Now that she’s a mom, says the cook in the video, she’s become “notorious for sneaking vegetables into everything.”

But we don’t think butternut squash needs to be “sneaked” into the recipe. We love the idea of this seasonal mac and cheese.

For added flourishes to the recipe in the video, how about:

 
More Mac & Cheese
After you’ve watched the video below, check out:

Image: Sautéeing the thyme and grated onion in butter and olive oil to make the squash sauce.

We’ve tried a lot of wine travel bags. We like VinniBag the best for car and bus trunks, airline travel and anytime a good bottle of wine can be jolted. It’s not just leakproof: It’s so robustly padded that nothing should break in the first place.

Like an inflatable bath pillow, VinniBag has inflatable air chambers that protect and insulate wine bottles and other liquids (olive oil, for example). The air pockets provide superior protection against impact and leakage.

Easy to inflate, VinniBag deflates and stores flat when not in use.

One VinniBag is $28.00; two or more are $25.00 each. It’s a welcome gift for friends who buy good wine and like to travel with it.

Get yours at VinniBag.com.

Instead of hours of cooking, enjoy a bowl
of steaming Vietnamese phö soup in
minutes. Photo by Simon Gurney |
Dreamstime.

Instead of making stock for hours, though, you can enjoy the 10-minute version with Pacific Organic Soup Starters. Not bad, given that a bowl of phö can have up to 30 ingredients (including all the seasonings in the broth).

It’s the best commercial phö we’ve had, and an easy way for you to treat yourself (and your family) to something special.

Phö, pronounced fuh, is also high in protein and low in calories when you enjoy the delicious broth without the traditional rice noodles.

While Vietnamese pho is a beef-based stock, Pacific Organic makes chicken and vegetarian soup bases as well as beef.
You can find them at natural food stores nationwide and online.

It takes extra effort, but brining a turkey produces a moister, more tender bird.

Brining is the process of soaking the turkey, for an extended period of time, in a liquid that contains salt and other flavorings. The salt in a brine draws the natural moisture out of a turkey and allows it to be replaced with the moisture of the liquid in which you are soaking it. Therefore, the flavorings and seasonings you add to your brine will become infused in your turkey.

Brining a turkey helps to tenderize it, which not only improves the eating experience, but also slightly cuts down on cooking time.

Brining is not to be confused with marinating: While they have similar functions, a marinade’s key components are acid and salt, whereas a brine in its simplest form can be nothing more than water, salt and sugar. But we have much more interesting brine ideas.

It takes time to brine a turkey,
but the results are worth it. Photo
courtesy Butterball.

Check out the full article, with easy-to-follow steps for brining your turkey.

Make Thanksgiving special: Serve your own
microbrew. CSP Photo.

We never review products we haven’t tested. So last month, THE NIBBLE office became a microbrewery, as we brewed our first batch of beer in the office kitchen with a Mr. Beer Micro-Brewery Beer Making Kit.

In the fermentation tank (a plastic keg), we combined hopped malt extract, unhopped malt, dry brewing yeast, a packet of fermentable sugars and water. We put the keg in a corner to ferment.

In two weeks, our brew was ready to be bottled for its second fermentation. In another two weeks, it was ready to consume. You can cut the four-week production time down to two weeks, but the beer will be less complex.

Finally, we took our first sip…and were more than pleasantly surprised.

The style was a little on the light side for us, but it’s exactly what most of America is looking for. It tasted fresh and lively—much more so than most beer.

If you use the shorter method of fermenting and bottle-aging (two weeks total), you can make twenty 12-ounce bottles of beer every week. The Premium introductory kit, $49.95, includes everything you need to make the first 20 bottles. After that, buy a refill kit for $17.99 and re-use the fermenter and the plastic bottles to make the next 20 (and on and on) for just 90¢ a bottle.

After you’ve made your first batch, you can experiment with fruit, spices and other styles of beer. All the ingredients to make many different styles of beer are available on the Mr. Beer website (see Refills).

For Thanksgiving, we’re brewing two darker varieties: Englishman’s Nut Brown Ale and Bewitched Red Ale.

Consider Mr. Beer for holiday gifts as well. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, 20 bottles at a time.

For more information, visit MrBeer.com.

Learn about the different types of beer in our Beer Glossary.

Some of the Premium Kit contents (stein
not included). Photo courtesy Mr. Beer.