A couple of weeks ago I received an email blast from Epicurious.com, one of the few opt-ins I have opted for – my life is email heavy enough as it stands.
In a clickable ad I espied one of the cooking contests so popular these days. This particular contest is for cooking a classic holiday turkey. The prize: an incredible $25,000 high-tech kitchen.
Seeing this, I offered to cook a
turkey for my good friends Judy and Keith at their place so we could hang out pre-Thanksgiving style.
I devised an Italian-inspired recipe: turkey with morels, cipollini onions, guanciale (that pork jowled unsmoked bacon king), fennel, white wine, fresh marjoram and fresh thyme stuffing. It sounded like a ringer to me and them.
So we had our turkey party. 
Just a few days before I unexpectedly found myself to be the recipient of an elaborately boxed and bottled flagon of Armand de Brignac champagne. This luxurious libation comes in a gold-toned gleaming pewter-coated bottle. I figured it would be a splendid thing to share with two of my favorite Vegas peeps.
Along with the aforementioned turkey and stuffing, we enjoyed roasted shallot and red potato mashers, Brussels 
sprouts in a Sierra Nevada porter spicy mustard sauce (with a touch of deep green pumpkin seed oil from Judy's home country, Austria) and a gratin of roasted corn, zucchini and red peppers with Parmigiano-Reggiano. Oh yes, an Ikea bowl boatload of gravy was present, too.
A uniting factor in the stuffing, gravy and turkey basting was a hunk of that rich Plugrá butter (salted).
Throughout the day we enjoyed music, the Sunday New York Times, a couple of beers, chatting, smoked trout and cocktail onions on crackers and feeding “fur kids” Luna and Randy scraps of guanciale rind and smoked trout packing oil. It was lush life for the pups.
As for the champagne, it was delicious. It's a brut but seemed nicely on the sweetish side of the dry spectrum. It has a clean flavor and we all liked
it much. It was a pleasure to toast friendship and the approaching holiday season with the glinting bottle to the side of the table.
Cheers to all Encyclopedia Vegas readers. May you too unexpectedly receive some fine beverage of your own.
Note: There's a rub in all this turkey cooking contest business if I just happen to be so fantastically lucky to win the Grand Prize: I rent.
Musical Highlights of the Week
After Friday's grand opening of Trader Vic's, I popped in to the Gap in the Miracle Mile Shops. I found two natty black shirts on sale to the sounds of my beloved (and lamented) Luna's “Lovedust.” Black shirts and Luna – very NYC. (I also walked by a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf while The Strokes could be heard, NYC again.)
For a more prosaic moment that was enhanced aurally, I enjoyed Monday buying laundry detergent and paper towels at a Vons to the stylings of Roxy Music's “Love is the Drug.” It didn't make it a glam shopping spree, but good music is always appreciated.
(This blog was stuffed into the internet space with the musical help of the Old 97's “Drag it Up” album.)