Roasted Yellow Pepper Soup and Roasted Tomato Soup with Hot Pepper Cream

If you ask me what holiday I love most, I will respond “Thanksgiving.” I know, I know, it’s a horrible bastard of a colonized holiday. But for me, it’s just a time to cook for 2 days and share time and food with my good friends. For the last 5 years, I’ve hosted a “friends only” feast, and last year's was by far the most impressive. A full 5-course meal for 16 people, from appies too dessert, and way too much wine in between. The meal lasted 5 hours, including a rock band break before dessert. There was much laughter, much swearing (we all had name tags with pseudonyms like “Fuck Face” and “Ho’ Bag” adorning our shirts) and way too much drinking. I’m not one for traditional celebrations. At any rate, I’ve been meaning to post recipes from last Thanksgiving for about 11 months now. What can I say? I’m a procrastinator. At any rate, it’s high time I posted them, so here’s the first in a long awaited series of recipes from the Thanksgiving 2009 extravaganza!

Course one: Roasted Yellow Pepper Soup and Roasted Tomato Soup with Hot Pepper Cream

As Halloween Approaches: A Ridiculously Long Post About Horror Movies

When I was seven, I watched Child’s Play with my babysitter. Therefore, as far as scary stuff goes, I hate dolls, and I refused to watch horror movies until I hit college and my buddy Stephan sat me down to watch Dawn of the Dead (shopping mall version). Now I love craptastic horror movies, especially zombie movies. As Halloween approaches, I look over the Boston Globes “50 scariest movies” list and contemplate those I have watched and those I will never watch. The rest are going into a list, and let’s see if I can watch ‘em before my favorite hallmark holiday. I promise not to include ALL the movies on their list, just my highlights, and if anyone has any recommendations I must see before Oct. 31st of this year, y’all better let me know now. 

But before I start my list, I must say, if there’s a scary movie you must watch this year it’s Them, the movie The Strangers was based on, but 100x, no, 1,000x better. I also have no idea why Let The Right One In isn't on the Globe's list, but it's fantastic, and I hear Hollywood is ruining it, so you best see the original before the story goes to shit.

Hudson’s Humble (Apple) Pie

Autumn in Washington State mean apples, and lots of ‘em. So, when we moved back a few weeks ago, one of the first things I purchased was an apple corer/ slicer/ peeler in hopes it would help me take advantage of the bounty of apples grown in my home state. This weekend we headed over to one of the apple farms and picked up some cherry apple cider and apples of the Jonagold and Granny Smith variety for pie making and I finally had a chance to use my new doodad. I discovered it now takes approximately a minute and a half to prep an apple to go into an apple pie. Plus, it’s really fun to use, in a nerdy homesteading kind of way.

However, none of this would have even happened if it weren’t for Hudson. See, my friend Vanessa, who has been the cutest preggers lady for the last nine months, finally graced us all with her son Hudson’s presence. And he is a cutie. Normally newborns have that “I’m an alien prune and I look like I need these wrinkles ironed out of me” look about them, but not Hudson. So on our way back from the apple farm, my wife and I got to go take a peek at the cutest six hour old I’ve ever seen, and I knew right then who I would be making a pie for. Before I laid the top crust on the pie and popped it in the oven, I pulled out my trusty cooking stamping set (that my awesome friend Ruth in Germany sent me) and stamped “Hudson’s Humble Pie” and “Apple of Our Eye” into the crust as a sentimental bitch slap to Martha Stewart. Boo-yah!

Hudson’s Humble (Apple) Pie Recipe