The recent blog chatter about cooking Kale has my relatives in a panic about my Thanksgiving Menu this year.

For the last ten years, I have been making the same Maple Glazed Turkey. It marinates for 24 hours and it has always been a sure-fire hit. Delicious and never dry, except for one year when we had too many cooks in the kitchen and my sister-in-law insisted it needed to stay in the oven a little longer. If I hadn't had so much wine while preparing the meal I probably would have put up a bigger fight but I wasn't too keen on loud voices screaming "It's still raw" coming from my kitchen.

I feel it's only fair to give you a little bit of brief history. In my early homemaking days, I used to be a terrible cook. Awful. I was famous for cooking everything out of a wok until one day my friend pointed out that I had the same ingredients in the salad as I had cooked in the wok. The standing joke when coming to my house for a meal was, "what's for dinner, Hot and Cold Salad?" I've gotten much better over the years, because the pressure to produce family meals cultivated some pretty decent culinary skills and some freedom to experiment.

But never on Thanksgiving. It's become a kind of "go-with-what-you-know" menu for my crowd and although everything is delicious, it's getting, shall we say, boring.

So you can imagine my caution when one of my relatives jokingly asked if Kale was on the menu this year. As a matter a fact it is.

"Just don't go all Tofurkey on us, please", was one comment.

Geez...well, at least I know that they're reading my stuff.