Thanksgiving Aftermath

So, what Thanksgiving remnants are still strewn across the landscape of your life?

Hereabouts: Two pounds gained. Dayum! Now I’ve gotta get rid of that — it took six weeks to drop the two or three pounds gained during the endless stress marathon. Best thing to do, I guess, is just to starve for a couple of days. That was what finally worked to jump-start the weight loss last month.

More to the point: FOOD IN THE FRIDGE!

Holy mackerel, what a lot of Food in the Fridge. None of it is conducive to weight loss. 😀

I came away with half a pan of the (really incredibly delicious!) pan “dressing” we made for the party. It is, of course, mostly bread, the single most inimical foodstuff in the pantheon of delicious foods that loads the pounds on my bod’.

When I went to make this delectable, we were a little short on bread. M’hijito had picked up a couple of nice loaves from Sprouts, but they were focacccia and so not quite large enough to make as much dressing as we needed. I really wanted some cornbread but had neither eggs nor milk in the house and had no intention whatsoEVER of entering a grocery store the day before Thanksgiving. So I made a batch of regular yeast bread and substituted a cup of cornmeal for a cup of wheat flour.

The result was two particularly yummy loaves of cornmeal yeast bread. Put one and a third loaves into the dressing and then had…oh, yes! Bread!

Bread in the morning, bread in the evening, bread all throuuuugggghhhh the dayyyyy…. So good to eat.

Well. So. Bread “stuffing” adorned with leftover incredible turkey gravy for breakfast. Fresh home-made bread with butter on the side with the big noonday meal. Fresh home-made bread with butter, served up with a glass of wine, for evening snack. Oh, what the heck. How’s about another plate of bread and butter? And a splash more wine?

Inimical.

Meanwhile, I’d made a gigantic pot of turkey stock out of the bones from the Butterball pseudoturkey I’d bought and processed into food for the dogs. It made a lot, but it was watery. Like a Butterball itself, pretty flavorless.

But instead of throwing it out, I poured it into a bunch of storage containers and filled up the fridge with the stuff. That of course left no room for much else. Plus I need those containers, because over the next month I’m going to have to make several weeks’ worth of food for the dogs, not knowing how long it’s going to take to recover from the upcoming surgery. Assuming there is an upcoming surgery.

Today I poured all of that into a stock pot and set it on the stove over a low flame, where it’s gently simmering away as we scribble. The plan is to reduce it by about 30% to 50%. The result, I expect, should be pretty tasty, especially if a little wine is added to it. Sure smells nice right now!

Speaking of wine, I’ve developed a fondness for that vinho verde discovered during the search for lower-alcohol wines. Very low-brow, no doubt, what with its tendency to display a little fizziness. But it’s really VERY tasty as a simple white table wine — not too sweet, not too stringent, just a refreshing drink that actually tastes like a halfway decent wine. The price could not be more right — $8.99 at AJ’s, a joint whose wine prices make Whole Foods’ look like a bargain — and some brands are as low as 9% alcohol.

So far I haven’t found a comparable red wine, which is too bad. Some Beaujolais are acceptable, sort of, in terms of flavor, but they’re unpredictable (some are truly awful) and the alcohol content is up around 12%. Personally I tend to prefer reds, but I’m fast cultivating a taste for Portuguese whites.

Well, it’s getting late. Got to make a Costco run, a Home Depot run, and a variety of other runs. Read client copy. Pay subcontractors. Walk dogs. Walk me. And generally carry on. And so, to work…