Barding

Who uses it: Cooks
What it means: Wrapping lean cuts of meat or poultry in bacon, as a means of adding fat and flavor
How you can use it: To make almost any food better.

My brother Ed has a whole riff about "Foods that Cannot be Improved by Bacon," which basically consists of two items: ice cream and beer. I don't know, though... bacon bits on vanilla ice cream might be a true taste adventure.

Let the amateurs rhapsodize about white Christmases. We have white Thanksgivings in my part of the world. Yesterday was only a dusting, but today we're supposed to get more snow, perhaps as much as four inches.

South of here, in Portland and Freeport, they had much less snow, or maybe it just melted faster. My friends the Eraths are in Biddeford for the holiday, so I met them in Portland last night. We had a beer at The Great Lost Bear, then dinner at Ri Ra, an Irish restaurant/bar on Commercial Street. It's so much fun to go to Portland for dinner, and then it's miserable to have to drive home after.

Today Dizzy and I are bringing creamed spinach and stuffing to the Lechners' Thanksgiving dinner, in Freeport. It's been a while since Dizzy got to go to a Thanksgiving dinner, so he'll be pretty excited once he figures out what's happening.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!