After Thanksgiving

I doubt if anyone is much interested in hearing about pies or turkey right now, so I'll be brief.

I accepted the offer of the carcass, thinking I'd make a soup. Only to discover at least five pounds of perfectly good meat still on board. So, in addition to the soup (with barley, porcini mushrooms, asparagus, carrots, tomato, edamame) there are now multiple containers of turkey chili, paprikash, and curry to fill our hungry freezers.

As for the pies, I made three. They are long gone, and were all a big hit. I can make awesome pies, practically in my sleep. New this year was the "Foolproof Crust" from Cooks Illustrated, involving 1/4 cup of vodka. I've never really been "fooled" by piecrust, but I'm always up for innovations. The vodka (substituting for half the water) is supposed to contribute to extra flakiness. It was easy, delicious, and very manageable; I'm sure I'll make it again.

I generally prefer to keep blog posts to a single subject, but in the interests of catching up I'll mention a few other things that have kept me occupied:

1. Computer maintenance. How boring is that? Well, email was getting tedious, needing major sorting and filtering. But here's the biggest change, in a nutshell: RSS feeds. When I first started reading blogs, I was convinced that a program like "Bloglines" was the most efficient way to keep track of them all. But when you subscribe to a blog as an "RSS feed" it means that you get the posts one at a time, like an email, in its own folder. You can read, save, or delete at leisure this way. I find this to be a much better system. (I use Thunderbird, which makes this very easy, but I suspect other email programs allow for it too.)

If you are a blogger, and are not set up to provide this sort of feed, I'm convinced that you're doing your readers a disservice It's an easy thing to set up. Nina, are you listening?

2. Reading. A major activity in recent months, but, on second thought, worthy of some separate posts. So never mind.

3. Mice. Oh what an exciting life I lead! Yes, I've had a mouse problem. And still do. I can still hear scuffling sounds in the attic crawl spaces. The exterminator threw little bars of green poison in there. This was enough to drive them out in the open, leading to various sightings I'd prefer to forget about. Attic scuffling, in comparison, isn't so bad. Still, I'd like them to be out of here once and for all. And though I think that getting a cat would probably be the best solution in ONE way, in another way it would seem to be adding a whole new set of potential problems and irritations (litter box, food, water, vacation care, daughters' allergies). I guess I'll throw more of those little green bars in there. Any other ideas?