"friends" news and stories

There is more than one way to cook a turkey, just as there is more than one way to cook just about every other type of meat, but because there is some pressure on Thanksgiving to produce a big, beautiful bird for family and friends, it's hard to know whose advice to take when prepping the turkey for the big day. If you roast it, should you brine if first? Should it be braised? Can you cook it in the microwave?

To answer these questions, you can take a look at the Turkey for the Holidays guide from the University of Illinois. They cover everything from turkey-cooking techniques, which includes guides on eleven good techniques and reasons to avoid a few bad ones, to turkey nutritional information and turkey history and trivia. Aside from the cooking techniques, which might be the most useful tips on the site for cooks, the turkey carving instructions are going to be helpful even if you buy your bird. The site seems to be a great Thanksgiving resource overall, and anything that helps decrease holiday stress really is something to be thankful for

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If you just "watch" the game, this will be of little aid. Remember, it's early in the season; you'll have plenty of time to hone your hometown hand foods before the super bowl, which is sacred and has a its own set of game day gastro requirements. If you are an aficionado in for the season, take these tips and have a four hour tailgate party at home.

First of all you need a crockpot, a large T.V. at the very least, and probably cable. Where I live one of the Networks comes in unacceptably snowy via antenna. For quick, easy dishes check these crock recipes at Out of the Frying Pan. Use your imagination and plenty of cheese to personalize things. Food coloring, shaped or sculptured dipping foods, etc. Here are a few more tips:

• Watch with friends; if you drink, make it light beer. You'll get plenty of carbs and calories from all the snacks.
• Don't start throwing food at your friends until the third quarter. Don't throw cheese in any form, hors d'oeuvres dipped in cheese, or the crockpot.

Just last week, I posted about FoodCandy, a social networking service for foodies. Today I came across DueSpaghi.it or 2Spaghi, a social network of sorts where users create profiles and post recommendations for restaurants around Italy. None of it is in English, so hopefully your Italian language skills are good. Mine aren't, and so far I've just been reading pages translated by Google. I know, not always accurate, but at least I can get a feel for the service. Users can post comments on restaurants and create a roster of their favorite places, it seems. They have a blog and a small wiki that explains the service. There are also tag clouds of popular search terms, mainly for regions and specialties. Right now, the service appears to have about 150 users.

Wine reviews can sometimes be a bit... annoying. Once in a while, the flavors described in a review will actually come through in the wine, but more often than not the "crisp" flavor and "pineapple notes" are nowhere to be seen. Or, at least, they cannot be identified by the average wine drinker.

To actually get some use out of the reviews, we've come up with a game to play the next time you have some friends over. Print out a copy of the review and pour each of your friends a glass of the wine. As they sample it, get them to try and guess how the reviewer described it. They almost always involve a fruit or a wood, so that's a good one to guess, but you can get creative. Here's a review to get you started:

At Chowhound, there is an interesting discussion going on about dinner invitation etiquette. The question is whether you should extend an invitation to someone who probably will not be able to make it to the event. The chowhound who started the thread had a friend who was offended that she was not invited to a dinner, though she admitted that she probably would not have come anyway. On one hand, you might think that if she wasn't going to come, it does not matter whether she was invited. If she had decided to show up, though, it could have caused problems for the group, which was dining at a restaurant.

Excluding large events, like weddings, most dinner parties at restaurants or at home have a lot that depends on the dynamic of the group. When you are planning the party, you want to make sure that everyone will get along and that you have a good mix of people. You want to invite people who will get along and you have to know in advance how many people are coming in order to place a reservation or make the appropriate amount of food.

Personally, I think that the friend was out of line. Do you have to be included in every single thing a friend does? No - and if you're not going to come anyway, don't complain about it.