I hadn’t had any for awhile, so I pulled out the recipe my Aunt Patti gave me over twenty-five years ago and made a tasty loaf.

Have you ever made beer bread? You can buy mixes, (hubby got one for Christmas that was good,) but the recipe only has five ingredients so it’s super simple. I heard one time that cheap beer works best so I use whatever we have in the house. If I was more adventurous, I would try a better beer, but I am afraid I won’t like the results. (Try different beers and let me know what you like.)

I don’t drink alcohol, but beer bread doesn’t taste like beer. It just tastes delicious. I have provided a recipe below, and I’m sure there are a lot more online.

Aunt Patti's Beer Bread

3 cups flour
4 1/2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. salt
3 tsp. sugar
12 oz. beer of your choice

Preheat over at 350 degrees. 
Grease bread pan. Mix dry ingredients. 
Add beer and mix until doughy. Pour batter into pan. 
Cook 50 to 60 minutes.

One more hint, I think the bread is better the next day. It’s very moist when it first comes out of the oven. Of course, I couldn’t wait and enjoyed every bite.

This is not an easy question to answer. First of all, you can’t just make cookie dough on the International Space Station (ISS) because flour and sugar in zero gravity would just float around and not stay in the bowl.

There would also be baking challenges. On Earth, the hot air in an oven moves around and heats the dough. This doesn’t happen in zero gravity. Likewise, gravity makes the cookies spread out and flatten, so a cookie in space would look different without a lot of baking changes.

Last November, these issues were tested. A tin of DoubleTree (the hotel) cookie dough and a zero-gravity oven were used on the ISS to bake cookies. (Here is a short video about what the oven looks like.) It was an interesting experiment.

First of all, they baked five cookies, one at a time. Each one was cooked at a different time and temperature. The first one was undercooked; the other four smelled like baked cookies. Unfortunately, the astronauts couldn’t eat the cookies. They were put in individual containers and sent back to Earth for testing.

Here is the answer to our opening question. The cookies on the ISS were baked between 70 and 130 minutes at 300 and 325 degrees. The best looking cookies were numbers 4 and 5 that baked for 120 and 130 minutes. Two hours!!!

This may seem like a frivolous experiment, but if we are going to have colonies on the Moon and Mars, it will help to have real food, including cookies. Plus, a fresh-baked cookie is better then one that’s been in a box for months, especially if you have a bag of milk with a straw to go with it.

Since my moms-in-law are visiting us this week, we had turkey with all the fixings yesterday. We’ll do it again on Thanksgiving with friends. What I forget every year, until I do it again, is how much I like cooking a turkey.

It’s simple, hands-off, and the results are always great. Why can’t all food be this easy to fix? The smell makes everyone happy, and there are leftovers. It’s a perfect food.

I think the turkey industry is missing a bet. Except for an occasional Easter turkey, we only cook a turkey in November and December. Why doesn’t the turkey lobby convince us all to have turkey once a month? We don’t do it now because it’s almost impossible to find a turkey and if you do, it’s really expensive. But that could change.

Maybe the turkey growers don’t want us eating whole turkey year-round. Perhaps the industry’s doing fine with the Thanksgiving turkey formula. I once saw a Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe where he went to a turkey farm. It seemed like a lot of work and a very dirty (and noisy) job.

I don’t think the amount of turkey I eat in a year is going to increase, so I’m going to enjoy the couple I get to make. I’m just glad it’s so easy to get tasty results. All I need to be happy at Thanksgiving dinner is turkey and cranberry sauce. What do you like best?