A Non-Martha Stewart Thanksgiving...
…but I doubt she’ll enjoy hers as much as I’ll enjoy mine, considering. (I think I have the best friends to share it with.) I’ve never seen her show, but back when there was a K-Mart store somewhere, decades ago, I scored a set of classic Sunday through Saturday embroidered flour-sack cotton kitchen towels. I still have them and love them.
I know I should have made a list of what to do first and when to do it. I know I should not have loaned out my pie plates. I know I should have cleaned out the fridge before I put an 11 lb. turkey in it last week. I know when I finally do clean it out, I’ll discover I didn’t have to go to the store today as many times as I did. I know I should have made a shopping list before I went to the store. I know I should have read the recipe for the pecan pie before the stores closed.
On the bright side, everything I make is going to taste like it should; it might not look exactly like it should, but nothing in these mountains looks like it should these days. Helene changed all that, two months ago this day. Well-meaning people from all over the country sent us stuff. And more stuff. And then some more. There’s no place to put any more stuff, and what’s not being tossed into dumpsters is free for the taking at various sites around the county. (My old 4-drawer file cabinet plastered with Bernie and Warren and Keep Abortion Legal stickers is out on the curb, because I no longer have 4 drawers’ worth of files.)
My biggest success today was figuring out how all 4 leaves from my family’s kitchen table fit together. It took an hour. Each leaf has wooden pegs on one side and holes on the other side (and some holes on the peg side!). The whole tabletop had been covered with that classic white “ice cube” formica, and all but one of the leaves was stripped of that, but not finished. It looks rough, but it will fit 12 of us tomorrow if we all suck in our thighs.
My second biggest (shared) success was our trivia team, the Potato Liberation Front, winning 1st place again. I am the sole team member well past 35. I knew The Jazz Singer was the first talky/singy movie. I knew Mark Twain was the first famous novelist to use a typewriter (but I was overruled). But I’m completely useless on most of the music rounds, because it’s almost never the Beatles or Broadway musical prior to 1970. My day will come; I just know it. Maybe when the quizmaster is my age.
Though I’m making do - having to substitute a couple of things - I’m picky about some other traditional Thanksgiving dishes. For instance, putting orange slices through a grinder with cranberries is a real pain but it’s worth it. A friend years ago suggested I just drop it all into a food processor and ZIP! press the button. I can’t; I know that will produce mush. It’s not the right texture. So in the morning I’ll be grinding as I think of a couple more things I probably should have taken care of today. Like vacuum?
I’d made a pie from a candy roaster-ish thing someone gave me (a regular candy roaster is a squash shaped like a watermelon, but with pinkish rind.). This one was shaped like a pumpkin - a big one. It has to have been cross-pollinated with some other kind of stringy squash. I scraped out what I thought was all the stringy part, but even after baking (at my neighbor Mary’s; because even just half of it wouldn’t fit in my oven), it became obvious that the entire pulp was nothing but string. It took hours to process it, trying to beat the string out of it. I’ll know tomorrow if that worked.
So - since I didn’t have any pie plates left, but needed to bake a bourbon/pecan pie - I put the crust into my 10” cast iron pan, poured the filling in, and put it in the oven. I poured a shot of Woodford into one of my Mom’s old wineglasses, and sat down to wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving.
Before each Thanksgiving meal I host, I read this, by Melody Beattie:
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
The timer has gone off. The crust isn’t burned. I like that all I had were pecan pieces (the recipe calls for halves), because it’ll be easier to cut slices into even-edged triangles - an accidental silver lining.
Good night, friends. Happy, happy!
Lucy