with some cinnamon sticks. About 3 sticks should do it for every cup of sugar you've got going. Let that sucker boil for about 5 minutes, and then let it cool completely. Now it's time to emulate our favorite mad scientists, and just mix together the various liquids we have lying around the house. Mix together a solution of about 2/3 cinnamon vodka and 1/3 cinnamon sugar syrup. The result is going to be super cinnamon-y, a little sweet, and a whole lot of deliciously awesome. Bring it to parties, drink it with friends on cold nights, or use it as a libation during your saturnalia celebration. Or all of the above. Happy alcoholism!

Stuffing Muffins

It doesn't matter if you know the muffin man. It matters
that he knows himself.

Thanksgiving times are upon us, which means that it's time to break out the most treasured of all holiday traditions: lying to each other about how good the food is. Because let's be honest here. A lot of classic Thanksgiving food is somewhere between unimpressive and super gross. You've got marshmallows melted on to overcooked yams, green bean casserole that pretty much comes out of a can, and usually some stuffing that amounts to dried out crusty bits of bread loosely held together by a mass of onions and disappointment. Which is a shame, because it really isn't that hard to make some delicious stuffing. And I should know, because I made some this morning. The whole process took about 45 minutes from start to finish, and at no point did I feel like my mouth had turned into a desert fortress from which escape is impossible, which isn't always the case with stuffing. Making it into individual muffins is a fun twist that makes everything self-contained and helps ensure that everybody actually gets some. Also it'll help you deceive your friends and family into thinking that you're creative and whimsical.

Ingredients:

Approx. 8 Cups of Bread (You've got some decent leeway here. Use something hearty, but really whatever bread makes you happy. Tear it into chunks, throw 8 cups of them in there, and be merry)
2 Eggs 
4 Crimini Mushrooms
3 ribs Celery
1 standard-issue Onion
1.5 TBSP chopped Parsley
2 tsp rubbed Sage
1 tsp dried Thyme
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
Salt 
Oil
Water

The first thing you're gonna need to do is learn to ignore people. Because undoubtedly there are already people constructing angrily worded letters about how stuffing is only "real" if it's stuffed into a turkey, and that otherwise you should call it "dressing." It's easy to get angry or annoyed with these people, but remember that they serve an important role in the evolution of our species. Without having obviously terrible people to be a focus for our communal rage and disgust, those feelings would fester and eventually turn into something negative, like dysentery or a world war. Once you've blocked out the voices, it's time to grab your bread. A lot of stuffing recipes start off by having you toast the bread to dry it out. We're not doing that. We're doing the opposite of that. Moisten your bread with a little bit of water until it starts sticking together just a little bit, and set it aside. You don't want it to be soaked and gloppy, so be careful with it.

Just look at those things. I can practically hear a drunk uncle
ruining a pleasant family moment already.

Now dice your onion and sauté it over medium heat along with an average sized human's pinch of salt. Let it cook down for about a minute. You can use that minute to chop up your celery, because now it's time to add it in with the onions and cook them for another 2-3 minutes. Then choppity chop up your mushrooms and add them in along with your thyme, black pepper, and another pinch of salt. It should take about 2 minutes for some of the moisture to cook out of the mushrooms and for the whole thing to start smelling crazy good. Take your vegetable mixture and stir it into your bread along with your parsley, eggs, and one final pinch of salt. Buy or steal a standard muffin pan and grease up the cups before filling them with your bread and vegetable mixture. Pack it in there and try to overstuff them a little bit if you can (you can). Throw those suckers into a 375 degree oven and let them cook for 15-20 minutes, until they start to get a little crispy on top and your entire home smells like condensed holiday awesomeness. Then take them out of the oven, take them out of the pan, and serve them. Or make them ahead of time in which case wait until your actual meal, heat them up, and then serve them. Bonus points if you don't make up an obnoxious cutesy name for them like "stuffins." Happy holidays!

Rosemary Roasted Potatoes

Rosemary, taking a selfie with some potatoes

So it's official. It's getting dark early, the air is getting colder, and people have begun to talk about "the holiday season." It's truly the end of times. All that we can do now is wait it out until the sun stops ignoring us and starts being cool again. You know, for about a week until the unbearable heat and humidity of summer. But that's a problem for future us, and those jerks probably have it coming, so let's focus on what's important: making a good all-purpose side dish that's tasty and hearty enough to satisfy us while we're huddling for protection from the cold and darkness outside. Which means delicious potatoes, at least to me. A lot of historians believe that if this technology had fallen into the hands of Ivan The Terrible, we'd all be speaking Russian right now. Or whatever proto-Russian they spoke back in the 16th century. So use with caution.

Ingredients:

2 lb. Potatoes (I don't know if you've noticed, but there are a lot of different kinds of potatoes, with more mutant varieties popping up in stores every week. Potato farmers need to just stop and get a life. Anyhow, any potato with a thin skin like red or white potatoes should be fine)
4 Cloves Garlic
3 TBSP Olive Oil
1.5 TBSP Chopped Rosemary (Don't buy chopped Rosemary. That's not even a thing. Buy Rosemary, chop it, and once it's chopped measure out one and a half tablespoons)
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
Salt

So full disclosure: this recipe is going to take almost an hour and a half to make from start to finish. If you don't have that kind of time, just get a store-bought can of potatoes and eat them cold while thinking about how incredibly important the things you've chosen to spend your time on are. Everybody else is gonna start by choppity-chop-chopping their garlic and rosemary down to size, which seriously represents like 50% of the work involved in this recipe. Throw your tiny bits of garlic and rosemary into a ziploc bag (Sorry, I forgot to act like Chopped and pretend that brand-names don't exist. Put them into a resealable zip-top storage bag) along with your oil, pepper, and salt. How much salt? Well, potatoes tend to need a lot of salt to taste like anything at all, so don't be stingy. I'd say throw in two large person's pinches of salt. For the frantic measurers out there, about 1.5 teaspoons. Chop your potatoes into wedges (Pro-tip: if they're all about the same size, they'll all cook in the same amount of time. If they're not, your life will be full of regret and sadness), and throw them in there as well.

If you're snowed in, just make these potatoes. Neighbors will
smell them, and dig through the snow to get to deliciousness.

Tradition says that you mix all these things together in a bowl, not a bag. But one of the oldest traditions is to not eat if your food can outrun you, so maybe let's use our brains instead of blindly following what people tell us to do. Seal up your bag and shake around the contents until everything's mixed together and the potatoes are thoroughly coated. Then spread them out onto a sheet pan in as close to a single layer as you can manage, and throw that sucker in a 400 degree oven for about an hour. Check on your potatoes every 20 minutes or so to stir, mix, and otherwise wangjangle them, which will help them brown evenly. Once they start looking crisp and golden and just kind of awesome, take them out. Serve them immediately, by which I mean eat them in your home while taunting the wild bears that are now roaming through your snow-encrusted neighborhood. Good luck out there, and remember that in no way by suggesting that you taunt bears am I trying to ensure that there are more scarce resources left for me. See you next week, possibly!

Artist's Rendition: January