I’ve been invited out to a friends house for Thanksgiving this year.  I’m very grateful for the invitation; I’ve had a hectic autumn and it looks like a hectic winter is approaching, so not having to clean and cook and entertain at my house this year is a blessing!  The only drawback is that I won’t have as much leftover turkey as I like to have for leftover meals.  So I guess I’ll be buying a turkey breast anyway and cooking it up here at home so we can have leftover turkey no matter what.  I’ll be making a cranberry-orange-apple relish dish to take with me to the dinner to share with the other guests.  It’s a recipe I’ve had for about four years now, and I like it a lot.  I hope the other guests will like it too!

One of my favorite treats is lemon flavored cookies.  In fact, I love lemon pie, lemon cake, lemon just about anything!  I’ve been having a hard time finding my favorite lemon flavored cookies at the store lately.  It’s very frustrating to have a favorite food and then suddenly not be able to find it anymore!  My favorite lemon cookies are sandwich cookies that are plain shortbread cookies on the outside with a lemon flavored cream filling.  There are other lemon flavored cookies on the market, but those are my favorite. 

For about the past three or four months the store was selling them on the endcaps of the aisle, and now the endcap has something different on it.  Looking in the regular cookie aisle, I can’t find them anywhere.  So I had to settle for lemon flavored wafer cookies, which are good, but not as good as the lemon sandwich cookies.  I suspect that it will be a while (probably next summer) before my favorites reappear!  It’s probably a seasonal item.

One of my favorite products in the world is the Hershey’s Good Night Kisses Hot Chocolate mix.  It is 99% caffeine free, and I like to drink it at night before bedtime.  It is sweet and soothing and I believe that it helps me to sleep because I mix it up with milk instead of water.  After all, the old folk wisdom is that a warm glass of milk will help you sleep at night seems to be true for me, and the fact that the Hot Chocolate is 99% caffeine free I don’t worry about the caffeine keeping me awake.

The problem that I have with the product is that often times the grocery store that I buy it from is out of stock for weeks at a time.  When I do find it on the shelves I usually buy three or four boxes.  But I ran out of it two weeks ago and the store hasn’t had it on the shelves the last three times I’ve gone shopping!  So I guess the next time I find it on the shelves I’ll buy every single box they have!

We decided to go for a fall foliage drive this weekend; we heard that the fall foliage was near peak, and we wanted to have a little bit of relaxation and enjoy the scenery.  So we packed up a picnic lunch and headed out for a short but scenic drive out Route 211 into the mountains.  With the price of gas so high we couldn’t drive too far, but we found a nice scenic overlook spot with a picnic table and enjoyed a nice lunch of cheese, bread, apples, and sparkling cider.  The weather cooperated, it was a warm, beautiful clear day and we could see for miles!  All in all it was a very pleasant day today.  I’d like to make an annual event of doing this!  I hope the price of gas doesn’t make it impossible to do next year!

A few days ago I cooked up a bunch of chicken thighs in the oven, using the recipe on the back of a famous pancake/biscuit mix. It comes out tasting great, and it is better for you than deep fat fried. It tastes like fried chicken, but has much less fat in it. And chicken thighs are a good value; you get a lot of meat and very little bone. I like to cook up extra chicken and put the leftovers in the refrigerator and then later on for a lunch (when I’m in a hurry) eat it cold. It reminds me of when I was younger and my folks used to go on “old fashioned Southern picnics” where we would have cold fried chicken, potato salad, cheese and crackers, some grapes, maybe some potato chips and maybe some devilled eggs.
I’m always surprised when I meet people who say they’ve never heard of eating cold fried chicken and think the whole idea is “gross.” I think it is yummy!