Calamity Shazaam in the Kitchen

Oy vey. No one tells you that as you age you stop staring at your navel and start slowly looking at the world around you through the lens of experience. Which is making me into a complete Debbie Downer. Ugh.  I love Thanksgiving and I am not sure exactly why I should still. It signaled the brutal eradication of an entire civilization which we mark by stuffing ourselves stupid.  Can you imagine if in Germany there was a national holiday to give thanks for Kristallnacht? Maybe now is too soon, but in two or three hundred years? Who can say. What I do know is I can't discuss this with most people because pretty much no one wants to talk about sh*t that happened in the past, especially if they think they are going to be made to feel guilty about it. Everything ugly gets swept under the rug and we hope for better tomorrows.  You see where I am at with this kind of thinking? Debbie Downer City.  However I can't bring myself to not have some k...

To the person who invented stretchy pants, I give thanks to YOU. Brandied Cranberry Preserves from Linda Ziedrich's Joy of Jams & Jellies  .  I will NEVER make cranberry sauce any other way. Ever Mennonite Cheese Bread for the stuffing. Blanched pearl onions ready for peeling.  Onion and garlic puree. I cooked onions and garlic for ages, slowly, before pureeing it and mixing it with grated cheese to make the sauce for the pearl onions.    Instead of pumpkin pie, I made pumpkin flan. It was pretty and pretty delicious.  Apple Pie.  I love apple pie.  Stuffing.  I could literally eat stuffing EVERY day. This is turkey sausage, apple, cranberry, and sage. Infrared turkey cooker. No oil, no nothing but heat. As you can see it came out looking good. It was also the juiciest turkey I ever cooked. The Thanksgiving Table with my crafty centerpiece. This is my folks house. I am MUCH messier. Shredded raw squash with vi...

a) This year there was no Turkey Shoot. No Grandpa = No Turkey Shoot. I just could not do Turkey Shoot without the oldest gizzard of all. I miss him and this only makes me miss him more. But we still got ourselves a gorgeous big ole birdy from Diemand Farm because they really do have the best birds, thanks to Dad for picking it up. and b) This year there was no insane excel spreadsheet for the Thanksgiving shopping list. I simply went shopping for everything last night and bought stuff that looked good. I have a couple of recipe ideas and basically I am winging it. More or less. At the very least we'll have turkey and gravy and pie. You know what else? I am not even stressed out about it. If I totally f*ck it all up then we're going to have pizza and beer. With a side of turkey and gravy and pie. No sweat, no problem. But keep this between us. No one else needs to know.

Great googly-moogly! I am a bad, bad, blogger! Bad! Eh, oh well. Sometimes being bad feels pretty good.... I digress. It is almost turkey bird eating time, although from the displays that having been popping up all over town like union stickers you'd think retailers had forsaken Thanksgiving as the insensitive white man's holiday that, kind of, it is. I suspect however that the more likely scenario is that Thanksgiving doesn't rake in the dough quite like Christmas and its attendant pressie-giving pressures. Personally I cannot handle Christmas displays before Thanksgiving. It's like having a martini with dinner, not before. Somethings just have to be savored in their appropriate sequence. I cannot get into my visions of sugarplums until I have first blasted at a turkey with ye olde blunderbuss. As is often the case, someone else has put this conundrum into words better than I ever could - Jim at Suldog has written about this for a few years now (I think... last ye...