i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

Dad: "You look much more chill this year. Fewer rebellious menu elements?"
Me: "AHAHAHAHAHA."
Mom: "I still remember the year you did the Peking duck. That was stressful."
Me: "We learned our lesson. Outsource cooking the bird.*"

* unless it's roasting a chicken, something either of us could do in our sleep

Happy Asian American Thanksgiving, year ... uh, whatever it is since we've been doing this formally, composing our Thanksgiving banquet menus to be primarily if not entirely recipes by Asian American cooks and chefs. Year 8? But we've been perfectly happy to give up on the turkey and just eat something yummy and celebratory, along with a bounty of sides.

- Main: Knowing both that Leonard and Sara were doing their own experimental turkey roast and planning on sharing if it worked out, and that there were going to be at least , we went with pork belly again. This time, we did Kristina Cho's Chop Shop Pork Belly, from her Chinese Enough cookbook. Lovely crispy skin on top, succulent meaty bottom, served over jade pearl rice (which was pretty and interesting and just a little sweet to balance; I'd be curious about making a horchata out of it!), and it paired incredibly well with ...

- Cranberry Sauce: Kay Chun's Cranberry-Asian Pear Chutney, always and forever. (Forgot to pick up mandarins to make another version I've been meaning to try, but I'll probably do that later this week.) This year's amusing highlight, though, was that the last time I bought raisins, they were "giant" ones from the bulk bin at Berkeley Bowl. Leonard: "Um, Lynne, are those grapes in your cranberry sauce?" Me: "No, they're raisins, I swear!"

- Stuffing: Mandy Lee's Red Hot Oyster Kimchi Dressing has been on my bucket list bakes forever, and now I'm mad at myself for waiting so long. "Oh, but I have to get oysters, and I really want to do it with the gochujang bread, and what if some people think it's too spicy?" Everybody loved it. We will be repeating this before next Thanksgiving, maybe as soon as Christmas. Maybe even with oyster kimchi to make it extra oyster-y. If you haven't had oyster dressing/stuffing, with or without kimchi, this recipe has completely convinced me of its deliciousness. Even the Chron had an oyster stuffing recipe this year. Time to bring it back!

- Orange Veg: After several years in a row of squash soups, it was time to shake things up; we called on our old fave, kaddo bourani. Sweet pumpkin echoing the sweet potato casseroles of our younger days, tempered with a meat sauce full of warming spices and a garlic-mint-yogurt topper.

- Potatoes: Likewise, with the potatoes, I wanted "not cheesy scallion, not maple miso, make something up, we're both Asian American, it'll still count for Asian American Thanksgiving!" hyounpark took that decision off my plate, thank you dear, and made mashed potatoes with toasted ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, soy sauce, and sesame oil. It tasted good, but note to our future selves: when you run out of regular soy sauce, substituting dark soy sauce is going to result in mashed potatoes the color of gravy, just be warned. :)

- Green Veg, Cooked: Made Andrea Nguyen's Sesame Salt Greens again (from her cookbook Ever Green Vietnamese). This time, with collard greens; probably should've cooked them a little longer, but that's okay.

- Green Veg, Raw: Leonard and Sara brought a salad with pomegranates and persimmons from their tree and it was exactly the right balance to all the other heavy stuff on the table.

- Dessert: the triumphant return of Alana Kysar's Liliko'i Chiffon Pie (from her cookbook Aloha Kitchen) to the table. We get our arm workout in every year making the passionfruit curd, but the results are well worth it. Even when yours truly realizes at 3:30 pm Thanksgiving Eve that actually, we *are* out of gelatin powder, and I'm going to have to go Brave The Grocery Store. Didn't find gelatin powder, but did find gelatin sheets, and learned a new thing, so it worked out!

*

Things that did not make it to the table this year, but hopefully will next year:

- Cornbread. I really did want to solve the custard cornbread problem. I was trying to de-dairify the custard-filled cornbread that used to be on our Thanksgiving table every year until our collective lactose intolerance got to be too much for even Lactaid to help with. But having talked to ladyjax's professional chef spouse, there may not be an alternative milk out there that's going to behave the same way heavy cream does from a chemistry perspective, alas.

I made two batches and both were big enough fails we weren't going to inflict the results on anyone. One used coconut cream, the other used A2 cow milk cream. In both cases, the cream that was supposed to sink below the top layer chocoflan/impossible cake style? Pooled in the center of the pan like creamy lava, with a ring of perfectly normal cornbread around the outside. It tasted fine, but the texture was obviously wrong.

I'm going to go back to basics and try making the original recipe with bog-standard commercial heavy cream to make sure even the original still works, sigh. Maybe in a few weeks. When I can stand to look at cornbread again.

The cornbread part itself came out just fine, though! I've wanted to make a cornbread with the same flavors as Betty Liu's lemongrass corn soup; I added lemongrass and shallots and scallions and used coconut milk as a base for our cornbread, and that part was great.

- Deviled eggs. I forgot I was going to use up most of the eggs on the chiffon pie, so didn't follow through. But I want to put chicharones on my deviled eggs the next time I make them! Just trying to decide what else should go into the filling or as a topping.

- Cheesecake. Following up on my successes with burnt Basque cheesecakes, I wanted to try to make one with the truffle cream cheese from one of our local bagel bakeries. I will in fact do that, and probably bring it to coffee ride this week! But the pie was enough for everybody.

*

Ten days out from Break Bread, trying to cram the Bach Magnificat into my brain, somehow having never performed any part of it before in four decades of choral singing. This is a CRAPTON of trills, peeps. At least I already have one of the Whitney Houston songs we're singing down flat (I can absolutely get up on stage right now and sing I Wanna Dance With Somebody from memory, and could have done so any time from 1987 on), and the same with the Hallelujah Chorus. Which leaves three other newer songs to learn quickly. Tis the season!

(We survived Verdi, but that's another post entirely!)

Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.

But I was flying back from the Bay Area on Wednesday, and catching up with things the last few days, and heading down to the Phoenix area on Monday for a Thanksgiving Week vacation, so it's now or never.

This past trip was to visit my brother and his family, and also to do crosswords and cryptics with his group, who I meet every Saturday morning on a Zoom-equivalent for puzzling; I was there in person two years ago and wanted to do it again. But since I was going to be in the area I coordinated with an OTW meet-up group for dim sum on Sunday and met several of my fellow tag wranglers and other volunteers, and then got together with hamsterwoman for a lovely afternoon of chatting and walking and sightseeing along the Embarcadero.

So, part of traveling is being on planes! And being on planes means lots of time for reading! I had been intrigued by a Yuletide promo post about a book duology, and though I didn't manage to get to it before Yuletide, I did find it at my library in time for this trip:

The Philosopher's Flight and The Philosopher's War by Tom Miller - this is an alt-history set in World War I with an odd kind of magic, "empirical philosophy", which involves drawing arcane sigils with different materials to do things like make plants grow faster, heal the sick, fly, and summon the wind. It's dominated by women, who are generally more talented at it, but the protagonist of the series is a young man who dreams of following in his mother's footsteps as a rescue and evacuation flier (literally, flying) for the military. Alt history and unusual magic systems are catnip for me, but I was a little worried that it being about the rare talented man in a woman's field would detract.

Actually, it was fun and funny, and inverted some sexist tropes and history in an entertaining way. Robert is not better than all the women, he's just pretty good, and better than most men. And seeing how the system is rigged against him in ways both overt and inherent holds up a mirror to real-world sexism: he has to work twice as hard to be considered half as good as a woman, he needs a special dispensation to study sigilry at Radcliffe, and a (female) general's recommendation to join the rescue corps, where he's called Sigilwoman 3rd Class, and addressed as "ma'am" - but eventually is regarded by the women around him as their "little brother", and distinguishes himself in his work as equal to his "sisters". A thoughtful treatment of politics and the military, too, and loads of unintended consequences wherever you turn. I enjoyed it!

What I've recently finished watching:

S3 of The Diplomat, but woohoo, that was a fun one. A little more relationship drama than I personally would have liked, but it was interesting to watch Kate basically being Hal while being oblivious to that fact, and also, people being shitty to each other while also acting in what they honestly perceived as being in the best interest of their country (or the world), and also, how actions have (often unintended, see above) consequences, and you just have to grit your teeth and deal. Also, can I just say how great it was to see a competent president? Especially a competent female president, who gives no fucks as to what she looks like to people who at the end of the day don't matter, for the important things. (Not that she's not flawed, but still. Better than the actual venial disaster we have.)

While I was at my brother's, we watched the French stop-motion animated comedy A Town Called Panic, which was an absurd fantasy-adventure delight. I laughed a lot! It was very weird! One of my nieces insisted I watch a couple of episodes of Bee and Puppycat with her, and - that was also very weird. I am not really sure what it is about! It is a cartoon about a girl and her possibly alien pet, who brings her to ... an interspacial temp agency? I may actually try to watch it more seriously this winter while riding the stationary bike, it's very pretty, and part of my ??? is that I couldn't hear the audio very well, but if I watch it at home at least I can use subtitles (and headphones).

We are now watching S4 of The Witcher.

What I'm playing now:

I finished Monument Valley, and have started poking at Monument Valley 2 (put it on my laptop and played a little while I was in California). I also have started playing Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, though I'm not sure I'm going to stick (heh) with it. It's really designed for a controller, so that's what I'm using (and the haptic feedback is nifty) but I also suck at using a controller, so my web-swinging movement is far from smooth and combat is mostly random button-mashing. I also feel like it's very distracting, with all of the CRIMES! I'm supposed to go stop while I'm just trying to get to my next quest!

So as I mentioned last time, B started playing Horizon Forbidden West and I've been looking over his shoulder every so often because I loved that game. Finally I decided...to start a NG+! Which I've never done. I never replay games! I tried to replay Dragon Age II and it annoyed me so much I didn't even get to Kirkwall. But I went right through the tutorial (fun!) and into Chainscrape, and..I might keep playing? We shall see! I've turned up the difficulty since I'm so buff and have so much gear. I think I need to look up how these things go...