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Silver Palate's stuffing/dressing with apples & sausage. Time for something a little different this year.

Just this weekend I had a taste for biscuits & gravy, so I researched onine for what I felt would be an appropriate recipe. Well, not to bring her name up again, but I figured an authentic source would indeed be Ms. Dean.

All I can say is thank goodness I cut the black pepper in half and I wished I had not added any salt, let alone 1 tsp. And we won't discuss the pound of bulk sausage, half pound of bacon, pint of half & half, white flour, and 2 TB of butter.

I can't even say if it was any good because the salt ruined it for me.

I'm making this over the weekend. Will report back.

My sympathies for the original poster. That same scenario recently happened to me, but it was with a white plastic cutting board that had been sitting in my brand new dishwasher for about that length of time. I was also quite freaked. I tossed the cutting board and ran the DW at the highest level, a sterilization cycle.

The first time I knew I loved bacon was in the late 1950s, when I was six or seven years old. I distinctly remember sitting in my Arkansas grandparents' kitchen and playing a mental food game with myself: "what are my favorite three foods?"

The winners were burned bacon, chocolate ice cream sodas, and buttered popcorn.

Still nothing wrong with those choices!

But to answer the question, I like it because it's good hot or cold, plays well with other foods, satisfies the fat-salt need, and is so versatile in punching up flavor. It's byproduct -- bacon fat -- is also a staple of the cooking of my mother's people (from Hungary).

Yes, I know the contest is over, but I just wanted to comment.

Most of my meals are taken alone, so I usually eat "normally," whatever the heck that is. Except when I don't, like the dinners of Cheeze-its and wine.

Why, oh why does my cable provider not carry the Travel Channel in my area? I'm missing all this.

Loved it! After a very short while, I realized that every time Julia/Meryl was on screen, I had stopped eating my movie food (sorry, it's an important movie theater ritual for me, and I pretended Julia would understand), but stopped eating it not because it was crappy movie food. No, it was because I couldn't stop smiling. You can't smile and eat at the same time, it turns out. But the oddest thing imagineable is that *while* smiling, I also found myself also leaking tears. Okay, crying. And believe me, I am not a cryer. In four months of chemotherapy I think I cried just once. Okay, downer note. But the point is, the movie moved me deeply. Go see it!

Question: do you flatten the puff pastry out a little with a rolling before adding the other ingredients? I ask because I've made a Martha recipe for a puff pastry-asparagus-Gruyere tart that required a slight flattening of the pastry first. Maybe I'd know this instinctively if I were a puff pastry diva, but I am not! The recipe sounds great, though, and I just so happen to have a log of goat cheese in my fridge and a Saturday farmer's market in my neighborhood that sells wonderful 'shrooms.

Empanadas!

My ghost is a famous basketball player. When I emptied the pantry earlier this month for a kitchen remodel, I found an individual-sized box of cereal-- I want to say it was Wheaties -- with a picture of Michael Jordan on it. He had hair. I'm guessing this relic dates from the early 1990s. I am keeping it.

I have a cookbook by TV personality David Letterman's mother. Homey, Hoosier food is the theme, I guess. I think someone gave it to me because I'm a Hoosier. Anyway, her fruit cobbler recipe has become my standard.