Eccentric Flower:199811/thanksgiving recollected
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thirty eleven fourteen thanksgiving recollected All right - this is my second postcard today, and if you haven't read the one before it, you might want to read that first. Rose and Eric are friends of ours. Eric's mother died earlier this year, and they decided that they wanted to have one last Thanksgiving in her house, a big Thanksgiving dinner with some of Eric's favorite traditional foods and lots of guests. Being in the house, which has been left basically untouched since Eric's mother's death, was a little creepy at first. One guest, one of the ones who had known Eric's mother well, had to leave - she was simply too upset to stay. But it became less of an issue as everyone got used to the surroundings. Food was something of an impasse, although a tasty one. Rose and Nonelvis, who were doing most of the cooking, are Gourmet readers who like to do off-beat things with food, and add lots of spicy; Eric I would describe as more of a traditionalist - he tends to like simple, unadulterated tastes. For example, we had to split the mashed potatoes in half, because we could only add garlic to one half. I'm not sure that was Eric's request or not. Actually I am coming to the conclusion that I prefer them without garlic myself. Horseradish, on the other hand, is a welcome addition, and one which I had never encountered before Nonelvis. I didn't really cook anything, just stood around the kitchen handing people the right bowl at the right time, cleaning up behind the two industrious people. I'm an adequate cook; more importantly, though, I can be useful to someone without getting in their way, a rare skill which led me to seriously consider nursing school, until my aunt the RN told me what hell it was. I also don't enjoy cooking usually, except for desserts, which are fun. I made a pecan pie and a pumpkin pie. The pecan pie recipe was a new one for me - it had cane syrup in addition to the corn syrup. Now, you're not likely to have tasted cane syrup unless you've spent a lot of time in the Deep South. It's more like molasses, with a vaguely metallic taste, than syrup. It gave the pie an interesting flavor. Everyone loved it but me - I think I'll use my old recipe next time. More importantly, I can still make fantastic pie crust, a skill I cherish, since it's the only thing I can make that my mother can't. Heh. You may add "stuffing" to your list of things where there is a north vs. south divide. In the South, stuffing is likely as not called "dressing," and the basis is almost always cornbread. In the North, stuffing is made from white bread. Aside from Stove Top, I'd never had white-bread dressing before coming up here. This fits the general tendency of the South to prefer cornbreads and quick breads, and the North for yeasted breads. It has to do with hard vs. soft flours and we can have that spiel another day. Nonelvis has been using the Cook's Illustrated method of turkey roasting for the last few years. It's elaborate - you need a V-rack and a means of turning the entire turkey over midway through, while it's molten - but it solves the usual problem, which is that the white meat cooks faster than the dark meat and usually becomes dry. Also the Cook's method is very careful about temperatures, which is good because roasting a turkey with stuffing inside is a very real bacterial hazard unless you watch the stuffing's temperature carefully. The food list: There were, hmm, eleven people at dinner. We were somewhat overfed. Sleepy from the turkey and red wine. (There were "tryptophan" jokes made, this being an intellectual crowd, and Seinfeld jokes made, because they unfortunately seem to be unavoidable.) The only real downside of the dinner, aside from the one premature departure, was that Eric's son Gus wasn't feeling well - it was pretty obvious, as he's a gregarious person like his dad, and when he was in a room full of people and food, showing utterly no interest in either .... Rose finally led him to the sofa in the living room and he slept through most of the evening. On Friday, Mary Anne was in town, in the middle of sort of a Grand Tour of her East Coast relatives. We were happy to treat her to brunch and talk her ears off (and vice versa) - it's amazing how people who correspond with each other almost daily can find so many things to say. We talked and talked and she came back to the house and met Inu and we talked some more and then drove her to her aunt's. I wasn't double-teamed but once, when they ganged up on me to try to convince me to make a trip to California, to see the sights and also all our friends out there. I'm not as reluctant as they think I am, but we have neither the time nor the money to make a trip of the length we'd need to do it justice. Why doesn't everyone come visit the East Coast instead? Boston's lovely, and you don't need a car to sightsee. One of the things that perturbs me about Californians (not anyone specific - this is a stereotype) is how they feel that California is the best place in the world to live, like it's a paradise on earth or something. (New Yorkers are like that too, but they at least admit that their city has big problems, which gives them a certain paradoxical flair.) Even so, I recognize that a trip to see the other ocean is inevitable. It will happen, sooner or later. © columbine |
