We have an awful lot to be thankful for this year. Thanks to you for continuing to read our site, and for writing us with your ideas. All our cooking plans are in place for the big day tomorrow, we're going to try two new things, cooking the turkey on the grill, and making our own pie crust from scratch. The turkey is going to get a heavy dose of hickory smoke, with some sage, thyme, rosemary and chopped apples for cavity aromatics. Our pie crust is going to wrap itself around a pecan pie. Camri has a big list of side dishes, including buttermilk mashed potatoes, french bean salad, and glazed carrots with cider. Should be a great meal.

Hope you and yours have a great turkey day!

We've been away from writing the past two months, because we were preoccupied with the birth of the latest Tastebud contributer, William Christopher McAvoy. Wil was born August 4th, 2007. He weighed in at 7 pounds 1 ounce. So far, his favorite food is milk, but we're pretty sure he's going to have a diverse palette in the years to come. Why? Because we're starting him early with a gift from our friends the Otto's. They got Wil a series of books by Amy Wilson Sanger about different kinds of food in kid board-book form. You'll have to give Wil a little time to do some research, we expect he'll be ready for article writing in a decade or so. In the mean time, expect our future articles to mix in some kid friendly suggestions from time to time. Welcome Wil!

You'd think a hard-boiled guy like Philip Marlowe would drink his coffee as is, that he'd not fuss over the intricacies of getting a good brew, that he'd just put a slug of rye in it and drink.

Nope.

It turns out, Philip Marlowe, the character that made Humphrey Bogart...Humphrey Bogart, is sort of a coffee dandy. In the following excerpt from The Long Goodbye, we get a detailed peek into Marlowe's coffee making process, as well as how a real coffee connoisseur would have made coffee at home for himself and a gun wielding alcoholic house guest in 1953:

I turned the hot water on and got the coffee-maker down off the shelf. I wet the rod and measured the stuff into the top and b that time the water was steaming. I filled the lower half of the dingus and set it on the flame. I set the upper part on top and gave it a twist so it would bind. The coffee maker was almost ready to bubble. I turned the flame low and watched the water rise. It hung a little at the bottom of the glass tube. I turned the flame up just enough to get it over the hump and then turned it low again quickly. I stirred the coffee and covered it. I set my timer for three minutes. Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique. Not even a gun in the hand of a desperate character. The coffee was all down and the air rushed in with its usual fuss and the coffee bubbled and then became quiet. I removed the top of the maker and set it on the drainboard in the socket of the cover. I poured two cups and added a slug to his.

See? Even tough guys take special care of their coffee.

A friend at work lent us a few issues of Cook's Country by the editors of Cook's Illustrated. We'd seen the magazine on the newsstand before, but never bought it. Cook's Illustrated is a pretty distinctive magazine, completely illustrated and ad free, with lots of good cooking tips. Cook's Country is pretty similar, except they have full color photography, still no ads though. While Cook's Illustrated focuses on cooking in general, Cook's Country specifically covers American comfort food. Chicken pot pie, bread pudding, king ranch chicken, hot dog taste tests, it's like having Aunt Bea in magazine form.

The recipes are great, as is the overall design and feel of the magazine. That said, it's also sort of a heart-attack magazine. They don't pull any butter-punches. This is a macaroni and cheese magazine folks, expect to put on a few pounds just by looking at it. All in all though, it's pretty great. We highly recommend it.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article on kool aid pickles, which pretty much blew our minds. We thought they sounded like a yummy summer treat, so we tried them out this week. Here's our recipe:

1/2 jar of mini dill pickles
1 packet of cherry kool aid
1/4 cup of sugar


Add the sugar and kool aid to a quart jar filled
with the pickles.  Don't worry if the jar has some pickle
juice in it.  Our jar had a bunch of chopped onions
floating in it, and it went just fine.  Fill the jar to the top
with water, cap it and shake.  Leave the pickles in
your fridge for a week.  Then eat them.

They're crazy.

Folks, we were skeptical. These things are crazy good though, jump right in. Don't be afraid of the red pickles. The red pickles are there to freak out the squares. You're not a square, right? You're a cool dude. The kind of cool dude that wants to eat a crazy red pickle. Get out there red pickle eater...face the world...proclaim your love of oddly colored foods!

We went to our friends Amy and Marshall's house this week so they could show us how to cook pizza on the grill. "Pizza on the grill!" you exclaim, "that's impossible! Dogs and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!" We interrupt your wild raving, and point to a picture, which clearly shows pizza being made on a grill. "Oh man!" you further exclaim, "this is mind blowing!" We snatch the picture out of your hand (seriously, you're crunching it), and get on with the story.

Amy and Marshall made the pizza grilling technique up themselves, with no help from any recipe books. We were pretty surprised, "weren't you scared? The first time you put the dough on the grill?" Amy says no, she's clearly way tougher than us. "She also doesn't follow recipes," Marshall tells us. Amy is the Evil Knievel of food, just without the jump suit.

They learn a lot from the Food Network. Their favorite food to cook (other than grilled pizza) is enchiladas. They like to make big batches of them, and freeze left overs. We ask them what their favorite kitchen utensil is, because readers of Tastebud Chicago want to know this kind of stuff. The answer is a big metal bowl. It's funny, because that's one of the answers Brett gave us when we interviewed him about Panade. We're also fans of our big metal bowl. Bowls are pretty great, reader. Go out and get yourself a bowl.

Grilling pizza is shockingly easy, so easy that Amy makes pizza a lot after work. She buys the dough from Trader Joe's, and keeps it on hand. "The secret," she says, "is to add a handful of flour. The dough comes too wet. You need to dry it out a bit." She presses the dough out into a rough square, "tell people that I don't use a rolling pin, I just press it out by hand." The square looks rustic to the max, which is the goal.

She puts a teeny coating of olive oil on the dough, and then slides it onto the hot grill. No toppings are on the pizza just yet, you have to get the crust a little crusty before that. When one side is done, she flips the half cooked pizza onto a cookie sheet (cooked side up), and starts to put the ingredients on. For one pizza, she puts homemade pesto made from home grown basil, feta cheese, and roasted pine nuts, for the other she uses fresh tomatoes, more home grown basil, and fresh mozzarella balls.

Then the pizzas slide right back onto the grill where they cook for another few minutes until the crust is nice and brown. For the feta pizza, she used a whole wheat dough, which was our favorite. The white dough was great as well, but we have a thing for whole wheat.

I already wrote about the pork meat buying adventure on Lake Street, as promised here's the write up of the actual cooking of the meat. Things turned out really well. This is the second time we've made pulled pork this way, both times turned out great. We followed the recipe for North Carolina style pulled pork from Steven Raichlen's "How to Grill", one of our favorite grilling books.

The recipe takes a little bit of time to prepare, but is much easier than you'd think. Prep-wise, you need to pull together a bunch of spices for a basic BBQ rub and a vinegar sauce for the sandwiches. We're fans of vinegar based pork sandwiches, instead of traditional BBQ sauce sandwiches. Once the rub and sauce are made, the rest is pretty easy. Pat the meat with the rub and put it on a grill set up for indirect grilling. Add some soaked wood chips to a grill bag (or directly on the coals) for smoke flavor, mop the meat with your sauce every hour or so, then wait six hours, or until the meat reaches 195 degrees.

Let the meat rest for ten minutes, and then start pulling it apart. Add a cup of the sauce, mix it all up in a bowl, put some of the meat on a bun with some coleslaw and you're all set. Although it's time consuming, the recipe is really pretty straight forward. It impresses the heck out of guests.

Happy Memorial Day all. We celebrated with pulled pork sandwiches, which will be the subject of our next article. In the mean time, buying the pork butt for the sandwiches was a real adventure. Saturday morning I got up early to get my hair cut downtown. My barber is a nice man named Phil who likes to garden. We talk a lot about vegetables and occasionally cooking. I mentioned that I had a busy morning planned. When I told him I was going to buy a pork shoulder at Jewel, he suggested I go over to Lake Street to a meat packer he knows. Phil came here from Italy when he was in his early 20's, still has a strong Italian accent, and has never steered me wrong. I worked very briefly near a meat packer there with a retail butcher shop attached to it, and thought it would be pretty cool to buy my meat there.

When I was through with my haircut, I took the business card that Phil's quiet co-barber gave me and headed to Lake Street, expecting that he was directing me towards one of the packers that welcomes walk ins. I was surprised when I found the address, and only saw a loading dock. The dock was busy with butchers and restaurant buyers, picking up their orders. I couldn't find a door that looked like a retail door, so I just walked in through the loading dock.

Inside, it was cold, and pretty busy. Guys in white coats were buzzing around carrying bags of meat. A few guys wearing shorts and t-shirts were looking over cuts of meat, figuring out what to take back to their butcher shops or restaurants. A whole pig was hanging from hooks in the ceiling. There were buckets full of pig heads. Kind of gruesome, but also pretty great in a "so this is where meat comes from" kind of way. Although I clearly didn't belong, I tried my best to fit in. It's pretty hard though. I'm 6'2'', and have soft computer programmer hands.

I walked up to the counter and asked for a pork butt. The guy behind the register looked pretty incredulous, like "do I look like a friendly man that is going to go find you your butt?" He pointed at the unmarked door to the side of the room and told me that it was the retail shop. I nodded to say, "of course...I know where that is. I just forgot."

The retail shop had another whole pig hanging from a hook, and more head buckets. The walls were lined with piles of meat. A radio in the corner was tuned to La Ley, and men in white coats were chatting in Spanish as they split cuts of meat with cleavers as big as your head. I eyed the ribs, but remembered I was hear for butt, not ribs. I found the butt department, and then froze. I didn't see any bags, other than the thank-you-for-shopping bags on a shelf. I looked around, wondering if I was supposed to just pick up the raw pork and put it in my pocket. I stepped back and found someone that looked like they knew what they were doing. He was buying several racks of ribs, probably for a family BBQ, or maybe to sell in a parking lot somewhere. He didn't look like the kind of guy that would want to help me out, so I just stared at him, hoping he'd buy something so I could watch how it worked.

After poking at ribs (with his bare hands) for a while, he went to a shelf and pulled a pair of plastic gloves from a mysterious box I hadn't seen before. Then he grabbed a few of the thank-you-for-shopping bags and went back to the ribs. He started piling giant rib racks into the too tiny bags. Meat was hanging off the sides. Then he walked to the cashier in the other room and paid. The whole transaction involved lots of meat touching surfaces. It was disconcerting.

I wanted that butt, to get it, I'd have to just be tough and go grab it. I went to the mysterious box of gloves, pulled out two, grabbed a shopping bag, and went back to the butts. Most of them were in the 10 to 15 pound range. I found one on the bottom of the pork pile that felt like it weighed about five pounds, put it in my shopping bag, grabbed a second bag so that the blood wouldn't seep out into my trunk, and went to the cashier.

"This all you want? This one piece of ham?"

"Yessir. Just this. Oh, by the way, the barber on Wells Street sent me."

"Oh. That will be $4"

That's right folks, a pork butt that would easily cost me $12 cost just $4. Plus, I got this great story. PLUS, now I call pork "ham," which is pretty cool. So, in short, if you need to buy some ribs or butts anytime soon, don't be afraid to go to Lake Street. Please don't tell them I sent you. I'm trying to build up some rep.

A few weeks ago we lamented how difficult it was to make your own marmalade. It turns out, pleasant little English women agree. The little English women didn't give up though, they persevered, and preserved. With a little bit of innovation, they decided to can up pre-chopped seville oranges, with a marmalade recipe on the back.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why the sun never set on the British Empire. Innovation! Determination! 8 pounds of sugar! Yes, the recipe on a can of "Ma-made Canned Seville Oranges" calls for four pounds of sugar per batch of marmalade, since we decided to do two batches at once, that meant a whopping 8 pounds of pure sugar.

We started early Sunday morning. Our friend Tish came over. This is an honest to goodness pleasant woman of British descent. We thought her presence would not only be pleasant, but also give the whole proceeding an air of Miss Marple like sophistication. I ran to Jewel and picked up the sugar, stopped at the Ace hardware on Lincoln to buy 12 pint jars, and then we got started.

We ordered the Ma-made canned oranges two weeks ago from shopenglandonline.com. We thought for sure we'd have to seek out a recipe to go along with the cans, but we didn't...Ma-made printed it right on the side of the can. I guess there isn't much call for a giant can of sliced seville oranges without a marmalade recipe printed on the side.

The recipe is pretty straight forward. The whole process took us about an hour or so. The kitchen smelled great the whole time. It got a teeny bit tricky towards the end, we weren't sure how to tell if the marmalade had "set" enough to put in the jars. The can suggested a "wrinkle test," where you put a small amount of it on a plate to cool, then run your finger across it. If it wrinkles, it's ready. We weren't sure the degree to which wrinkles were necessary, so we sort of winged it. It turned out we took it off the heat at just the right time.

Ladling the scalding hot jelly into jars was as painful as it sounds. All of us came away with at least one small jelly burn. One of the great things about spooning the jelly in hot is that it sterilizes the jars for you. As long as you heat the jars up a bit with hot tap water, they won't break when you pour the hot marmalade in them. Put a lid on, and wait a few minutes. As the jar cools, the little bit of air in it compresses, which eventually pulls the pop top of the lid down. You have an officially sealed jar. Tish gave a jar of it to her Mom, an actual British subject. The review was good, "It remind me of marmalade in England." Huzzah!

We made 11 pints of marmalade that day, at a cost of around $60, so around $5 per pint. We didn't really save any money, but we certainly didn't lose any either, plus it was super fun. Any amount of money is worth the thrill of a jelly burn and answering the typical "happy-monday-what'd-you-do-this-weekend" question with "not much, just made 11 pints of marmalade."

For more pictures of the process, check out our flickr set.

A few weeks ago, our friend Tish came over for dinner. She brought us a jar of honey, and a big chunk of honey comb from her friends Judy and Ted in Montana who own a few bee hives. We were super grateful for the fresh honey, but were even more interested in the story behind her honey producing friends. It's not uncommon to hear about home gardeners, or folks brewing their own beer, but raising several hives of honeybees is pretty cool.

Ever since I read A Book of Bees by Susan Hubbell, I've been obsessed with bees. Camri is allergic to them, and we live in the city, so it's not really realistic to raise our own bees. We were excited to have access to real live beekeepers that we could ask questions of.

We got their email address from Tish, and wrote them asking about what got them into beekeeping. "I brew my own beer and I tried a delicious mead, which is fermented honey water," Ted writes in his email, "the price of honey is expensive when you have to use five pounds, so I decided to become a beekeeper and have my own source of honey."

Each hive produces 100 to 150 pounds of honey. The amount of labor isn't trivial, but it's not intensive either, "Spring time is the laborsome time inspecting each overwintered hive, feeding pollen substitute, sugar syrup w/medication, and monitoring brood production. It takes about an hour per hive, once a week for about 4-6 weeks. During the summer it doesn't hardly take any time other than inspecting the hive for honey production and putting on more supers to gather more honey. Summer is the time for the bees to work and me to enjoy watching their production."

When production ends, the really fun part begins, "Towards the end of summer and early fall it is time to start removing the honey filled supers, extracting and bottling , and attending farmer 's markets and craft fairs for selling. Once this is done it is time to make sure I have left enough honey in the hives for the bees and start preparing them for their winters rest. The whole process starts mid April and ends at the end of October."

Recent reports of honeybees disappearing have illustrated how important the honeybees role is in the great big circle of agriculture. From the New York Times, "one study says that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in US." When we asked Ted what he thought was causing the nationwide bee vanishings, he suggested global warming. The winter time temperature fluctuations cause the bees to leave the hive too early, "Most hives don't get monitored very often during the winter while we are in the house reading A Book of Bees, by the warm fire and sipping on our hot tea w/honey and planning our strategy for next season."

Thanks Judy and Ted for answering our questions, and for the great honey.