Yeah, I’ll totally concede your groceries - I love going into grocery stores when I travel - were better than ours.

I have to admit I was more about the gin - whisky sort of overloads my nose before it ever hits my tongue so it’s wasted on me.  But all the lovely gins and various tonics were awesome.  The Edinburgh part of our trip is all fuzzy with a mellow glow...

I know we get a rap for unhealthy food in the US, but there are plenty of places to eat healthy if you know where to go. It’s just not as fun to cover on food blogs.

I tried to make it fit into our longer trip last year but couldn’t quite do it. My husband couldn’t figure out why I was so keen to go until we finally made it to the Natural History Museum in London.

Dear Salty:

This year, I am making crab-brie bites. (Melted brie mixed with cream, sherry, Old Bay and back-fin crab, spooned into phyllo cups and topped with chives.) It’s from a Tidewater, Virginia area Junior League cookbook, so I figure it’s probably decadent as hell.

Otherwise, I have been known to make these gougeres if I’m…

It’s your 50th, dude, and you appear to love good whisky. Why on earth didn’t you just GO to Scotland? You could stay in Edinburgh, see all the cool things, eat all the yummy venison/salmon/langoustines, and do a couple of different Rabbies day-tours that include stops at several different Whisky distilleries. (Oh,…

The closest we get in containers is Heavy Whipping cream (it’s basically that or Half & Half, which does have its uses). Though we can get tubs of Creme Fraiche - I didn’t try any of that in the UK, though, so I’m not sure how ours compares.

Double cream = posset, and we don’t have that either except in small jars.

I would love to have a real tree, but we travel for Christmas a lot. The curse of being the childless couple of families who couldn’t POSSIBLY travel over the holidays - how could we ask that of them? Easily, we say, “do you want us to host Christmas this year?” It’s not a difficult sentence. (And apparently, we must…

It’s like that No Pants Subway Ride thing - I’m always left thinking, “Aren’t there about a billion better ways to draw attention to yourself than putting your unprotected nethers on unwashed public seating?”

The WTSU snub is a clear indication that the HFPA felt that since two black-helmed movies were nominated for Best Drama last year - BlacKkKlansman and Get Out - then, you know, they’re cool for this year.

Raw milk is a contentious issue in the US.

When I still had my small business, my attorney would send out Harry & David boxes - so a few pieces of fruit and tons of the other stuff - to all his clients every year. I looked forward to that EVERY year.

Our rules around pasteurization mean we can’t really make our own clotted cream, since you have to start with unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk. (You could buy raw milk, but that’s not something you can get at a grocery store.)

I have one of those Chef’n Buttercup Butter makers for making small amounts of fresh butter, and making compound butters with this thing is a dream.

In the cold open, the food choices made me giggle:

I was born in NYC, raised between there and the DC area, and moved to Western Wisconsin in my 30's as part of a job transfer for my husband. We lived there for the better part of a decade before we finally decamped to the Twin Cities.

When I read the John McWhorter piece, I looked up his bio. I felt like that with his Temple-employed parents (at least his Mom was, I’m not sure about his father, who was just “college administrator), his private-school K-12 education, his rapid ascension into college and the Ivy League (Rutgers is a Public Ivy, and…

This is such a great idea.