Category: Food

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Quick N EZ Thanksgiving

If you really want an easy turkey, buy it pre-cooked…

Photo from Safeway.com.

…pre-rolled up, maybe even pre-extruded, like these Foster Farms beauties. Nothin’ says EZ TurKY like a bird that looks like sausage.

Photo from Foster Farms website.

If you really want an easy turkey, how about Turkey Spam? MM…Spam and Beans, Spam and Stuffing. What about Spam ‘n’ stuffing with your pre-extruded turkey roll?

There’s always a turkey spam/roll taco bar. Everybody likes a taco bar!

How about a hot fudge sundae bar? Skip the turkey and vegetables and make it easy and yourself and everyone. Everyone loves a sundae bar!!!!

It’s that time of year, when the foodie experts are full of helpful hints to make your holiday easier. And much of it isn’t going to make your life easier whatsoever. Either that or all this pre-cooking, pre-microwave, just-heat-up-at-the-last-minute by adding seven other things isn’t going to make it easier. So, here is my evaluation of all these “Easiest Thanksgiving Ever” hints that are designed to make your life harder.

Plus, at the end, I’ll share my amazing and impressive turkey flow chart, and that will make it all clear for you!

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W is for Wine

Silk Road specialties, from Pressfood.org.

I’ve heard that you need to age wine, but isn’t 8000 years a little over the top?

They have found the oldest wine vessels in history, and they are from Georgia, near the Southern Caucasus. Were they on the Silk Road? Or did grape wine come from China? How do they know it was grape wine anyway? And what else did they drink, when they didn’t have grapes? Plus, what about the apples and melons?

Today, it’s all about Silk Road Food and Drink, especially Drink.

Vitis vinifera

As it happens, I don’t drink alcohol, but please don’t hold that against me. I can certainly discuss alcohol with the best of them, especially when it involves archaeology. I was trying to look up Silk Road wine information which, the other day, told me that many people drank non-grape wines made from honey, mare’s milk, and other fermented carbohydrates. At least that’s what I remember. But there is a Silk Road winery (or more than one) and so all I could see today were ads for that wine. Feel free to do a brisk little Google search for “Silk Road Wine” on your own.

The reason that Georgia–and that means the country over in Asia near the Silk Road not the U.S. state–the reason that Georgia was trumpeting its wines is because archeologists dug up some big ol’ wine jars. These jars, called qevri or khevri, definitely date back to the Neolithic as far as 6,000–5,800 BCE. Lead researcher Patrick McGovern and the team were careful to look at dating the pottery, dating the site, and establishing the appearance of the right combination of acids that represent fermented grapes. They also found grape pollen, starch, and skin remains that sealed the deal. Eight-thousand-year-old grapes in Georgia!

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P is for Pepper

Black Gold. Texas Tea. The most valuable commodity in recent years has that nickname, and if you watched a certain TV show from the 1960s, you remember the words. But “black gold” before 1800 meant something else, something also very valuable. Futurists picked up on it, too.

The spice must flow.

Black Gold

Even today, pepper is the most traded spice in the world. It originated out of India, on the Malabar coast, although more than a third of it today comes from Vietnam. In the Silk Road days, it was so valuable that it was demanded by the Huns when they took Rome; they asked for 3000 pounds of pepper in addition to precious metals and furs. Rome lived on cinnamon and pepper, so it knew the value, too.

Accountant Luca Pacioli in his double-entry bookkeeping text explained to merchants how to list their inventory: gold coin in ducats, jewels, unpolished pointed diamonds, silverware, feather beds, and …

… cases of ginger bellidi … sacks of pepper, long pepper or round pepper … so many packages of cinnamon.

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