Life: Idiotropic

Thursday, while you were scurrying about preparing your turkey and it's trimmings, we were just finishing up a nice taco dinner. Sounds horribly wrong, doesn't it? But it's not a holiday for us here. Kirk had to work. The girls had school. I'd baked 8 dozen pumpkin cookies to send to school with Elise, Luci and Tiara and to work with Kirk. I made caramel apples for Arianna's class. Then I went to and photographed Luci's party where her class dressed up as pilgrims and visited the other kindergarten class who had dressed up as Indians and they all had a pumpkin pie feast together. Then to Arianna's party for their feast which consisted of all the treats that mothers brought in including "puppy chow" - something that all the other mothers seemed to know -- Glorified chex mix with peanut butter, chocolate, and powdered sugar.

On Friday (this is starting to sound like a Very Hungry Caterpillar story - I'm sorry... it's late now and I'm probably too sleepy to be coherent...). A hem. OK. Let's try this again. On Friday, I enjoyed a quiet Spanish morning with my friends where we discussed politics... a frequent discussion - always interesting. Then from 1 until almost midnight I baked 2 pumpkin cream cheese rolls, 2 apple galettes (home made dough, of course), a pecan pie (with said dough), and a new recipe for an amazing spice cake with coconut pecan icing, and then did all the pre-cooking of onions, and celery , and cranberry sauce, and assembled the stuffing. Cleaned it all up, so I'd have a "new kitchen" to work in the next day.

This morning, I prepared my 20# bird with a compound butter and rub, stuffed it, then made yams with banana and pecans, the mashed potatoes and gravy, the 3-onion goat-cheese tarts, the artichoke spread on baguettes, the stuffing, and then got stuff out to make paper turkeys with the girls. Kirk was in charge of one deep fried turkey - and, because he wanted to fry more meat, one chicken that he found shoved and forgotten in the back of our freezer. Guests started arriving at 1430, then "fashionably late" still arrived until almost 1700 when we finally ate our delicious meal. This was a much smaller group than last year, but it was a nice group and I honestly liked everyone that was there - strange comment, but it felt good to look around and be really happy that each of them could come.