Happy Thanksgiving to friends and family! It's here already, and I couldn't be more grateful for all of the good things that God has blessed us with throughout the years. I know that the era of Covid has been hard for a lot of people. I personally know people who have lost loved ones to the virus, and I've held my breath as people I love have contracted the virus and, finally, come out on the other side of it alive and seemingly well. I'm grateful for those who made it through, and my heart breaks for anyone who has suffered loss.
Now we are (supposedly) dealing with inflation, rising gas prices, shortages - you name it, we've got it going on. Ironic, though, isn't it, these shortages and rising prices? In the meantime, the housing boom continues. and people are spending money like water all around me. I think if all Americans took one collective day off from spending, we could make a very good point to the world of consumerism that some of these perceived shortages are not shortages of things that are necessities.
We are sold the idea that "must haves" are something besides shelter, food, and water. If a new holiday designer pillow for your couch is a must-have and it's held up somewhere at a port due to labor shortage or whatever, then that's a very skewed perception of the necessities of life. Also, turn off the news. The media loves a good stir-up. If there's no wind blowing to stoke the fire, it'll die out fairly quickly.
Meanwhile, as we wait around for the media to tell us the next terrible thing we should panic over, let's talk about food! Yay! I know everyone has their holiday traditions, those staples that appear every year. I have one friend whose family is not a big fan of a turkey dinner, so he spends this one holiday a year making a lasagna from scratch. They serve a big green, leafy Caesar salad and garlic bread with it and homemade tiramisu for dessert. I think that sounds divine.
We do the traditional dinner, which I always look forward to. I spent yesterday evening making two big pans of roasted vegetables. The house smelled wonderful. Full disclosure - Peggy Ann Bakery made our pecan pie and dinner rolls! With the cost of food being what it is, it ends up being cheaper to buy some things, as long as they taste as good as homemade. In this case, Peggy Ann pies can easily pass for homemade, although I never tell anyone they are. I always give full credit to the bakery. I want people to go buy goodies there so that they stay in business!
Dressing, broccoli cheese casserole, cranberry fluff, turkey, gravy, etc., will also be present, as we've all signed on to bring something. I also sent the holiday coffee home with my parents (they are hosting Thanksgiving this year, wah-hoo!!!!) to have with dessert and have wrapped up thick slices of the best fruitcake to hand out before everyone goes home so that they can properly kick off Christmas. And yep. We all love this particular type of fruitcake, even my husband, and he generally doesn't like fruitcake. It will be eaten in no time at all.
It has been so cold lately. That means that in order to thaw out after being outside in the evenings with babies, the hot tea at night ritual is already taking place. Normally, this is reserved for January through April (we get very cold weather and often some hard freezes in April, ugh), but I've bumped it up a month. And before you worry about the babies, they only get 30 minutes monitored time outside if it's cold. Then, back they go inside their warm house.
My go-to tea is Constant Comment. I will drink other teas just fine and enjoy them a lot, but I always gravitate back to that spicy beloved tea of mine. It smells and tastes like heaven and, in my opinion, if you're going to dunk cookies, it's by far the best flavor for doing so. My husband is an Earl Grey guy, and I do like Earl Grey just fine. But I'll take my favorite any day over other teas.
With tea, you (naturally) get cookies! I love a good, cheap iced oatmeal cookie for dunking in hot tea or even with ice cold tea in the summer. Tea and iced oatmeal cookies go together unlike any other combination. The first picture shows you how dark I like my tea. I steep tea for three minutes, one bag per cup, not a shared bag. I don't generally use a bag more than twice, either. The second picture shows a better view of the kind of cookies I'm talking about. At a dollar a pack, they're a cheap comfort food when you are trying to thaw from the inside out.
I've made some headway on Christmas shopping, but I still have a ways to go. I'm not sweating it yet, though. The new job I took means that I don't have to work my entire holiday break, so I will actually have time to get some things done without scrambling. I'm still not used to working normal hours, but I can tell you one thing - I'm SO grateful. I look forward to the deep dive into the new position. It's good to push ourselves sometimes, and while my skill set is fairly decent and has grown a lot, there's always more to learn. I had forgotten it could be this way!
It's been in the 20s for several mornings in a row now. Time has passed so quickly in the last couple years that I currently find myself somewhat surprised when I wake up and there's a deep freeze outside. I shouldn't be surprised - it's late November, after all. But I am surprised, and it's disconcerting. Silver lining is that we are closer to the 2022 garden season with each passing day. I cannot wait. I miss my flowers, and I miss good tomatoes and little bees and hummingbirds and butterflies.
It's the week of giving thanks! I'm truly grateful for so much. I have been combing through closets and drawers and taken some items that are still very nice but that I no longer wear to charity shops. I plan to do some cabinets next, just taking it slowly and doing one at a time. I'm glad to share what I do have in the hopes that it helps others. I don't yet have the energy for a full-on, all-weekend purge! In my 20s and 30s, I would have been all in on that. Now? There are things I'd rather do than spend an entire weekend on closets and drawers. Priorities definitely change as we age and gain wisdom.
I've started gathering some holiday favorites, particularly fruitcake and holiday coffee. I know a lot of people hate fruitcake, but the one that I have bought for years at our local bulk store is fantastic. Even people who don't like fruitcake have tried this one and asked me where I got it. I also grabbed a bag of their holiday blend coffee. We'll have it with dessert on Thanksgiving Day, and I'll slice and package up the fruitcake to hand out to everyone to take with them so that they can kick off Christmas 1400s style, ha ha. (At least I think the 1400s is when fruitcake originated.)
The season of pumpkin is beginning to narrow a bit, although I love pumpkin all through winter. In the month of February, I've very often defrosted a slice of pumpkin roll that I've frozen in October. With a cup of Constant Comment tea and a good, high-body count murder mystery to watch, that's a fantastic way to pass a gloomy January or February (or March or April around here) day. I read a lot of seed catalogs and garden blogs during those months, as well. You cannot really plant anything around here until after Mother's Day weekend. We often have late snows and even later hard freezes, so it can ruin your seeds if you get too ambitious early on.
Speaking of pumpkins, look at my little man below, with his stripes and precious crossed front legs. Baby Oscar from our first batch of rescue babies is incredibly special to me. No details that I want to share other than it was a heartbreaking rescue effort that resulted in saving two babies that have grown into giant, beautiful boys. They own my heart.
I hope your week of Thanksgiving is gentle and calm because, before you know it, we'll all be expected to be merry and bright! Love to you on this Sunday in the last full week of the month of Thanksgiving.
I didn't do an intense amount of anything this past week during my time off, but I did accomplish the seasonal change of the house and got through the messiest part of my closet. Flimsier, lighter draperies and bedding got swapped out for the heavier stuff. This helps keep us warm at night, and those heavy curtains work alongside the aggregation of marginal gains in the area of the electric bill for sure.
My headache yesterday was not from crazy hormone fluctuations like I initially thought (so much fun to be a woman, rolling my eyes). It was a weather system that rolled in overnight. I did not realize that we were expecting a rain and snow mixture this morning. When you stick your head out the door, the air is made up of that thick, heavy, damp that hurts your bones. I'm not a fan these days. I'd much rather smell our honeysuckle vines and tomato plants floating by on a soft, warm breeze. Have you ever walked through a patch of tomato plants? That smell is just heaven.
Yesterday was a day to make cranberry compote and biscuits! Isn't it gorgeous?!! I love it the most on warm biscuits, but it's fantastic on pancakes and waffles with maple syrup, too, or for the meat-eaters, it's good alongside ham or turkey or on a turkey sandwich, etc.
Mine is super easy. You take one bag of fresh cranberries and wash/rinse them really well and pick out the bad ones. Grab a 9x13 pan and preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Then, dice up about a half a stick of butter into the pan. Pour in the cranberries and sprinkle one cup of sugar over everything. If you like it a bit sweeter, then add another 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar. Finally, grab a whole, fresh orange and squeeze the juice of the entire orange over top of the cranberries. Throw this all in the oven, uncovered, and baked for 25 minutes.
Stir at least twice during bake time. If the cranberries have all begun popping open and the mixture has thickened a bit, then it's done! You can also add about five whole cloves as it bakes (and cinnamon if you love cinnamon), but remember to remove the cloves before serving. Walnuts would be good in it, too! I'm getting ready to go warm up a biscuit, throw some peanut butter and vegan bacon on top of that biscuit, then drop a giant glob of this stuff on top of all of that and eat it with a fork. This stuff looks and tastes like the holidays. I make at least two batches a year.
I've made some headway in the Christmas gifts department finally. The weekend after Thanksgiving, I'll change the house over from Autumn to Christmas/winter and we will wrap up the gifts that we have so that they look pretty until we get them delivered. Right now, they're just in their original boxes and bags, so the room that they are in looks a little clogged up on one side. Well, frankly, it actually looks cluttered. Blech.
Happy Saturday to you. Here's hoping you have sunshine heading your way! I think we have to wait until Tuesday before we see the sun in its entirety again, but it is Autumn, after all. 'Tis the season for cold and wet and damp around here. The excitement of laundry is on our agenda today, don't be jealous, I'm sure you can find something fun to do, too, ha ha.
Well, brrr. These past two weeks have not been chilly. They've been COLD. Frost several mornings in a row, and in the shaded spots, there has been a hard freeze. It is that time of year, I know, and silver linings include way fewer bugs and no mosquitoes! I fully admit, though, that I am already thinking about the gardens for next year. I cannot decide if I want to try my hand at a huge coneflower spread in full sun or a large scarlet red lantana patch. I'd really like to go for the coneflowers, but they might be tricky to grow. We'll see how it works out.
There's some real beauty in the month of November! Our leaves are starting to show off, and I begin making the odd Thanksgiving Day comfort food here and there. We had dressing and gravy the other night with our supper. Today, I've got a green bean and rice casserole that just came out of the oven, made old-school style topped with homemade sweet Hawaiian roll croutons. It smells like mid-morning of Thanksgiving Day when these types of dishes are being baked. You can imagine that the parade is on TV, and everyone is mentally preparing to overindulge in the annual sacred goodies. I think next week, I'm going to do some baked cranberries with sugar and orange citrus. Mmmmmm. So good, especially on biscuits.
One of our gorgeous trees is pictured below. Last year, the color was just okay. This year, it's been extra nice, and I will be so sad when the leaves are all gone. The casserole is pictured below, as well. Notice the close-up of the homemade croutons. I do not like mine overdone, just dried out and barely golden. They're wonderful in soups, on top of casseroles, on salads, etc. They're just straight-up tossed in butter and toasted. If I know I'm going to use them exclusively for salads, I add quite a lot of parmesan cheese. But for the casserole below, they were just tossed in salted butter.
I've been thinking about TV. Yes, I mean the talkie box thingy. I'm tired of too many streaming services and the overwhelming choices of often-mediocre entertainment. I think that, mentally, it's become exhausting. I feel it the most during the holidays. Holiday specials used to be just that - special. Now, you can own them and watch them at any time. You can watch them on a million different channels, put them on a loop, often find them streaming on YouTube - you name the special, you can probably find it and view it all year long.
For me, personally, that's depressing. The specialness of those things that we loved as children is gone. Kids now days think that all this stuff has always been at everyone's disposal, and I have to think hard to imagine what is special to them because it is an enjoyed rarity at only certain times of the year. I truly cannot come up with anything. Maybe the every-now-and-then new holiday movie? Even those have gotten watered down and feel empty. People fight getting older, but you know what? I'm grateful to have been born in 1970.
I'm not saying it was easy for anyone, especially those on the receiving end of prejudices and disregard for simply being a human being because they did not fit what society adhered to. I know that for many people, the experience in that time was much, much different.
But I still believe that some things were better, that the lack of materialism was a good thing. All of the things that made holidays special were only rolled out once a year and not months in advance. The colored lights were an enormous treat, then "designers" ruined that with white lights. I like white lights for winter, but if you were this little girl in the 1970s, you loved colored lights, chocolate covered creme drops, chocolate covered cherries, hard candy ribbons in holiday colors, and the smell of orange and peppermint. You watched the Peanuts specials once because they were on only one of the major networks and those networks ran them only once.
I could go on forever, but I'll stop there out of fear of becoming a cranky old ranting coot. I plan to enjoy Sunday and that casserole and the leaves and pumpkin ice cream today! I hope you do, too. If you are my age or older, I hope you find the loveliness in the season; don't let how things have become drown out your nostalgia. We are so much more than the million-miles-a-minute stuff that gets thrown at us 24/7 these days. Maybe one day, we could all band together and say "no more" and push the initiative that more is not always better.
Love to you on this Sunday of the first full week of November. It's going by so quickly. Make the most of it!
