There. Writing that took most of the energy I had left. I'm grateful for the day though. It was an unusual Thanksgiving here, partly because I didn't invite a houseful of people. In fact, for the first time in so many years I can't count, we only needed my dining room table, because it was just the kids and me. Six people. We had a wonderful dinner with lots of laughter, and the only spill was a glass of water and the blood from the 2 fingers I tried to chop off.
In fact, at one point Coraline led the entire table in a rousing rendition of "Rolling Down to Old Maui" (listen below), and I started to say to Montana that I wished I had a video of that to post in opposition to all the memes on Facebook about how awful Thanksgiving and families are ... but then Elvira knocked over a glass of water and blamed it on Coraline, and I didn't get to even finish saying that until much later when it was no longer relevant.
We also ate several hours later than usual, because Montana and Drake had a wedding to go to. On Thanksgiving Day. The best holiday of the year. What? Who does that? But it was fine. We roll with shit like that here. For the first time ever I didn't have to clean my house or get up at the asscrack of dawn to put the turkey in the roaster and start the rolls. I cooked a lot of food, but I had all day .... OK, all week really. Because T-day dinner takes at least 4 days to prepare and about an hour to eat.
Monday was shopping day. I caught myself looking at the 22-pound turkeys and realized I didn't need to cook a bird the size of a 3-year-old this year. So I found one that was 13 pounds. Who knew they even grew turkeys that small? Practically an egg.
The grocery store was kind of a zoo, but I just kept smiling and eating free samples and reminding myself that the privilege of having access to all that food far outweighs the asshole who parks his cart sideways and then walks halfway down the aisle to look for Jello, or presses up against me from behind trying to get to the free samples, or says "excuse me" and tries to push my cart out of the way with his cart when I obviously can't go anywhere .... Oh, wait. That was only that one guy. Asshole.
Filling my tank for $135/gallon made it all worthwhile.
Tuesday I prepared the pumpkin. It took both the oven and my biggest pot to cook the whole thing, and it made close to 3 gallons of pumpkin puree. I could have made at least a dozen pies with all that, but it will freeze, and we'll have pumpkin pie in the summer too. And next Thanksgiving. And maybe the one after that. It might actually last that long .... and did I mention I have a few other pumpkins too. OK, I might have over-invested in pumpkins this year. I get excited about pie.Oh, and I put the frozen solid rock of turkey ball in a salt brine in my roaster. I've never done that before, but I'm sold now. The turkey thawed in the brine on my counter, and it was the best turkey I've made .... maybe ever. Even the year I killed my own.
Wednesday and Thursday .... well, you know how it goes. Peeling, chopping, rinsing, mixing, sauteing, baking, roasting, making a dozen trips to the compost, and running and unloading the dishwasher over and over. This is the 5th Thanksgiving I've written about here. I don't know how much more I can say about the food. It's delicious. I ate way too much, and I have leftovers. The idea of them makes me sick, but I know that won't last. I'll be eating hearty again tomorrow.
How was your Thanksgiving? Any good stories come out of the day?
Our Thanksgiving was good and in a minute I'll be heating up leftovers for dinner. I love not having to think about what to cook for dinner.
ReplyDeleteI love the leftovers. A couple of the kids stopped over, and we just dug in again. No preparation, and the cleanup goes into the dishwasher. I'm glad you had a good T'day.
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