Greg Laden's Blog

First, the recipes. Most of these are mine, but not all.

• Making Stock
• How To Make Gravy
• Savory Squash Ravioli and Ravioli Update
• A good way to cook a turkey
• Grandma's Cranberry Relish
• The Best and the Hottest
• This video will make you hungry and possibly nostalgic
• A little theory: Plants can help you. They can kill you. And they can get you stoned.

And now, a quickie. How to make the abso-freaken-lootly freekin' best pumkin pie. Well, actually, I'm not going to give you that recipe because it is too hard. But the second best recipe is brilliantly easy.

Go to the store and get the can of pumpkin stuff. Not the pie mix, but rather the pure pumpkin puree. Get all the ingredients on the back but also get one pint of heavy cream per pie and less evapo-milk. Make sure your spices are FRESH and if possible, grind them yourself.

Now, follow the instructions on the can except for the following:

• 1) Double the spices. Don't argue, just do it.
• 2) replace about 80 percent of the evapo milk with heavy cream
• 3) If you know what you are doing, you can replace some or all of the canned pumpkin with home made. In this case, use a mixture about 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 of small dark cooking Pumpkin, butternut sqash (again, get small ones), and what used to be called "turk's head" but now has a politically correct name I don't recall. If you can't get the "turk's head" use acorn.

Only eat this once a year. In fact, I make it (and I'm indeed making the pies for this year's dinner) and I won't be eating it. Too rich.

Oh, get extra heavy cream. You'll need that to make whipped cream....

OK, enough of that. Continuing on with our blogspherics, here is what you can read over the long weekend upcoming. First, a few items related to religion because this is kinda a religious holiday:

• Do Animals and Plants Have Souls?
• Getting giggles at church (I think this is about penis size enhancement or something)

A little gender politics with your turkey and gravy:

• "Give Me A Head With Hair; Long, Beautiful Hair" in which Zuska, kick-ass alter ego, takes down Isis, ego. (BTW, that blog post title is a reference to something. Do you know what?)
• gender dynamics in science (and elsewhere)

And now, a plethora of fascinating items crossing varoius boundries of science, politics, fun, and technology:

• Using a "distributed grid of undergraduate students" to annotate genomes
• Greenpeace fish head protest
• The Prickly Finger (don't try this at home! Sober!)
• Fun with Bugzilla Textbook Death Match: Insect Palaeontology (They have textbooks on that? Cool!)
• 50 years of getting yer (video) game on
• Radiolaria and jazz