Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Cadenhead's Old Raj gin with Vya dry vermouth martini (3:1 or 2:1)-- lemon twist, well-shaken. Be careful, though, because the Cadenhead's gin is substantially more alcoholic than regular gin. Hendricks is also tasty, with the strong cucumber element.

Martha Stewart has a very simple asparagus and gruyere tart that gets raves whenever I've served it. Just cheese, asparagus, puff pastry, and a little oil to dress it. It's on her website.

dark, but not really dark. Too high a percentage and it tastes like dirt ... really good dirt. Wait, is that a bad thing?

Connecticut has more than one style of pizza, btw. While the New Haven branch is great, my heart belongs to the medium crust, cooked in a greased pan, cut in squares pizza of my Hartford youth. The sauce is similar to the "Greek New England" style described by serafina, but with a thicker crust (not Sicilian thick, tho). Always commercial mozzarella, usually grated romano on top as well, and my favorite, fresh sausage chunks, put on raw, cooked as the pizza cooks, spreading the pork fat love over the whole pizza, none of those lazy slices of pre-cooked links! Have seen cheese put on top of other ingredients, but it's not common. Also, no selling of separate slices (the horror!). My family fights over which is better, the "corners" which have the maximum crust to innard ratio, or the inside slices, which have no edge crust at all. mmmm...

Goose always sounds good in theory, very Chaz Dickens and all, but in practice, I find it much too rich and kinda greasy. We've done ham the past couple of years because there's so much food that you can put it out on a buffet and people can eat what they want. This year, Dad's lobbying for rib roast, so we're going old school: rib roast w/roasted potatoes and veg, and yorkshire pudding.