A tweet from my sister:     GoHybrid: Mmmm. Muffaletta Pizza. Yum. Off to have dinner.

My response:    @GoHybrid What the hell is a muffaletta, and is it in season? Is that like Turducken?

I didn’t know what the hell a Turducken was, either, until Jan spelled it out for me.

It’s a turkey, stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken.

Don’t believe me?  Check out this link:  It’s from Food Network, and it’s Paula Dean’s Recipe and you KNOW Paula Dean isn’t lying…anyone that loves butter  THAT much can’t lie. I know this.  I LOVE butter. I don’t lie.  And, no, your butt doesn’t look big in those jeans.  Not a bit. 😉

**Shifting Gears**

So the holidays are coming.  Woot.  Yes, that was, in fact, a serious lack of enthusiasm on the part of me.   Remember, Halloween should be a federal holiday and IS, since you asked, my personal favorite holiday.

Thanksgiving? Meh.  The bird is good…Well, now, anyway.

I remember when I was a teenager living back in California, I petitioned my mother to make a ham for Thanksgiving, as I was not a huge turkey fan. In my teenaged mind, turkey was just a fat, bloated chicken, and ham was ever so much better.  She declined my request for ham.  I told her I was going to boycott the bird. She still declined.  I threatened to eat a freaking PB&J sandwich for Thanksgiving dinner, because, after all, why bother to put that much effort into cooking a bloated chicken if a quarter and most important part (in my mind) of the family was not going to eat it, anyway?  Do you know that she STILL denied my request?  So I went to work. I made posters, one of which was lettered, “The Peanut Butter & Jelly Brigade.”  (Gawd, I thought I was a hundred and ten pounds of pure wit, back then….)  We would be making plans for the holiday, and I would throw out there how cranberry sauce would go well with PB&J, because it’s a JELLY, but sweet potatoes? Not so much.  I carried on for weeks…And ended up sucking it up and eating the bloated chicken, anyway.

When I cooked my own Thanksgiving dinner, my then-husband was NOT going to deal well with a Thanksgiving PB&J, so I ran the whole ham idea past him. I was 19, what did I know about tradition?  All I knew was that I wasn’t going to cook a turkey, ESPECIALLY since those Jenny-O or Butterball or whomever’s commercials about, “Oh, it’s her first turkey. It’s going to be dry” were so popular back then (and please know that I looked for those videos and just could not find them).  When presented with the choice between PB&J and Ham…Well, you do the math.  What’s so pitiful was that it sure didn’t seem like Thanksgiving without the turkey. Damn those traditions, anyway…

I wish you and your families all the blessings you deserve, and then some. (And if you are a really rotten person, I hope you get more than your share of blessings…You probably need them.)

Oh, and for those of you dying to know what a Muffaletta Pizza is:

@JuliesMusings “A white pizza crust topped with muffaletta (a coarsley chopped mix of black and green olives with carrots, garlic, herbs and olive oil), provolone cheese, salami, canadian bacon, red onions and banana peppers.”

Thank you, Sis, for clearing that up, and now I simply must find a recipe! 😉