My family is having Thanksgiving tomorrow, as my sister will be back in Boston for the real Thanksgiving. I'm looking forward to it very much - especially since the always risky business of baking bread seems to have turned out unprecedentedly well. My bread is bigger and better looking than ever before, even though I've used the same recipe every time. This could be due to using Cooper's Best Stout from Australia (Hey! They have a recipe on their website for Stout Chocolate Cake!) in the reciepe instead of the Guinness I usually use. Or it could just be that I'm getting better at baking bread.

People often ask me how I can deal with Thanksgiving, as a vegetarian. This always cracks me up. Even before I was a vegetarian, the turkey was not at all the highlight of the day for me. My ideal Thanksgiving plate is filled with mashed potatoes with butter, lefse, and lots of stuffing. And pumpkin pie with whipped cream for dessert. That was my ideal Thanksgiving meal way before I ever thought of vegetarianism. This is why I really have no interest in things like the Tofurkey feast, which is basically a log of dry, bland overly processed soy protein with not-very-tasty stuffing piped into the center of it. Not my form of choice for processed fake meat products (I am particularly fond of fake Buffalo wings, and did you know that fake corn dogs taste exactly like real corn dogs? At least, how I remember corn dogs tasting. It's been almost 10 years now.)

If only I knew where to look for the photos of that turkey my mom and grandma constructed out of vegetables one year. That was a good vegetarian turkey.