I have a number of posts in mind—a great new muffin recipe, some more anti-fad-diet rants—but for today here are some ideas for you to ponder as you head into the rest of the summer with all of its get-togethers. I’m sure there are cookouts and weddings yet to come, family visits and maybe even block parties. (Jim and I are pondering that last one.) There’s always the temptation to simply check off boxes for the menu. We have potato salad from Costco—check. We have fried chicken from King Soopers—check. We have a cake from King Soopers or Costco
Here I sit in Kansas City, Missouri, well after the events I described in my last post: the post-concert reception and the dinner for the annual business meeting. So I’ll give you a quick update and then a great, simple frosting recipe that you can use in the place of that horrible powdered-sugar stuff. I’ll be doing an exhaustive (and exhausting) recipe and variations for my streamlined Swiss buttercream, but that will have to wait.
All calories count, but they don’t all count the same, I said in my last post. So I ended with the horrible prospect of how many grams of sugar are in a 32-ounce Big Gulp regular soda. (At some point I’ll take on the diet soda industry, but not today.) 72 grams of sugar all dumped into the bloodstream at once constitute an EMERGENCY. Remember, these liquid sugar calories basically pass right through the stomach and into your small intestine where they’re absorbed. Alarm bells are going off and your pancreas is pumping out insulin at a mile-a-minute clip. And the system is proactive as well as reactive; your digestive system doesn’t wait for nutrients to hit it before swinging into action.
I have a subscription to the New York Times mainly because of Melissa Clark, a cookbook author and food writer who is absolutely the most charming, delightful, quirky, quirkily delightful, delightfully quirky . . . well, you get the picture. I periodically go onto 
How was your Thanksgiving? I have to say that this was one of the nicest I can remember in an unbroken string of enjoyable holidays. We had our 15 people who ate, played games, talked, watched college football, and hung around for a long time. That’s always my yardstick for measuring how successful a party is.
Who am I kidding? (Actually, whom am I kidding?) If you’re the cook for tomorrow you’re not reading blog posts, and this won’t arrive in your inbox until 6:00 this evening, at which point it will be far too late for you to go to the grocery store and buy a butternut squash. I actually should have posted this additional material on Monday, or even Sunday afternoon, as a friend told me at church that morning that she hadn’t been able to access the New York Times articles/recipes by Melissa Clark. But there it is. Maybe you’ll decide to make her pie for Christmas dinner. And you can still roast your turkey the way Melissa says to do it even if you decide not to do the dry marinade. I think you should be able to access the video at least: