The Great Thanksgiving Do Over

So, there I was, minding my own business, packing for my next business trip and trying to eat down the perishables in the refrigerator before I left. The meals were getting more and more spartan. And then my daughter called and invited me to The Great Thanksgiving Do Over.

She had spent Thanksgiving with her husband's family in Memphis. And the cousin hosting the dinner bailed on the traditional meal (which he had never hosted nor cooked before). Instead he had a shish ka-bob grilling party in the garage. Except he had never made shish-ka-bobs before either.

The whole experience did to her what it does to any good cook -- it made her want to come home and cook something better. So she came home and did just that.

We had:

Pork tenderloin rubbed with bloody mary mix
Turnip and potato puree so creamy and tender it jumped up and kissed you
Fresh green beans with bacon
Red leaf salad with diced carrots
Sage dressing
Horseradish sauce
Homemade scones

The Pastry Goddess bats perfection once again.

Said business trip, back to Washington, DC, will take me out of pocket till next Friday. Talk among yourselves till then. Will try to post some photos next week. It's a great town for photography.

Peace,

Janelle

Alone at Christmas Is Not Half Bad

I don't know about you, but it threw me for a loop the first five times people went all agog with pity upon finding out that I was going to be alone for the holidays.

I didn't particularly feel deprived. I was orphaned in my teens, and I have done more than my fair share of mercy invites R.S.V.P.s. After a certain point, you would rather just not have to schlep on over to somebody's house – for another couple rounds of agogness at your purported staggering lack of family and plans.

I volunteer at Thanksgiving and Christmas. I fix swell little meals. (My favorite is to recreate the menu from Mister Steak Restaurants). I sleep in. I read the morning paper with Motorboat the cat on my lap. I have a second cup of coffee and take an extra long walk mid-morning and a nap in the afternoon. I love old movies, and Turner Classic Movies runs some great ones around the holidays. (Yesterday was a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers marathon). And I come back to work rested and relaxed and still enamored of my friends and relatives.

But back to the volunteering. The trick for singles in the holidays is to stay very outwardly focused. I set a December 5th goal for myself to make my contacts at Meals on Wheels and the Salvation Army. I set a December 10th deadline for myself to do a small, home-cooked gift for everyone at work. and my neighbors, and my vet.. I buy Ball jelly jars and fill them with homemade salad dressing or homemade sauces. I fill a small sandwich bag with homemade cookies and sweet-and-salty munch mix and string that and a jingle bell around the jelly jar with curly Christmas ribbon. In all my years of doing this, I have only had one stinkerooni of a person turn it down, and she turned out to be a bad, manipulative apple all the way around. People just don't get homemade stuff with top grade ingredients in their lives on a regular basis anymore, and they go Ga-Ga.

I take treats to the public librarians. I tell them "Thank you for public libraries." I make homemade milk bones for my friend's dogs if I have time. I sing at a Do-It-Yourself Messiah every year and I go to Tuba Christmas

www.tubachristmas.com

And I love church at Christmastime. I have the neighbor ladies in for high tea with my Christmas china. I read "A Christmas Visitor" by Truman Capote, and "Sampson The Christmas Cat" and "Christmas For The Heart and The Home" by Susan Branch every year. I made sure my grown daughter has a Merry Little Christmas, and that it is totally separate from her birthday, which comes right afterwards. None of this involve, uh, a date. Or being the fifth wheel.

And none of which—and this is important—involves sitting around contemplating my own pitiful navel.

And yes, I set up a Christmas tree, even when I was stuck in Minnesota and nobody saw it but me. I also have, from my yuppie days, a whole porcelain Christmas village, but I have been too busy to set that up for years.

This year I am also going to make a bolster pillow in royal purple for Clyde, the college girl dollbaby, who came and helped me unpack in June, and a counted cross-stitch sampler for my new grandson. I am also starting to study up on a grand-looking sock caterpillar and a little felt Santa Claus that I probably will not get to this year, but I have been plans for in the future.

And the exception proves the rule, in that the best party I ever went to was a Thanksgiving meal at a co-worker's house. Marv and Maria were orphans themselves, and always invited four singles over to eat with them and their two brainiac little girls. We saw Maria's oil paint gallery. We saw Marv's stock charting computer program. We told funny stories at the dinner table, and inbetween the main meal and the dessert, we took an stuttering cold walk, a long walk. Then we came back and ate pie. But the likes of people with the hospitality chops of Marv and Maria don't come around very often.

The saddest human being I ever met was a friend of mine who had just found out that her husband had embezzled from her father and raped their 12-year-old daughter. And as we sat at a little cafe luncheon table, she explained to me why she was not leaving this man. "If I leave him," she said, with genuine Betsy-Wetsy tears in her eyes, "then I will be alone."

Alone is not fatal. It can be very calm and gloriously peaceful. And alone is something every adult has to learn to do. It took me a while to realize that the alone-est you'll ever be is in a bad marriage. Just being alone with yourself—that is – in the big picture – a piece of cake.

This year I am very blessed with events too. There is a roast beef dinner and karaoke contest that my union is putting on. And I taking a new friend to that. There is a cookie exchange at work (will be posting those recipes. more on that later). There is a luncheon at work too. And a co-worker has an extra ticket to The St. Louis Symphony Holiday Pops Concert. I am one lucky little old lady. But I've had years where it was just Mister Steak, me and the laundry too. And that is fine too. Peace Like a River, Baby.

So book yourself up. Drive around with a Starbuck's hot chocolate and a CD of cheezy jazz Christmas music playing in your car and make fun of other people's Christmas yard lights. Go watch the tenor at your church sing "O Holy Night." Stay away from The Mall. There be dragons. Find the yuppie grocery store where you can buy single serving pie. Glorious pie. Get one of those quarts of eggnog. Put a Santa Claus pin on your good winter coat. Let everybody you love know you love 'em, nice and early, and then leave them alone. They are busy. And you are, heh-heh, free as a bird.

Janelle

Easy-Peasy Bread - Ice Box Rolls

Homemade bread does a lot to brighten up any meal. Here's one that doesn't involve two days of you doing the culinary version of The Hokey Pokey:

Icebox Potato Rolls

Scald 1 cup milk and cool to lukewarm. Dissolve 2 cakes of yeast in 1/4 cup water, and then add to the milk. Add 1 cup boiled mashed potatoes, 3/4 cup shortening, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 eggs, and 1 tsp. salt. Mix well. Dough will be stiff. Spread a little oil on top of the dough. Cover and place in ice box overnight and let rise. Take out amount of dough needed and shape into rolls. Let rise for two hours. Bake in 400 degree F. oven about 15-20 minutes. Dough will hold in refrigerator four to five days.

From "Talk About Good! Le Livre de la Cuisine de Lafayette" (Junior League of Lafayette, Louisiana, 1969)

Not THAT Green Bean Casserole

My dear friend Byron had five heart attacks, rat-a-tat-tat, one Sunday afternoon. When they finally let him out of the hospital, he asked me to teach him to cook. I basically told him to de-glop his life.

In the big picture, there is nothing quite so gloppy as that canned-green-bean casserole everybody plops onto the Thanksgiving table. Between the canned beans and the canned soup and the canned, french fried onion rings, the sodium levels are circling Venus. It is one of those foods that are simply carriers for salt. And if you're eating the least widdle bit circumspectly and healthy the rest of the year, this casserole is not going to do a thing for you—except making you puffy and deathly thirsty the next day.

Enter "The Winter Kitchen," by Louise Andrews Kent and Elizabeth Kent Gay (Houghton, Mifflin Co., Boston, 1962). This book should be called, "What Would Mrs. Appleyard Do?" It is one of those old cookbooks that you can read like a novel. There're slyly funny little vignettes before each recipe, describing Mrs. Appleyard's rural Vermont life. What Mrs. Appleyard would do with the ubiquitous green beans is:

1. Start with fresh green beans. Cook them until just tender.

2. Use fresh mushrooms, and ditch the soup for fresh onion, and a little slap of butter and cream. Thus creating a (gasp!) homemade mushroom sauce, in which you (gasp!) control the salt, the quantity of sauce, the add-ins (nutmeg, a little sherry, or jalapeño peppers). Mrs. Appleyard notes that this sauce is also good with broccoli, lima beans, Brussels sprouts, and shell beans.

Here's the recipe:

Green Beans and Mushrooms

(serves eight)

2 pounds fresh green beans
1 tsp. fine minced yellow onion
2 Tbl. or less real butter
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1 pound fresh mushrooms, caps cut in two and stems sliced thin
1 Tbl. flour
1/2 tsp. paprika
salt or salt substitute to taste
1/2 cup or less cream

Cook beans until just tender. Saute onion in the butter until straw colored. Add the mushrooms and cook 4-5 minutes, stirring well. Sprinkle in the flour, mixed with the seasonings. Blending it in. Do all this over very low heat. Turn off the heat, and add the cream. The standing heat will warm the cream. Add this mixture to the beans and stir well. Serve hot.


I love old cookbooks, especially from the early 60's. I call them "P.C." = Pre-Cholesterol. They give you a good place to start, if you want to cook fresh and you want to cook at home (and have a grocery bill less than one-arm, one-leg). And if you love to tinker with recipes, start with a solid old cookbook. I have been making all my own salad dressings and sauces for about ten years now. These books know how. Because they didn't, back then, have all night grocery stores or all of the prepared, shelf-stable stuff we have now. But nowadays you really do not have to be part of the thundering herd that spends five bucks on something you can make at home for 45 cents.

Here's a quick test: Pick that grocery item up. Look at the expiration date. If it says, "Best used before June 1, 2022," put it back down and walk away.

Yum-yum,

Janelle

Episodic

Minnesota Public Radio, last year, interviewed a beloved, retiring weatherman and asked him what the overarching pattern of Minnesota weather was. He told them, "There is no pattern. It's episodic."

This time of year, with the cool mornings and the blankets on the bed and the honking Canada geese, it's episodic too. You gain just enough introspection this time of year to be open to all kinds of things. You are, as my friend Rosina says, "ready to receive."

My old girl cat, Motorboat, was a stray teen-kitten who limped across my frosty front yard, in just this kind of weather, just this time of year. I went out and threw my afghan over her, took her in, fed her, and let her sleep in my lap for four hours. Then I took her over to the young neighbors across the street, who had just lost their cat. The husband took her, walked through his house, opened the back door, and threw the cat back outdoors.

That little cat had the good fortune to limp back through my front yard the next morning. She let me throw the wool afghan over her again, and take her in, and feed her, and she slept in my arms, in spite of being sick as a dog, and she never, ever stop purring. Sandy, the vet assistant, promptly named her Motorboat, for that purr. She's kept it up for 13 years now. We are little old ladies together now.

I left my dying marriage just about this time of year. I had found an apartment and put it on hold for two months. Just knowing I had someplace calm to go sleep if I had to was a tremendous relief. Then the big yuppie department store downtown, Schmulekov's, put mattresses on sale for 99 dollars. I went down and bought a mattress and had it set up on a metal Hollywood bed frame in the new apartment. When Motorboat and Buster Cat and I finally left, we slept on that bed. And the weather broke into bright, deep fall sunshine days. Day after day. It was just incredible how good the weather was that fall.

My friend Diane left her husband just at the start of the Christmas season, just about this time of year . Her husband had taken her and her daughter out to the Christmas tree farm for the tenth year in a row, and was, for the tenth year in a row, too drunk to tie the tree to the top of their car in any functional way. And, for the tenth year in a row, the tree fell off the car and onto the freeway on the way home.

Diane found a little apartment up over the movie theater, in her little town in Virginia. She found out her first night there that the landlord had forgotten to tell her that the heat had been turned off. She was so cold that she kept waking up from the shivering. She could smell the popcorn from the movies downstairs. And she could not stop smiling.

Sometimes you just got to step forward, into the arms of the future. You don't get blueprint approval, but it gets better the farther out you go. I found my way to a furniture store across the street from my workplace and the salesman showed me a wonderful thing called a Lady Lane Recliner. I got a little TV that I could lift and move around by myself. The judge ordered my soon-to-be ex-husband to give me my furniture, on board a moving truck, in clean and good condition. I watched the Slumberland sales and got my chest of drawers and a much better mattress. Me and my back love that upscale mattress with a great and abiding love.

Diane found a house, a wonderful house. And a wonderful, dreamy-handsome new boyfriend, who, stone-cold-sober, tied the Christmas tree to the top of the car and it DID NOT fall off.

I've always liked fall. When I was kid, it meant my birthday was coming. I like it when the sweaters all come out. I like warm tea and cats who want to cuddle. I like crisp, cool mornings when anything is possible, episodically. Helen Keller said, "Life is either a great adventure, or it is nothing at all."

Peace,

Janelle

What A Difference A Year Makes

Hello, and yes, it has been a year. But what a difference a year makes. Through a tremendous stroke of good luck, I was able to transfer my job 700 miles south, to the city where The Beloved New Grandbaby is.

It is now late November, and it is like what September is in St. Paul. I have not even gotten out my winter coat yet. And I had lunch yesterday with said Grandbaby. He smiles when he sees me.

I have another small, second floor apartment, but this one has a pantry, a walk-in closet and a fireplace. All in all a very nice change.

And I know, just as sure as I know anything, that part of why this happened was I was able to move quickly. My new boss hired me on June 5th and wanted me to report to a training center in Austin, Texas, on June 14th. I would not have been able to do that, plus relocating, if I was still married. Just imagine coming home and saying, "Honey, could you find a moving company tomorrow? Because we have nine days to move."

More later. Just remember, Sweet Babies, what my father always said, "Just because there's snow on the roof, doesn't mean there's still not fire in the furnace."

Bestest,

Janelle