Have you been making plans for Thanksgiving? We have to be careful, or we start thinking about Christmas and forget all about it until it's right upon us. I love Thanksgiving...good food, good friends, and lots of family, without any of the stress of the Christmas holiday. We always spend our Thanksgiving holiday with my family. My parents live a couple of hours from me and I don't get to pop in as often as I'd like, so I always look forward to a nice visit. My mother always overdoes it. There's too much food, which she then practically begs us to take back home with us, and I'm happy to oblige. Something happened between my mom's generation and my own. Or perhaps it just happened to me and all the other 40-something mothers out there have it all together in the kitchen. I still kind of flounder around in there. For starters, I wouldn't think about cooking without a recipe. I have a really hard time replicating my childhood favorites unless my mom is standing beside me because she never uses a recipe for anything. If I call her and ask her how much garlic I need, she doesn't know. Just add it until it tastes right. How much flour? Until it looks right. How can I cook with directions like that? What will happen when my mom is no longer doing the turkey and dressing? I guess my sister will have to stop going to her in-laws for Thanksgiving and stay home to fix my dinner. Sounds reasonable to me!