funny

Well, it’s a gray day. I hope you’re not out there driving around or trying to fly around in the snow and ice that seem to have descended on half the country.

Hereabouts, Gerardo, clad in a thick down jacket, is out there shoveling up two months’ worth of mess…he must have noticed at the same time I did yesterday that he didn’t come around last month. He called last night to say he’d be here at 7 a.m.

So. If I were having TG here, the yard would look very nice. 😀

M’hijito and I are going to his buddy’s home for an afternoon of socializing and eating. This has become an annual tradition…getting a bit out of hand, maybe — he says they expect 25 adults and God only knows how many children. So that will be a ton of fun, tho’ how they’re going to fit that crowd into their modest starter house out in the suburbs beats me. But young people have resources and energy that we old folks can only remember vaguely and dream of.

LOL! Some of those dreams are the stuff of nightmares.

Back in the Day, we and the couple who were our best friends each had family to cope with over the holiday, and for both of us it wasn’t all that great an experience.

Barbarella, who was given to even greater crankiness than I — and I’m cranky as a cat under normal circumstances — had to make a vast effort to put up with her hopelessly bourgeois sister-in-law; a brother-in-law who, after, having been thrown out of the state AG’s office for some sort of malfeasance, subsided into quiet sleaziness; a mother-in-law whose life was consumed by supporting the man who married her after she gave birth, illegitimately, to her oldest son (our friend, Barbarella’s husband); and parents who as they aged were slowly sliding into alcoholism.

My then-husband and I had to put up with the woman my father married nine months after my mother died, whom I liked at first but came to loathe for her mind-bending meanness; her proudly ignorant, anti-intellectual, extreme right-wing family and their circle of Ohioan ex-pats; his father, who was simply bat-sh!t rabid; his father’s meek, submissive second wife; and his mother, who was a decent person but whose eccentricities and extreme left-wing opinionation drove me nuts.

Thanksgiving would pass, for each couple, in the company of these worthies. My step-sister, whose idea of cooking involved plenty of boxed items, would prepare what I used to call “flat white food”: a typical feast consisted of steamed turkey with the flavor of sawdust, mashed potatoes, cauliflower…the only color on the table came from the Jell-O salads, usually arsenic green or day-glo orange. Barbarella’s relatives served up similar fare.

Then, after the dust settled and the dishes were washed and the flavorless turkey leftovers were stashed in the freezer (or fed to the dog), we would have our own holiday party:

TGTGIO!

Thank God Thanksgiving Is Over!

Barbarella and I could cook, and I mean really cook. And we liked to work together — we were very good at it. So we would prepare some amazing feast, the centerpiece of which would always be anything but turkey. Leg of lamb, maybe — in those days it was possible to get these marvelous bone-in New Zealand legs of lamb. Haven’t seen them in years…they were so good. But sometimes we might have a real prime rib, or a pork crown roast, or…whatEVER was not turkey. The kids would be fed and relegated to the TV room, which in both houses was far enough from the dining room that the humans could linger forever over their wine and conversation. The dogs would take up residence under the table. And a good time — at last! — would be had by all.

My son’s friends, mercifully, like to cook. So we surely will be served up a meal that does not leave us feeling we need to stage our own to make up for a lost holiday. It’s not easy, though, to turn out enough chow for 25 adults and a passel of children in a tiny modern kitchen with a stupid glass cooktop. So these things are largely a pot-luck kind of thing, with the young people preparing the pièces de résistance and the guests bringing the side dishes and desserts.

We’re bringing fresh cranberry sauce and a carrot dish that I’ve found the young people like a lot.

Whipped Carrots with Apple

You need:

• As many carrots as you figure will feed your guests
• About one fresh apple per package of carrots
• Spices to your taste: a little cinnamon and nutmeg, for sure. If you feel daring, try some cardamom and maybe even some cumin. Take it easy with these — a little goes a long way
• A freaking ton of butter. For one package of raw carrots, about half a cube. Increase according to the size of your carrot output.
• A food processor or blender

Scrub the carrots clean, peeling off any scraped or bruised spots and trimming off the root and the stem ends. Steam or boil the carrots until they’re soft all the way through.

While the carrots cook, peel the apple(s) and cut out the seeds. Cut the carrots coarsely into chunks.

When the carrots are done, drain them and cut them into chunks, too. Place the hot carrots and apple into the food processor, add a chunk of butter, and toss in whatever spices you’ve selected. Process or blend until the mixture is smoothly, gloriously puréed.

You can make this ahead and reheat for dinner. For pot-lucking, we intend to cook up a large amount of this stuff, place it in a crock pot, and haul it to the friends’ place, where it can heat during the pre-dinner festivities and be kept hot and out of the hosts’ way until the feast is served.

There’s really no need to put sugar in this dish, because the apples contribute just the right amount of sweetness. If you’re concerned that it won’t be sweet enough and you’re boiling instead of steaming, add a tablespoon or so of sugar to the cooking water.

Image: Male wild turkey, re-introduced to California. Yathin S Krishnappa. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.