One more week of gratitude: Days 23 through 29

Day 23: Taste

I couldn't possibly have only one photo to represent taste, as varied and seasonal as my tastes are! I looked back through some of my favorite food shots of the year and picked the ones that speak to me right now. As the summer is sadly past, I will begin craving fresh and summery foods in 10... 9... 8... sigh. I am grateful for the love of fresh and healthful food (with a side of cheese, of course!).

Day 24: Comfort

Nov. 24 is our anniversary and I took and posted this picture before I really clued in on the word for the day: Comfort. While usually I would think warmth or carbohydrates, on this particular day, this particular picture spoke comfort to me. I am very grateful for the comfort that husband and I provide to each other, and am so blessed by our eight years together.

Day 25: Family

I am very grateful for the family I was born into, and the many things that each family member has brought into my life. This photo from the '70s brings me joy and a smile every time I see it, and given that it's on my desk at work, I get to see it and smile quite often!

Day 26: Routine

Morning rituals mean a great deal to me, and get me up and going! My cuppa is a big part of that ritual, whether coffee or tea (on rare occasions I have been known to give up coffee for a bit, go figure), and my mugs are also very important in the routine too. I'm grateful for routines and the structure and familiarity they bring to my mornings.

Day 27: Creativity

Whenever I feel a little dry in the creativity department, all I need to do is pick up a food or craft magazine, or open up Pinterest, and my creativity wheels start turning. I'm grateful for creativity ebbs and flows, and for the return of ideas after a dry spell. It makes me appreciate it all the more.

Day 28: Sky

Thanksgiving morning on Bainbridge Island. Beautiful and foggy, almost mystical. I'm grateful for skies that aren't always blue and filled with sunshine, and I'm grateful for Thanksgiving with family.

Day 29: Movement

Well, this one might be a little tongue in cheese, but it's in keeping with the kind of holiday we've had, which is very very relaxing. Ahhh. Mei Mei on my lap, and this was about all the movement I needed today. I am very grateful for the ability to unwind, for the fireplace and the company and the peace and quiet. Bliss.

I hope that wherever you are, your grateful list is long and your hearth is warm. Ours certainly is!

Sept. 20: Friday night grateful list: Holiday time!

Today's blogging challenge: What is your favorite holiday and what are your traditions around it?

Well, this is what I get for blogging late in the day: I look like a big, fat copycat. Jen already posted about Thanksgiving, and that's my favorite holiday too. Thankfully, I have lots of documentation of my holiday love, not the least of which... it's the day husband and I got married!

There are a lot of great quotes about Thanksgiving and gratitude/thankfulness, but I am always very grateful to find a new one that speaks to me. Just today, I saw this on Facebook, and my heart sang with joy:

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. -G.K. Chesterton

To prove my love for all things Thanksgiving/anniversary, here's a rundown of posts since the blog began:
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012

As Thanksgiving approaches this year and we contemplate our time with family, I think about all that I enjoy: the food, the family, the relaxation of the day. I love autumn, so I will undoubtedly be past the grief of losing summer fruits and veggies, and by then I surely will have embraced all things pumpkin. I will be happily wearing sweaters and boots and appreciate the chill in the air and the lack of yard work.

Our traditions are fairly simple:
*Turkey dinner with all the fixings (turkey substitute too). We have many "stand bys" but there is usually a little room to experiment--though, not with the pumpkin pie. Husband needs the pie to be regular--none of this "sour cream pumpkin pie" or "pumpkin struesel pie." Pumpkin. Pie. That's all he asks.
*Decorate a bit--leaves and pumpkins and candles.
*Wake late, eat breakfast, then lay around for awhile before thinking about dinner.
*I have stretched the boundaries of Christmas decorating to include possibly decorating the tree on--or near--Thanksgiving, if I am home. This may confuse some, but I enjoy it.
*Watch movies and/or football. Surely there's a 007 marathon on somewhere?
*Nap.
*Maybe go for a walk if we're not too groggy.
*Make dinner.
*Eat dinner. Recount our many blessings.
*Lay around some more.
*Depending on how large the celebration is, play a game of hearts, or Taboo, or Pictionary.

Don't we sound like a barrel of fun? Why yes, we are! Ha. We have even been known to combine Thanksgiving, a couple of birthdays (Ma & Pa) and Christmas into one big (and multi-day) festival of family love, which we call Thanksbirthmas. It's pretty spectacular.

Tonight I am ever so grateful that Thanksgiving exists, and that it is coming up in the not-too-distant future.

What is your favorite holiday, and why? 

Jen and I (and occasionally my mom and Lisa too!) are blog challenging throughout September. You can catch her blog over at Stuff Jen Says. If you want to write along with us, give me a shout and I'll send you the blog prompts.

Thursday 13: 13 things I'm looking forward to eating today

appy Thanksgiving, everyone! I know, this post should be filled with 13 quotes of gratitude, or 13 reasons I'm glad I married my husband six years ago today (there are more than 13, for sure) or some other deep and meaningful post, but nope. You get to hear what I'm excited to eat today. This is my favorite food day of the year. Period. Yum.

Tomorrow I'll make a stab at deep and meaningful, I promise.

Thirteen sounds like a lot of items to eat, but as I got rolling with it, it does appear that indeed, we will have at least 13 items at our ample buffet...

1. Turkey. I roasted three turkeys last week for a YoungLives dinner, so I'm feeling really ready to roast again! I experimented with a very simple roasting technique (450 for the first hour, 350 for the next three or so hours, cover as needed) and stuffed it with garlic, lemon and sage. And butter. That's it. It was amazing, and I think we'll give that a go again today.
2. Turkey loaf. This one is an old family favorite, from our more vegetarian days. Even though we all love turkey, we really can't envision the holidays without both on our plates. How odd, I know. But very "us."
3. Stuffing. We'll roll pretty simply with this one. Sourdough, cornbread, herbs. No nuts, no fruit, no meat. Definitely no meat. I am forever scarred by the Thanksgiving where a meat stuffing made an appearance. That's all I'm going to say about that.
4. Mashed potatoes. Did you know cream cheese is the secret to truly creamy mashed potatoes? I know, The Pioneer Woman does it too, but I swear I was doing it first.
5. Gravy. Simply and pure, like all good gravy should be.
6. Cranberry sauce. There was a small misunderstanding on the cranberry sauce procurement, so the grocery stores had better be open for cranberries in our early morning run!
7. Brussels sprouts. I'm feeling a little gratin coming on for the Brussels this year. A little cream, a little cheese, and there won't be any complaining about the Brussels, I am sure.
8. Yams. These puppies will get roasted in rosemary. I know, not really the sweet style, but, again, this is how we roll around here...
9. Corn casserole. Look at all these veggies! A girlfriend made this for the dinner last week, and I loved it--I don't have the recipe posted yet, but I will. It's a variation on this one, though.
10. Pumpkin pie. Simple, basic, and essential to this day.
11. Rolls with butter. Lovely bakery in town made a contribution (well, we paid them, but...) to our dinner of beautiful rolls. I think this is the one meal of the year when I feel that bread with my meal is critical.
12. Sparkling cider. Not a drinking clan, this is our beverage of choice. We have an assortment of the sparkly stuff.
13. Leftovers. Doh. Right after The Muppet's and some early Black Friday shopping (some stores are open at 9 p.m.? That sure beats early Friday in my book.) I anticipate some fridge raiding.

I hope whatever's on your table this Thanksgiving, it's right up your alley! I am off to roast the bird!

For more Thursday 13s, go here.

Order has been restored to the universe...

Fog's gone, for the moment. Take a look at that tail end of the sunset tonight. Much better. I know, you really wanted to see what the shop looks like (not!), but we were zooming home (quite literally) tonight from basketball practice and barely got this shot before all the color was gone...

Here are a few other pictures from our Thanksgiving time, that wouldn't load via dialup, go figure:

Seth making himself useful on the little tractor! And posing.


The dogs are ready to go. She who is known as RubyBadDog is in the middle. Check out her dirty snout. Who knows where that's been... Peaceful Jack (right) and little Darby are just ready to be home!


And Chief is annoyed with me and won't look at the camera. He hopped in and got Seth's seat all muddy in his eagerness to get his prime position for the ride home... and got a little scolding from me for his muddy paws. So he's withholding affection for a few minutes to punish me. He's almost human, that one.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I haven't done a lot of research into recipes for moose steak... is that a done thing? Canadians, weigh in here... I just couldn't resist the sentiment in this sign.

We left the dense fog of Walla Walla this morning and rose out of the mist by the top of Tollgate, and enjoyed sunshine all the way over to the Wallowas. In quiet and peaceful Joseph, Oregon, it is cool (well, cold, really!) but clear. As I write this the night before Thanksgiving, it is 25 degrees F and going down. Nice to be in by the fire...

Internet connection is much more sketchy than planned, so we'll see what, if anything, gets posted the next few days... I take it as a sign to unplug for a minute or two, or at least just catch up on every gadgety show known to man on the Discovery channel! I sense a Mythbusters Thanksgiving Day marathon...

Wishing everyone, near and far, a very happy Thanksgiving. We all have so very much to be thankful for, today and every day. Again with the royal "we," but I feel confident that if you're reading this, then you probably are also clothed (I don't want to know about your nekid blog surfing, if that's the case...), fed, warm and dry and have confidence that tomorrow will bring more of the same. Right there, count your blessings. That's a gentle suggestion, not quite the order it sounded like...

Peace and joy, turkey and stuffing too!

Holiday photo shoot, with few pictures

It was quite a day, last Wednesday. But the pictures (mine, at least, I trust the actual photographers did much better!) don't do it justice, even close. I think it was the waking at 3 a.m.--at least, that's the best I can think of... I was sleep deprived... yeah, that's it.

Anyway, we set up for Christmas first (above), and then ran through Thanksgiving (below, before we set it up all pretty-like). It was fun, kind of like catering in that it moved really quicky and time passed in a flash. Mostly I was pretty pleased with how golden I got the turkey. When you don't have to think about drying it out, is it done? isn't it done? you can just think about the color and crank the oven heat up and go!

One of the fun parts of the set-up was accummulating garnishes for the turkey. In "real life" I am just pleased to get the turkey to the table. But for photographic purposes, I referred to various publications like MS Living, Sunset, Gourmet and Bon Apetit, etc. The settings they featured ranged from quite rustic and bare to very elaborate. I aimed for middle of the road, and let the art directors pull off the platter any items they thought didn't work.

For the Christmas setting, I used sage and rosemary tucked in to the neck area, and bay leaves around the bottom, with halved little key limes and tamarillos and fresh cranberries for red accents (you can see that in the top picture--the tamarillos are the roma tomato-like fruit; I'd never used them before, and they were very pretty). For the Thanksgiving setting I used roasted garlic heads, halved lemons, mandarines and key limes, with lime leaves around the bottom. Oh and persimmons! It had a nice fall feel to it. The picture below is the Thanksgiving turkey garnish, just hanging out and waiting for the turkey...

All in all, a productive day! Next time, though, I will do better at getting some shots of the action...

What the guys need for Thanksgiving dinner

So it's just going to be the three of us for Thanksgiving, which essentially means we can have whatever we want. Not like we don't usually have whatever we want, but somehow, not having guests feels wild and crazy, like we could order pizza or make tacos. Well, that's not happening. I need the stuffing and mashed potatoes (turkey is somewhat optional), but truly, it's about the leftovers. There is nothing on earth like Thanksgiving leftovers all weekend... you have the freedom to pile your plate with whatever strikes your fancy, and who has room for salad?

So in the planning, silly me, I thought I'd open it up for discussion. All went well until we started talking dessert...

Here are the current requests from the men:

Turkey

Stuffing (no fruit and barely any nuts, please, say the boys: see below)

Mashed potatoes

Peas for Alan, green beans for Seth, butternut squash for me

Gravy

Cranberry sauce for me, and me alone.

Rolls with butter

Some sparkly fizzy thing to drink

Dessert... Lemon meringue pie. What? Can you hear that sound of a record player's needle being ripped off a record mid-song? Does that seem even remotely right? This is going to need some serious discussion between now and next Thursday. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm angling for apple pie. I could even be persuaded toward pumpkin, but I'm really not in the mood. Or, maybe, like the vegetable, there will be a different dessert for each of us. That's happened before... (hee hee, I'll make mine, and buy theirs. They'll never know. Oh stop that with the horrified gasps.)

This whole discussion reminds me of a negotiation that took place recently in San Luis Obispo, Calif. A couple, who shall remain nameless, was discussing the upcoming holiday and their menu options. The lovely husband put in a request for fruit-less stuffing. Lovely wife, stunned yet confused, agreed.

What is it about guys and fruit? I've already referenced this dilemma in regards to salads... but apparently it crosses course-boundaries and now applies to stuffing as well. My advice, which the aforementioned wife already had well in hand, was to make the plain, boring stuffing, and separate the batch, jazzing up the concoction with her fruits and nuts, and thus, pleasing all. Or, like me, she could make hers and buy his! Ha. She's probably a much better wife than that (ie me)!

All this menu planning reminds me of a particular Thanksgiving celebrated at my brother and sister-in-law's, a gathering of friends with family too far-flung to make a turkey trek. Anyway, we all contributed various aspects to the meal and one dish from a friend-co-worker of my brother's was a quite-horrifying dressing/stuffing. It was a family recipe, we were told, of an all-meat "stuffing." I had never heard of anything like this. Growing up in a very bread-oriented household, it was quite unthinkable that the stuffing not consist mostly of bread (we don't really quibble over whether it's sourdough, cornbread or someother bready substance). A little internet sleuthing later, and apparently it's not that uncommon; I think the origins are originally French and trickled down to New England via the French Canadians. Just one more thing to thank them for: cretons! Luckily, neither of my men a) like meat THAT much and b) even know that the possibility of an all-meat stuffing exists. We'll keep it that way.

I'll keep you posted on dessert. And I'm open to ideas... anyone got anything for me?

Relish the thought

In preparation for the Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner photo shoot on Wednesday, I needed to come up with a couple of different relish/sauce/accompaniments for the turkey. One I knew would be a pretty traditional cranberry sauce, the other took a little more thought, and some creative license!

Cranberry sauce the way Sher likes it:
2 bags of fresh cranberries, picked over and washed
zest of one orange
juice of one orange
1 cup sweetener--you can use sugar, light corn syrup, honey or maple syrup
4 cinnamon sticks
1/2 tsp. cloves
1 T vanilla

Combine all ingredients in a saucepan on the stove and heat slowly over medium-low heat, to avoid popping all the cranberries. Stir occasionally. When simmering and about 3/4 of the cranberries are open and bubbly, turn off and cool. Taste and adjust sweetener as needed.

The photo above is pretty monochromatic--I'm still working on ye olde food photography, and feel extremely limited with my kitchen lighting, especially with zero sunshine when I'm cooking most days. Anyway, all that is to say that when we're shooting the sauce on Wednesday, I think I'll zest some more orange and maybe even thinly strip off some rind to give some more texture and color to it.


For sauce No. 2, I went rummaging online and found a recipe for a pineapple relish that sounded good, and one for an apricot relish, and so I combined them, threw in a little grapefruit juice for an acid and some habaneros for heat and pomegranates for texture and color and, voila!, a pretty zesty little combo.

Pineapple-apricot-pomegranate relish
2 cups chopped fresh pineapple
1 cup chopped dried apricots
2 T grapefruit juice (you could easily use lime or orange instead)
1/2 cup sugar

Simmer over medium heat until apricots are softened and mixture is bubbly. Take off the heat and add:
1/2 cup fiinely diced shallots
2 habaneros, sliced cross-wise
1 cup pomegranate seeds

Stir until blended. Serve warm or cold.

When I was tasting I avoided actually chomping on a habanero since I'm kinda wimpy in the heat department, but the overall flavor of the sauce had been warmed through by the peppers and it had a nice fire to it--nothing radical, just tasty and glow-y! This relish would also work well with "other" white meats... not just Mr. Turkey. You could even pretend it's a salsa and serve with chips, or, dare I say it, a cheesey quesadilla!

Butternut still undefeated in squash-off

I'm getting ready for a major Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner photo shoot at work this week--we'll set up both meals and shoot them in one day, getting double duty from Mr. Turkey. It's fun to get a dry run through the meal, trying out some pretty "extras" that I'll probably actually skip when it comes to our own Thanksgiving dinner. We're so low-key about it, and usually fix our favorites rather than get all jiggy with it.

Anyway, squash is on the menu for one of the photo shoot set-ups, and I found some fun, different colored acorn squash at Andy's and thought I'd cook them up and see how it might work. No run-of-the-mill green acorns here. The orange one is called Golden Acorn and the yellow one is actually called White Swan Acorn. Sounds more elegant than it is...

They look good, cook up easily enough, but are pretty ho-hum in taste; I did the usual S&P, EVOO on them and roasted at 350 for 20-25 minutes. Both boys said, well, yeah, what did you expect? when I pronounced them only so-so. Neither of them exactly rush for the squash, even all fancied up or sweetened (which I just can't do). These are fine, and provide a fun color contrast to the green rind of the acorn, but I still proclaim butternut to be Queen of the Squashes!