1. There’s a turkey neck situation.

2. Is it four thousand degrees in the kitchen, or is it just you?

3. You love your family, but you also wish they’d leave you alone so you can watch Gilmore Girls and eat mashed potatoes.

4. You’re so bloated that you feel like a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

5. Something that should be moist is instead very, very dry.

6. You’ve been obsessively trying to prepare for it, but who knows what will actually happen.

7. The placemats your kid made in kindergarten are making you tear up.

8. You need to go to an Orangetheory class for your own sanity.

9. There are tender breasts and big, meaty thighs.

10. You fall asleep on the couch at 4 p.m., then you’re wide awake at 3 a.m.

11. You swear you didn’t eat that much, but you look like you’re about five months pregnant, which you definitely are not. Or wait. Could you be?

12. There’s a bloodied history.

13. You’re debating whether to go the all-natural, hormone-free route or to just go for the hormones.

14. You’re not sure why you just walked into the kitchen.

15. For some reason, you are enraged about yams.

16. You spend a lot of time trying to keep skin from getting dry.

17. You hurt your neck and shoulder chopping onions.

18. No one really knows when it will end.

19. The turkey has been in the oven for six hours and is burnt on the outside, but somehow is still raw on the inside.

1–18: Both
19: Thanksgiving

Visiting Hamburg in 1878, Mark Twain heard a cuckoo calling in the woods.

“First cuckoo I ever heard outside of a clock,” he wrote. “Was surprised how closely it imitated the clock — and yet of course it could never have heard a clock.”

He added, “The hatefulest thing in the world is a cuckoo clock.”

(From his Notebook.)

Pasta lovers know there’s no such thing as too much pasta. Whether a craving calls for spaghetti, gnocchi, cacio e pepe, or a little bit of everything in between, the quest for the perfect plate of pasta is a never-ending journey. Luckily, the D.C. area is filled with plenty of options for getting that pasta fix, from cozy neighborhood eateries to traditional osterias.

Noodle newcomers to try include build-your-own pasta bowls at Gigi’s Pasta in Western Market and downtown’s dreamy trattoria Olio e Più out of NYC.

For this latest map update, we add: La Collina and Grazie Nonna, while now-shuttered Modena comes off the map.

Below, find the top Italian restaurants for pasta in D.C., and get all sorts of culinary inspiration for that upcoming date night or family outing. And for D.C.’s best pizza places, go here.

The following is an interview with Katie DeFonzo, a Reference Librarian in the Hispanic Reading Room

We’re back with Katie DeFonzo for the final post in the “Sampling of Cookbooks and Recipes” series where she tries a new recipe and shares her experience making it.

Please tell us which recipe you chose.

This time, manifesting that the weather would soon feel more authentically like fall, I chose a soup dish. This final recipe is taken from Buen Provecho: 500 Years of Hispanic Cuisine, a publication by the New Jersey Chapter of the Hispanic Association of AT&T Employees (HISPA). This cookbook is a carefully compiled collection of recipes from many different countries and parts of the United States, and this recipe for meatball soup (caldo de albóndigas) was contributed by Steve Colyer.

Why did you choose this recipe?

This recipe includes plenty of protein as well as some of the same quintessential autumn vegetables that have been found in the previous recipes I attempted as part of this series. I often watched my Dad and Grandmother prepare meatballs for dinners during the holiday season, and this recipe similarly called for making meatballs from scratch. That the meatballs in this recipe include pimiento was a twist that I was excited to try.

Tell us more.

While attempting this recipe, I was reminded of the importance of avoiding – or at least minimizing – multitasking. Because I was tending to a few other things in the kitchen as I began to prepare the soup, I let too much of the broth boil off initially and needed to add more. The recipe does specify that the pimiento should be chopped, and if I were to make this soup a second time, I would chop the pimiento much more finely. I believe this would have made the very soft mixture easier to work with as I prepared the meatballs. The sliced pimiento halves were too large to incorporate effectively into the mixture, and the meatballs broke apart quickly as I continue to tend the soup. The pimiento became in effect another vegetable included in the soup. It might be preferable to cook the meatballs in an air fryer before adding to the beef broth and continuing with the remaining steps. I made a few small modifications to the recipe: for instance, I chose not to add cabbage to the soup and tended to add slightly less of the vegetables than the recipe demanded. I also used garlic powder in place of garlic cloves and dried coriander rather than chopped cilantro. While this soup was not particularly hearty (I would recommend a chili or a creamy soup on the coldest winter days), it was certainly a delicious and flavorful option that could easily serve a larger group of dinner guests.

Sampling these different recipes has inspired me to continue trying new recipes from these books throughout the rest of the year. And I am grateful that the Library of Congress has so many of these kinds of cookbooks representing countries from throughout Latin America. There will be no shortage of recipes to choose from. Which new recipes are you hoping to try?

Thanks again, Katie, for selecting the recipes and sharing your experience making them! 

If you’re interested in this recipe or the others in this series, please submit your request through Ask-a-Librarian.

Explore the Library’s many resources related the recipe books in our collection through Alimentación, gastronomía, cultura y hábitos alimenticios: una bibliografía anotada.

We occasionally discuss Biblical cruxes (e.g., Daughter of Greed), and there’s a good one at Poemas del río Wang; the post begins:

I introduced the Jewish epilogue of the post on Saint Martin and his geese with this image, which, with its depiction of a goose-like bird and a signature unmistakably Jewish, proved perfect to illustrate the peculiar story of the Jews who delivered roast geese to the Habsburg emperor on Saint Martin’s Day.

But what exactly is this bird with that enormous egg?

The inscription only reads: זה עוף שקורין אותו בר יוכני zeh ʿof she-qorin oto Bar Yochnei, that is, “This is the bird called Bar Yochnei.”

All that remains is to figure out which bird is called Bar Yochnei.

1.

This name appears in the Babylonian Talmud. Tractate Bekhorot 57b amidst tales of wondrous animals and plants, mentions:

“Once an egg of the bird called bar yokhani (=the son of the nest) fell, and the contents of the egg drowned sixty cities and broke three hundred cedar trees.”

The colossal bird also shows up in Bava Batra 73b, in the adventures of Rabbah bar bar Hana whose travels and miraculous encounters would eventually find their way into Sinbad-style tales:

Once we were traveling in a ship and we saw a certain bird that was standing with water up to its ankles [kartzuleih] and its head was in the sky. And we said to ourselves that there is no deep water here, and we wanted to go down to cool ourselves off. And a Divine Voice emerged and said to us: Do not go down here, as the ax of a carpenter fell into it seven years ago and it has still not reached the bottom. […] Rav Ashi said: And that bird is called ziz sadai, as it is written: “I know all the fowls of the mountains; and the ziz sadai is Mine” (Psalms 50:11).

The mere existence of such a bird is miraculous enough—but two of them? That would be an even greater miracle. Later Talmudic commentators—implicitly the medieval Yalkut Shimoni, explicitly the Maharsha (1555–1631) of Poland in his commentary on Bekhorot 57b—identified the two as one and the same.

2.

We have thus learned that Bar Yochnei and the ziz sadai are one and the same. But what is the ziz sadai?

The post goes on to cite Psalm 50, Rashi (“who derived ziz from the verb zuz, meaning ‘to move about’”), and other early commentators, saying:

Thus, the three creatures—Behemoth, Leviathan, and the ziz sadai—form a coherent triad. They are three gigantic, wondrous beings, far beyond human dimensions, yet Adonai maintains dominion over them. According to Talmudic commentators, Behemoth is the wonder of the land, Leviathan the wonder of the sea, and Ziz Sadai the wonder of the air, as it is a colossal bird.

As for Leviathan, we have already noted that it originates from ancient Near Eastern creation myths, well known to the Jews living in Babylonian exile, and woven into their own mythology. During the Second Temple period, the strict priestly editors purged these myths from the Torah in its officially compiled form, yet traces remained in poetic or anecdotal texts, such as the Psalms or the Book of Job.

The central theme of these creation narratives is that the god or gods—Elil, or later Marduk, who replaced him—must first subdue chaos and its rebellious rulers, primarily in the waters, but also on land and in the air. […]

All of this is explored in detail by Nini Wazana of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in “Anzu and Ziz: Great Mythical Birds in Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Rabbinic Traditions” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 31 (2009).

That Anzu indeed made it into the psalm, surviving there for three thousand years under the name ziz sadai, is further confirmed by the fact that the word saday—a hapax legomenon appearing only here in the Bible, with an uncertain meaning—derives from Anzu/Imdugud’s original Akkadian epithet šadû, meaning “mountain.” For Mesopotamia, mountains were the threatening unknown, the source of attackers and storms, whose deity was Anzu.

There’s much more at the link, including the usual glorious images.