But if you are trying to get high fructose corn syrup (or corn or grain products) out of your family’s diet, foods that have been produced specifically for the Passover season (March 29th through sundown, April 5th this year) are your friends. I went to my local ‘large regional supermarket chain’ and found that the Passover display was already up: matza, coconut macaroons, breakfast cereals, baking mixes, potato flour, you name it. These are products that although you will want to read the ingredient labels just to read them, it is not as if you will have to read them to catch the manufacturer in putting corn products into them. Corn and other grain products are forbidden for Passover, so products are manufactured specifically with that in mind and the manufacturers’ premises are rigorously cleaned and inspected by religious authorities before the manufacturing process takes place to make sure that there is no ‘chametz’ (grain products) left behind to contaminate the manufacturing processing equipment. (more…)
Groan. Right about now, the thought of turkey anything is enough to make the residents of Chez Siberia lock themselves in the bathroom (and considering that there are only 1.5 ‘necessaries’, this could result in a rather interesting game of musical toilets..), but even the Siberians must eat. And, as luck (bad) would have it, The Boy had a birthday celebration intermixed in all this and asked for (hurrah!) a meal that actually hearkened back to a period when our family was…mmm…shall we say….how should Aunt Toby put this? 
You never know, when you get involved in this blogging business, into whose mailbox or IM or FB or other ‘social networking’ la-di-dah your words and pictures are going to land. I was notified by a kind friend that my Thanksgiving piece (post both here and back with ‘the folks what brung me’ back at firedoglake.com) had been picked up by an electronic publication which, shall we say, is at a slightly more rarified level than my little postings here. 
If your house is like mine, the carcass from yesterday’s dinner turkey got a piece of aluminum foil thrown over the top of it and is sitting forlornly in the refrigerator, having been combed for odd bits of meat over the past 24 hours.
This year, Christmas fruitcake has had a powerful competitor in terms of being the go-to punchline as the number of plays on Sarah Palin’s hunting prowess and the loss of poor Rudolph seem to have flooded the internet.
Ah, Christmas morning…filled with the sounds of ripping paper, “Dad, where’re the batteries?” and “I’m hungry…”
