The color of infinity inside an empty glass

AI Slop Recipes are Taking Over the Internet and Thanksgiving Dinner is what my feed greeted me with this morning, and geez, it's making me feel even more fiercely determined re the mini cookie cookbook of recipes I've made and loved that I'm trying to put together to send out with holiday cards this year. Though I need to get off my butt with those, too, still haven't ordered them.

In the meantime, the current status of this year's Thanksgiving meal:

- Main: Kristina Cho's Chop Shop Pork Belly, from her Chinese Enough cookbook. Pork belly is currently air-drying in the fridge; all we have to do Thursday is roast it. Will be serving with rice (or possibly a rice stuffing, see below), and ...

- Cranberries: Kay Chun's Cranberry-Asian Pear Chutney, as always since 2001. This is done and chilling in the fridge. But I was chatting with Marissa Ferola (who runs Nine Winters in Huron Village, Cambervillains), and she shared her daughter's cranberry sauce recipe with me, with fivespice and black pepper and mandarin and chinkiang vinegar! So that sounds intriguing. And I think both will go great with the spices of the pork belly.

- Stuffing: I found Rize Up's KPop Gochujang Loaf in stock last week, which means THIS IS THE YEAR I am *finally* making Mandy Lee's red hot oyster kimchi dressing. Seriously, this has been on my Thanksgiving bucket list for years. Between the New England tradness of oyster stuffing, hyounpark's well-documented love of oyster kimchi, and me finally putting all the pieces together, I am so stoked to make this. There's still a possibility we may get fancy and put together a rice-based stuffing on the side, as that's what my mom and hyounpark prefer, but we'll see. But I do need to get started on it.

- Cornbread: I was trying to de-dairify our favorite custard-filled cornbread, but the experimental batch yesterday proved that coconut cream does not behave the same way dairy cream does; it was pretty obvious when there was a giant crater lake of liquid coconut cream after an hour of baking when it should have settled into a layer in the cornbread, and upon slicing into the cornbread, said pool of coconut cream completely spilled over like a spring river. So the backup plan is to try it with our local dairy's A2 cream, since our issues are lactose intolerance rather than dairy allergies or veganism. I'd also been picturing flavoring it a la Betty Liu's lemongrass corn soup, so I may steep the coconut *milk* with the lemongrass, but leave the cream alone. (I'd steeped the coconut cream with lemongrass before, but I'm wondering if that also might have created custardization issues. Won't have time to fully experiment before the big meal tomorrow, but I have paths to follow before next year.) But this will bake Thursday along with the pork belly, so I do need to scrape the remains out of the cast iron skillet in prep for tomorrow.

- Orange veg: We're going with kaddo bourani in lieu of our default Orange Vegetable Soup trend of the last few years. Given all the other experimentation I tend to put on this menu, it's always good to have some reliable old faves on the docket as well. I'm making the meat sauce right now, but will probably not start the pumpkin part until this afternoon, as I need to do both the stuffing and pie crust before the pumpkin hogs the oven all afternoon/evening.

- Green veg, cooked: Which is why Andrea Nguyen's sesame salt greens (from her cookbook Ever Green Vietnamese) are back as well. Based on the greens we have in the fridge right now, it's gonna be collards to make the Southern boy happy :) It's stovetop, it can be done pretty close to last minute, but I might try to slip this in tonight and just rewarm tomorrow. If not, I'll make them while the pork is roasting Thursday.

- Green veg, raw: I was irked that some random reel came across my Instagram feed this week that said, of Thanksgiving dishes Sagittarius is salad. But the reasoning was basically atting me, hahaha. "It's like, chaotic, nobody quite knows what could be in it, it could be from anywhere in the world, any type of salad." Which is tempting me, don't get me wrong, to pull in a Midwestern dessert salad, hahahahaha 😁 (I'd probably go strawberry pretzel, LBR.) [Also, I could have sworn I wrote a thing about Midwestern dessert salads here, but I can't find it to link to, so maybe it's just in my notepad of things I've been meaning to post about? Must rectify that.] But Eric Kim's Roasted Seaweed Salad (from his Korean American cookbook) will also be on the table again. This one's easy - will be made during the half hour the pork is resting waiting to come to the table.

- Potatoes: uh I guess we should figure this out, right? But we're looking for something different from our usual scallion cheddar or maple miso mashed potatoes. And I don't want to do anything that involves mandolining or tiling a bunch of potatoes either. We will probably default back to some kind of basic mash, though Kristina Cho mentioned Sriracha Twice-Baked Potatoes on her Substack, and while the potatoes we have on hand are too small to do that properly, we could certainly run with the general flavoring principles. I may try to outsource this to Leonard and Sara though!

- Miscellaneous: If I get ambitious, I also really want deviled eggs and I have like two dozen options for recipes with Asian flavorings.

- Dessert: I did manage to get ahold of passionfruit, so Alana Kysar's Liliko'i Chiffon Pie (from her cookbook Aloha Kitchen) will be gracing our table again. And that's first up for today: I need to get started on the crust so that's out of the way before I work on the filling.

And with that, I'd better get moving! Especially because I may need to make one last dash out to the supermarket for forgotten ingredients (mostly for the pie: gelatin, eggs). Wish me luck.