It's the Holidays

November was busy.  The Fix-up Show.  The Human Target Season 2 premier.  The new puppy.  Thanksgiving.

New puppy.  Did I mention the new puppy?

His name is Riley.  He turned 10 months old on Thanksgiving, making him just a few weeks older than Ginger.  He's a purebred Golden Retriever, being the dog of choice at this house, and we rehomed him from a family in Camarillo.  He's a sweetheart, but definitely a puppy in the mode of Ginger.  The two have bonded, making Dexter roll his eyes in frustration with their antics.  Dexter remains the most perfect dog who ever lived.

Drew Carey was the celebrity guest on the second installment of "The Fix-up Show."  He's a comics fan.  He came to the episode of "What's My Line" when Len was a guest (rather than a panelist) and came over to introduce himself at the end of the show.  Then he took us out for dinner.

I didn't have a camera ready that night, but I did this time.  Here are Drew and Len after the show.

Thanksgiving usually means a much bigger number than 11 at my table, but by the time we sat down, my expected 15 was down to that.  We moved the living room furniture into the front room (in the background), where it all fit quite nicely, and we pulled the dining room table out to its 14' length.  Everyone had plenty of room and Harlan Ellison missed out on a terrific meal. 

 The food I'll write about over on my food blog.

Now it is time to get ready for Christmas, although we do light a mennorah for Chanukah.  I've decorated my white, pre-lit stick tree with cobalt blue ornaments, making it a lovely Chanukah bush.  So far, the puppies are leaving it alone.  I have no idea what they will do when we get our cut tree up and loaded down with geek ornaments in a couple of weeks, but I'm hoping for the best. The puppies are doing a real number on the landscaping in the back yard.  I may have plenty of places to plant tomatoes next year by the time they finish excavating their dens out among the trees and bushes.

In Recovery

We had another successful Thanksgiving feast on Thursday. It was a small crowd of a mere 10 people and everyone pitched in to help. We did all of the traditional stuff, including turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole (using Alton Brown's recipe from scratch, although I did burn the onions and we had to make a run to the grocery store to buy the canned fried onions), corn, butternut squash (with blue cheese and pecans, again from the Food Network website) and pumpkin and apple pie. I had a major panic when I discovered I had thrown out my old pastry cloth and not replaced it, since that's the easiest way to roll out pie crust. I managed with waxed paper, but I did go to Bed, Bath, and Beyond to replace the necessary cloth and rolling pin cover on Saturday.

Len makes the stuffing, but that's really his only contribution in the kitchen. With the exception of some donations from guests (Gillian Horvath made a great oyster pie and I couldn't have gotten dinner on the table without her help in the kitchen), I cook the rest. It's a very long day on my feet and Len did not follow through with my request for kitchen mats to ease the pain in my back.

After Harlan and Susan Ellison left, the remaining guests helped pack up the food and stack dishes and I spent the next three days cleaning up and then cooking a huge pot of turkey posole to take to a party on Sunday (thus messing up the kitchen again.)

The posole recipe was from Rachael Ray's suggestions for left-overs at Thanksgiving, and it was a huge success with the other guests at Gillian Horvath's party. I had eaten posole, a traditional New Mexican stew, at a place called "The Shed" on the square in Santa Fe. What's not to like about something with that much corn (in the form of hominy)? I realized I had never cooked with fresh jalapeno peppers before and I certainly had never had tomitillos in the kitchen before either. Tomitillos look like green tomatoes, once you pull off the papery outer wrap they have and taste a bit like green pepper squirted with lemon or lime when they are raw. I've had them in a mild sauce on the wonderful fresh and green corn tamales made by Corn Maiden here in L.A. (a must-stop-by at any of the bigger farmers' markets around town) and in this dish they were chopped in the food-processor before being added to the soup. The recipe is available on the Food Network website here, and it tastes just wonderful when finished with a squeeze of lime and some tortilla chips. I've got the leftover posole in my fridge and that's going to be lunch this week.

I started to make the house look like Christmas by laying out a red tablecloth and putting flowers in a vase of Lenox's Holiday pattern, flanked by a matching tea pot and candy dish. Then I replaced the every day white Corelle dishes with Holiday pieces on the open shelves in the kitchen. It's a pretty holly pattern and matching pieces are on my Christmas list.

We won't get a tree for a few more weeks because we hold our Christmas party on Twelfth Night and we like the tree to look decent on the first weekend in January. I think we're doing our party on January 5 this year, which is actually the right night to hold it. I've even found a fine way to make King's Cake (the same thing that's served during Mardi Gras), so this will be the first time I've made one for the party (if I get around to it.)

I did not indulge in the shopping frenzy on Friday, where stores opened as early as 4 a.m. There's nothing I want that much and I sure have no love for dealing with traffic at the malls. My son, however, did go to Best Buy at 5 a.m. but came home empty handed. He couldn't bring himself to stand in a line that snaked entirely around the store.

I did do a quick drop by Macy's on Saturday to pick up the afore mentioned Holiday vase, because I got $10 off the price which was already half of list. I think that brought the price down to about 30% of the original price. I do like bargains, but not at the cost of sleep.

Thanksgiving Preparation

Well, it has now been a year since the work started on my kitchen and I still don't have doors on the unit that houses the sink. July was the last time I saw our carpenter, and the old dishwasher sits face-down in what is supposed to be my kitchen garden. I have a new selection of herbs to plant to replace the ones that died from the heat when I couldn't get them into the ground. Here's hoping I can get it done this weekend. I did go out this morning before work to start some of the clean-up. If only it didn't get dark so darned early.

We're waiting to hear whether our friend Jack Dann is showing up to stay at our house this weekend and if we've convinced him to stick around a few extra days for Thanksgiving before heading back to Australia. Jack is always a welcomed guest. At the moment we think we've got a dozen people for Thanksgiving itself, which is a small crowd for us (we've had twice that in the past.) There's still plenty of time for that number to expand, as we've often learned in the past.

This weekend, we'll go out and pick up our turkey and I'll make pie crusts. I took the afternoon before Thanksgiving off last year, but I decided I didn't need to do that again this year. Having two ovens means I really do have the ability to bake my pies during the day on Thursday. I was inspired by Alton Brown last week when he made the green bean casserole entirely from scratch and I pulled down the recipe to try it myself. I hate the version with canned beans although the one with frozen beans is edible.

Our appetizers are being taken care of by a friend who will bring them in. Len's big contribution is his stuffing. Susan Ellison will bring a pumpkin bread. I get to do pretty much everything else, which I don't really mind. I just wish I liked Thanksgiving food more. It's just not Italian.

Calvin Trillin did a wonderful article about why pasta carbonara should be the national dish at Thanksgiving. It had to do with Thanksgiving being about home comfort food and that it was always served at his family's Thanksgiving table. I have vague recollections of similar Italian foods at Thanksgiving when my grandmother was alive, but there was always a turkey as well. The Trillin article was frequently reprinted. I think that article also made reference to Brits putting brussels sprouts on the stove to cook for 400 years, by way of reference to terrible British cooking versus wonderful Italian cooking.

I get to use my good china and silver at Thanksgiving and the table looks very pretty. Len grumps and says that before I came along, he was happy when he had enough superhero glasses to go around. I probably wouldn't get so pissed about his attitude it if he didn't highly complement other people who pull out the good dishes and fuss and decorate at various holidays.

Len has promised me that he will get the wall of comic books out of the living room this weekend instead of waiting until the last minute. We've also got to go to storage to get out the folding tables. Dinner for a crowd means that the couches go out on the patio to make way for tables and chairs in the living room. Last year (or the year before), I bought a dozen incredibly comfortable folding chairs with high backs at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. It took me quite a while to save up enough 20% off coupons to pull the purchase off, but I did it.

Len promised me a new dining room table for my birthday, but that hasn't happened yet. I actually found a table I like on-line. It is a 48" round table that can seat a whole lot of people when it opens up with 12" leaves. I think it can take 12 or 14 of them. Right now, I use four 6' folding tables and one 5' folding table to do the same thing. The table comes in oak or cherry and I've always been partial to cherry. It has a pedestal which splits and leaves a center support. I had hoped to find something with dropped leaves that opened, but this is would be just fine. In my perfect world, I would be able to have a round table that seats 12 comfortably but I don't have the room. (I saw a spectacular round table that adjusts from seating 6 to seating 12 with intricate triangular pieces but the $14,000 price tag did scare me away.) So this table will go from round to a very long oval and that will do quite well and be not quite as wide as my current system. That will make it easier to get around things for dinner. Maybe I'll have it by next Thanksgiving.

Here's hoping the refrigerator keeps working this year.