Dan’s Blog

Thanksgiving has come and gone, but the food stays with us, in our refrigerators, freezers and thighs. As promised, here’s the post-mortem.

The heritage bird that Blair landed for us was great; nice flavor without being overly gamey. The roasting instructions I had were for top heavy birds, rather than the mature, thick-thighed Kansan from Hertiage Foods USA that made its way to Brooklyn’s Bierkraft. The breast meat wound up somewhat dry, which was a bit disappointing; thankfully there was a whole mess of gravy to remoisten the meat.

The sausage/polenta stuffing worked out well, thanks in large part to an aggressively meaty brown chicken stock. Also, I did the polenta day in advance, using regular cornmeal instead of quick-cooking polenta, but retaining the 1:3 corn:water ratio, rather than the traditional 1:4 ratio. I also added fontina cheese, because fontina is del.icio.us.

The Persimmon-Cranberry Sauce was as expected; I think one the persimmons may have been not so good, though. I don’t know what persimmons taste like.

As it turns out, I didn’t need to make the Cornbread Casserole and Butternut Squash, Mushrooms, and Ancho Mole, but man is this a good recipe. Traditional pain-in-the-butt fancypants magazine vegetarian entree — “First cut up 7,000 things, then make a sauce that requires a food processor, then a stew, then cornbread, then combine it all and bake it.” All told, though, it’s healthy and worth the effort. The mushrooms are pretty muted (I used oyster mushrooms and a couple of portobellos) and the mole could use a little more spice, I think. And if you’re not a vegetarian, use stock instead of water. Duh.

Also, Blair made some extra delicious stuff. Highlights include a gluten-free pizza topped with shrimp, cocktail sauce and cream cheese; a cocktail involving champagne and Pom (called “Pom-paigne” (I made a “Common Sense” joke that didn’t go over very well)); sweet potatoes; and a pumpkin pie that was awesome.

But obviously the best and most important part of T-Day was the company — Jessica’s family — and they were wonderful guests/company. The fact that everyone was easy going really made hosting fun, and the fact that everyone helped out (going so far as to leave our kitchen cleaner than when they found it) really made a huge difference.

The other night I tried out the Polenta and Sausage Stuffing in preparation for hosting Thanksgiving. There were some problems. One was the consistency. Another was the texture. The final one was the flavor.

Let me back up. What makes stuffing delicious is that it is light, fluffy, and incredibly greasy. The strongly refined carbohydrate base (white bread, traditionally) combined with animal fat is like a slightly sweet lard suspension. Maybe you have some crunchy elements — like celery — but this is a dish that’s fundamentally about light, mildly sweet fat.

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My favorite spam filter is, by far, DSPAM. It’s pure bayesian, so rather than relying on a bunch of blocked IPs and dirty words, it makes decisions based only on what you’ve previously tagged as spam. Crucially, this means that you still get the newsletters that you’ve opted in to.

I’ve deployed it as a SpamAssassin replacement with tremendous results. The problem with SpamAssassin’s bayesian filtering — maybe they’ve fixed this, I don’t know — is that it would, after a while, tag one or two spam messages as ham and then autolearn them as ham. That sort of behavior snowballs if uncorrected, and there wasn’t an easy way to correct that behavior in a sitewide deployment with POP users. So snowball it did, and pretty soon the fact that ~70% of our correctly addressed incoming mail (and well over 99% of all mail) was spam meant that people were getting a spam:ham ratio of about 1:1. At that point, email is unusable.

The thing that made DSPAM a strong replacement was that users can decide what is and what isn’t spam, so you’re bayes db doesn’t get poisoned. Using DSPAM, you can tag things as spam in one of two ways — either by forwarding emails on to a convenience address, or by dropping them into a folder set up for that purpose.

After getting the kinks out of the DSPAM deployment — you’d do well to have a separate mySQL server — it hums and runs with well over 99% accuracy with basically no intervention on the part of admins, and little intervention on the part of users.

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Subversion, the almost-drop-in-replacement for CVS, has really taken off as of late, which is great. It’s got all sorts of nice features (atomic commits, file moves, etc.), integrates with apache, and is generally well loved by us developers. At least those developers who spend a significant amount of time on the command line. Because, unfortunately, the GUIs have been a little stinker-doodle.

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Biking home tonight, I got mildly doored. (”Dooring” occurs when someone in a parked car opens their door as you’re riding by on your bike, quickly halting the bike and launching the rider.) My dooring was mild, as I was able to get mostly clear of the door — upon seeing the door open, hitting the breaks and turning turned out to be more effective than my inarticulate yelling — and so wound up on the pavement with my bike about six feet past the door itself.

I’ve been biking in city traffic on and off for about 5 years now, and I guess I was just due. Thankfully I’d read the Transportation Alternatives Guide to Dooring (or Getting Doored) so I had some sense of what to do. Also, thankfully, I was wearing a helmet. Turns out that they really are important.

One of the nice things about being 26 is that, foodwise, I’m not associated with a single dish or set of dishes. This means that it’s not yet part of “being me” (or, less charitably, “performing myself”) to bring, say, homemade pickled tomatillos (”I brined them myself. The key is salt.”) whenever presented with bringing something to a potluck or hosting something.

I’ve yet to call anything I make “my patented ____” and that’s all well and good, until something like Thanksgiving rolls around and I’m one of the people responsible for setting the menu and preparing the food. Because one of the joys of Thanksgiving is knowing that it’s traditional. For me, it’s eating my mother’s mussel and tortalini salad and my aunt Angela’s garlic mashed potatoes while watching the North Quincy Red Raiders take on the Quincy Presidents.

So between now and T-Day, I’ve got recipes to test from myriad magazines, but this may be the wrong way to go, as Thanksgiving is a classic meal, and “Classic Periodical” sounds a bit like an oxymoron.

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