Oh My Ears & Whiskers! The Turkey Cometh

Not even two weeks until Thanksgiving!

Meaning, a relative of one of these guys is on its way to That Old House.

Wild turkey,wandering aimlessly near our house. Silly bugger - it's November. Flee!

Because eventually, all November roads lead to this:

 This is motivating.

Yes, this wakes up my hostessing DNA and gets all those

holy-monkeys-get-your-act-together genes percolating merrily.

Because we won't just have turkeys here on Thanksgiving.

No turkeys in this group!  :-)

We'll have people.  Aged from 22 months to 88 years.

This year, I do not have a long, elaborate, impossible
To-Be-Done-By-Thanksgiving List.

Nope, this year, it's pretty pared down.
In no particular order, here it is:

Polish the old silver.  The easy way.
(You don't know the easy way?  I'll show you.  Tomorrow.)

Clean.
At least enough so as not to frighten the guests.

Plan the menu (yes, because Thanksgiving foods change

so much year to year), send Howard to shop (he likes this, or so he claims),

and then do the cooking, from cranberry sauce to pies.

Get the Thanksgiving china out of the breakfront.
Actually, that will be Annie's job when she gets home.
(I wish I had her home for days beforehand!  She cooks.)


Speaking of the dining room, I better include
"clearing off the table" on my TBDBT List.
Ha ha! Gotcha!
This was October 2010, when we were rejiggering the kitchen, and 
all the kitchen stuff was all over the freakin' house.  Including here:

We still don't have matching dining room chairs, but that's okay.
No one coming has matching bottoms, either.  :-)

I am tempted to add "sew dining room draperies" to my List this year,
as I have had it on my TBDBT List for years, but I am not including it.
After all, don't the windows look nice, all nekkid?

If the draperies get done, that will be a lovely surprise.  For me.
Do elves ever show up at night and sew curtains?  Please tell me Yes.
 

So, pared down, this year's TBDBT List is:

Clean, shop, cook.
(Yep, that covers a lot of ground.)

Change the chandelier lightbulbs, an annual event.

Find all the table linens, platters, wineglasses,
and the cords to the big coffee urns.
(More of a challenge than you might think.)

Fetch guests coming by plane or train.

Plan table centerpieces.
(I pretty much always forget this.)

Bathe the dogs before Turkey Day itself.
(This reminder is hard-won; don't ask.)

Don't poison anyone.
(So far, a perfect record on this one.)

Yup.  That pretty much covers it.
Mostly, just the basics.  And the fun stuff, like cooking.

What's on your T.B.D.B.T. List?
Cass

And thanks to Karen at The Graphics Fairy for the vintage images.
Her website is amazing, and addictive.  Go see!

The $5 Meal Challenge -- Slow Food USA

(Two posts today -- check here for my post on our Front Porch.)


On the very same day back in June,
when our daughter Alida married Josh, one of their grad school
classmates also got married, to a young lady named Emily.

Emily's Black Bean and Tomato Soup.  Mmmm . . . soup!

Emily keeps a blog called Feeding Philosophers, where she writes about -- well, Emily can explain better than I.  This is from her "About" page on the blog:


"I’m a currently unemployed philosophy wife with a master’s degree in college administration.  I love food and I have a growing interest in green/sustainable living.  This blog gives me a chance to share my cooking and baking experiments, as well as a space to further explore healthy living.  It also serves as a fun distraction from the soul crushing pursuit of finding a job during a recession (sigh)."

Two weeks ago, Emily and Alida paired up to host a special dinner party,

part of Slow Food USA's $5 Challenge.

According to the Slow Foods website, this was the challenge:

"You're invited to help take back the 'value meal' by getting together

with family, friends and neighbors for a slow food meal

that costs no more than $5 per person."

Emily and Alida signed up for the challenge, got their newly minted husbands on board,

and invited several other people for the feast.  Everyone was to bring something, and play by the rules.

Please visit Emily's blog here, and let her tell the story.

The dinner party was at Josh and Alida's apartment, and those are the

only pictures I've ever seen of it.  I'm just sayin' . . . .

But back to the business at hand.  The $5 Challenge.

If you've gone to Emily's Feeding Philosophers blog and read her entry,

you can stop here and go eat a Mallomar, or a batch of beans and rice.

You've gotten the important information.  What follows is just my own tale of the $5 Challenge.

********************************************************

We've got two examples of people who signed up and participated in this.

One group did things the right way -- that would be Emily and Alida and their

dinner guests in Los Angeles on that Saturday night, the 17th of September.

Then there's the people who did things the less-than-right way.

That would be me and Howard.

In our defense, we didn't have much warning, plus I didn't actually read all of Slow Foods USA's info.

Although the "slow food" part should have cued me in.

This is what slow food looks like!

After Alida told us about the upcoming dinner party, I thought of what a good idea it is,

to make people aware of what they are spending with an at-home meal,

as opposed to a McMeal that (probably!) isn't as healthy.

I say probably, because it all depends on what you make at home, doesn't it?

Howard is That Old House's official hunter-gatherer.  He likes supermarkets; I loathe them.

Off he trotted to the local stores, with instructions to bring home food for that evening,

costing no more than ten dollars total -- $5 each.  And he did just that.

Here's what he bought:

A package of beer brats, a bag of pre-shredded cabbage and carrots, one big sweet potato, and

a steam-in-the-microwave bag of creamed spinach because he knows I love creamed spinach.

So we grilled up the brats, baked and mashed the sweet, nuked the spinach,

and I mixed up a dressing and made cole slaw.

Well, it wasn't curried lentils, no tofu or homemade focaccia bread,

and there wasn't any slow food cooking involved unless you count the time spent baking the sweet,

but it was certainly under $5 a person, was way better tasting than a Value Meal,

and certainly couldn't have been any worse nutritionally and probably a whole lot better.

 And we even had leftovers.

***********************************************

All kidding aside, it is sad and worrisome that the diets of so many people -- particularly in lower economic brackets -- are very lopsided, with fast food and convenience foods dominating.

Emily writes that she found cooking for $5 per person "easy."

And for Emily, and Alida, their friends and families -- it is easy.

But they have something special that makes it easy -- the incalculable resource of good educations and creative minds.  (Not to mention excellent parents, of course.)

Lunch -- Leftover asparagus made into cold soup; leftover fish, broiled, on grilled bread.

A philosopher's stamp of approval.  Alida chows down, May '10.

Lots of us were lucky enough to learn real cooking from our mothers,

who hopefully learned cooking from their mothers,

who themselves learned back when peanut butter was considered a convenience food.

Others of us can teach ourselves how to cook real food.

This requires time, good reading and comprehension, patience, books or the internet,

and enough money to afford mistakes.

  That's luxury.

Tomato herb omelette, fresh blueberries with Greek yogurt -- faster than an Egg McMuffin.  July '10.

I wonder what are the lasting effects of a challenge like this.

Did it reach the people who need the message most?

 How do we encourage cooking -- slow food or any other kind -- when fast food is so quick, relatively cheap, and people like it?

How do we educate both the fast food consumers who don't know alternatives,

and also the ones who buy fast food for pure convenience?

Persuasion and education is a more powerful tool than legislation

and, to me, philosophically more acceptable.

Anyone got a good sturdy soapbox?

If you haven't visited Emily's blog, she's got lovely thrifty recipes,

and there's the post about the $5 Challenge.  Plus, let's all make a wish that she

finds her job soon, and can afford to buy saffron and very ugly mushrooms.  Click here!

Also visit Designs By Gollum for Foodie Friday.  Click here

and go see what Michael is up to!

Loads of foodie posts await you there, thrifty and otherwise.

 As for Howard and me, we've got a work weekend out at the beach house.

Visit my other Friday post,

about our front porch, by clicking here!

Fab weekends to all -- Cass

A gathering of family and strangers: A typical Thanksgiving!

It's two weeks to the day since we celebrated our first Thanksgiving in our new old house. We thought we'd be down about five in our usual head count, but it seems that Nature and Thanksgiving both abhor a vacuum.

We welcomed 3 complete strangers, California natives (poor things!) with no East Coast family. Niece Alice invited one of the Californians, niece Becky invited two others. We were delighted to have them.

So all in all we were a modest group of 27.Howard and I, married 30 years, have hosted Thanksgiving all but 4 years. It is the perfect ecumenical holiday; everyone celebrates, so there's no chance of offending anyone's beliefs, or non-beliefs. Everyone believes in eating. And everyone believes, or should believe, in gratitude.

It was odd, planning for Thanksgiving in a different house, after 20 feasts on Riveredge Road. In that old house, I knew where everything was and where everyone would sit, and our kitchen was so narrow that there was only room for Howard and me in it -- no spectators allowed. We realized this year, with the kitchen so open to the conservatory, that people could HEAR us. Yikes.

I discovered the day before the feast that I was missing the long banquet tablecloths, half of the old silver flatware I use at the holidays, and various bowls, pots, etc. Time to improvise.

Plus ... our dining room is a good size, but not large enough to seat 27, especially now that "the cousins" are actual complete and full sized humans. It's no longer possible to jam 10 little bottoms cheek-to-cheek at the far end of the table, as we used to do at the long living room set-up on Riveredge Road.

(Picture of dining room, before setting up the long rental tables. So serene before the chaos!)

We put a "cousins" table in the conservatory, a kids' table, with "kids" ranging from 18 to past 30.

The 13 "grownups" got rented tables, diagonally placed, in the dining room. The dining room table was moved into the parlor as a drinks table, and the parlor chairs and sofa were moved back against the walls to make room for more chairs for chit-chat. With a fire going, it made for a lovely, cozy nook for my Dad and my brothers to sit and have a really good jaw.

My daughters, bless them, retrieved all of the Thanksgiving china from the bottom of a breakfront, and made sure all the wineglasses were spotless. Or nearly so.

It was a good dinner. The food was what Thanksgiving food should be: traditional, not poisonous, cooked in a timely manner, and EATEN.

And we all were grateful. Dion, above, and Connie, below --- enjoying the special
cookies our niece Becky brought for them.

I am thankful for so many things this year, too many to list. But my joy in a family gathering is shadowed by my mother's absence. I want her there to encourage me and tell me I did a good job, to call me the next day for our "party post-mortem" conversation. But she can't be a part of our family gatherings now, and she will never see this old house we love so much. Mom is a prisoner of Alzheimer's Disease, and lives in a facility only 10 minutes away... so close as the crow flies, but light years away from reality.

But to have my husband, my daughters, so much of our family, and those three complete strangers, to sit at our tables and break bread (and wishbones) with us -- now that is a blessing indeed.

Next Thanksgiving -- the draperies in the dining room will be actually SEWN and not just fabric panels hung by clips, and I will by then have found that missing silver flatware. Probably.

On to Christmas, Hanukkah, and the New Year!