🥧🌲👀🥧 @mcmoots@kith.kitchen

Why does this purple Skittle taste like rosemary?

This is, I think, the "wild berry" mix and not regular Skittles, so the flavor is supposed to be "berry punch". But it starts as a breath of rosemary. I'm not opposed, necessarily, but it's a little weird.

Also, tonight I made soup, and the best part was that I took a small log of leftover rye-mushroom pasta dough out of the freezer, chopped it into pieces, and threw them in.

It was *amazing* as dumpling bits. Way better than it was as noodles.

Now that the Thanksgiving leftovers are nearly consumed, I'm thinking about my next two fancy meals:

- Cassoulet. Not for any special occasion, just because I haven't made it before. I have the fancy beans and a pre-confited duck leg.
- Solstice ritual meal, where I eat food that I harvested on summer solstice. This year that means pineappleweed-saskatoonberry jam, and umeboshi made from ornamental red leaf plums. Onigiri and jammy dodgers? Not sure how to get a meal to cohere out of that.

Obligatory Thanksgiving spread shot. No one wanted to wait for me to take a picture before eating.

The meringue pie suffered a mishap during transportation. It was still good though.

Also I taught my boyfriend's daughter to roll out pie crust so that was heartwarming.

I failed to find chestnut cream in a jar so I had an annoying time with my little food processor making paste. I think the "matching" spare blade I felt lucky to find on buy nothing actually is slightly too small, it pops a little bit off the base at the slightest provocation. No clue where the real blade went.

4/6 pies complete. This is layered pumpkin-chestnut, layered pumpkin-chestnut-flowering quince (made from leftover filling bits), and apple-quince. The maple ginger banana cream is in the fridge.

Chocolate cream and the mise en place for Meyer lemon huckleberry meringue before I quit for the night.

The headline said "New Mexican Breakfast Cafe" and I clicked through to see if they'd have sopapillas... but no, it's just a Mexican cafe and it's new.

You can't make great sopapillas at this altitude anyway. Bah humbug.

I was all geared up for a big shopping trip, to get my annual "free with $150 purchase" turkey. But the offer was while supplies last, and they ran out 😥

There's a not-free-but-good turkey deal at the Grocery Outlet, I'll try them tomorrow.

I'm not responsible for the actual Thanksgiving turkey, but roasting the loss-leader promo bird on some random day in January has become a nice winter tradition.

Or, ooh, lemon blueberry/huckleberry meringue?

Planning the Thanksgiving pies.

- Maple ginger banana cream
- Pumpkin-chestnut
- Chocolate (by request from a child, so no funny spice stuff)
- Lemon rosemary meringue
- Apple-quince? Pear?? idk, I don't feel like the pie table would be complete without a fruit pie.

We're planning for 10 adults and 4 children, so a 6th pie would definitely be overkill but that won't necessarily stop me from making one, if I see something interesting at the market.

What are your favorite ways to combine root vegetables with beans?

I kind of want scalloped roots, but need to also eat a protein. I'm feeling so uninspired.

Something prompted me to put blue cheese on top of my toast with jam this morning.

It was a shockingly good instinct, good job subconscious.

After 45 minutes of roasting in the oven, the flavor is pretty good, but it's still basically just squash. Not delicious enough to justify its mediocre garden performance; I'll look for a powdery mildew resistant variety to grow next year.

Tonight I'm making squash soup with garlic, ginger, and berbere.

Chopped up the only Sweet Meat squash I got out of the garden this year.

The plants resisted powdery mildew better than the zucchini, but still eventually succumbed - I got one full-size squash from the plant with the best sun, and two mini ones from the other side of the bed.

The pretty blue-green turned to pale yellow during storage, and the seeds were mostly shriveled & brown. Not sure if the problem was during growing or storage there.

I saw a bag of marshmallow circus peanuts on super discount in the post-Halloween clearance bin. This was my grandfather's favorite candy, so I grabbed it out of sentiment. I didn't remember ever liking them but it's been decades since I tried, maybe my tastes have changed?

Nope, they're still terrible! Like candy corn cross-bred with styrofoam, or Peeps + cardboard. Nope nope nope nope nope.