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!

Well, after a long hard week at work, I’m glad the weekend is here! We’re going to go eat out at the local Ruby Tuesday for supper tonight. It will be a real treat because we don’t eat out very often. Money is tight, and the price of gas makes us think really hard about going anywhere. But, we are going to see a movie after the meal, so that makes me feel a little less guilty about going out “just to eat.”
We are joining a few friends that we haven’t seen for a while; it will be good to catch up with them. I hate that we get so busy that we don’t get together as often as we used to. We need to try harder to keep in touch with them. Friends and family are what make life worth living!

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!

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.

With Spring almost here, I decided to bring the grill out of the garage and clean it up. As soon as it is warm enough to be outside without a jacket, I will be using the grill to cook dinner. I love food cooked on the grill – it adds a special flavor to the meats that you just can’t duplicate on the stove or in the oven. I also like to use marinades on the meats if i am going to be grilling. So I will have a much larger variety of flavors for all the different meats very soon.