The Man and The Turkey

 

The man above is my father, the picture probably taken either by my mother or one of my sisters who sent it to me.

I believe he loved Thanksgiving Day better than any other holiday, except maybe Easter. 

Of course it was my mother who planned and prepared the food and the table for all holidays. Wish I had a Thanksgiving Day picture of her for here. 

They were a great cooking team, especially when he was cooking outside. He was a superb outdoor cook, both on his grill or his smoker.  

I actually don't remember Daddy washing dishes as they accumulated on Thanksgiving Day in the kitchen. It was a different time then; sorry RH, you missed out on that.

But he was always in the kitchen helping Mama that day, after he'd come home from cooking at the Men's Breakfast at church where he'd fried the stacks of country ham slices for the crowd. 

One of my treasured memories is being outside with clippers on a cold dark day, gathering snippets of shrubbery for the table centerpiece, and looking up to the kitchen window and seeing Daddy and Mama working together in the kitchen, and my younger sisters through the glass door to the den, maybe watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade on television. 

It was one of those rare moments as a teenager when my thoughts turned from my own important personal world to seeing my family as I would a Rembrandt painting--a lump in my throat, struck by the beauty of them all. 

The picture of Daddy above, with Mama's traditional Thanksgiving dishes set around the turkey he was about to carve, strikes me the same way right now and makes me miss this man so very much. It was a Thanksgiving when they lived a great distance away from RH and me and our family so I was not there. 

I'm thankful this day before Thanksgiving Day for the years I was there with my mother and father and three younger sisters.

 

Cranberry Sauce and Thanksgiving Day Cards

 

I love getting cards in the mail. Do you?

And they're rarer than hen's teeth in 2022. I used to be a prolific card-sender and always sent Thanksgiving Day cards to our adult children and my parents. I think I got that gene from my mother who was a card-sender extraordinaire.

And I always addressed all my Christmas cards on Thanksgiving Day night after the cleanup was finished, personal messages to be added in the following weeks. Just me and a good Christmas movie and several boxes of cards, my address book, and always the current USPS Christmas stamps. 

But now? It's been two years since I've sent Christmas cards and I don't know how many since Thanksgiving cards. And I'm ashamed of that. Maybe if I get out all my leftover Christmas cards from over the years and send them no one will remember they got the same one many years ago.

But I do have a stack of Thanksgiving cards set around the house. All sent us by our one and only daughter, another prolific card-sender, even as busy a career woman as she is.  She sent us the card in the first picture last year. I love a pop-up card as much as a three year old! This year the card is sitting in the living room instead of on my kitchen shelves but I need to dust that table before taking a picture of it. 

I've exhausted that subject (and my readers) so I'll make short shrift of the subject of Cranberry Sauce.

Simply put, making the first Cranberry Sauce of November makes me happier than makes good sense. 

From the time I wash them and put those ruby red jewels in the pan...

 And watch them gel, smelling spices from the cave of Ali Baba...

 To Open Sesame! they go into the fridge to be used on omelets and entrees long before Thanksgiving Day that requires a fresh batch.

No can of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce for me although one of my most pinned pictures on Pinterest is this ad in my Ads That Sold board by the iconic company showing Mother serving Grandmother slices of cranberry sauce on a silver salver while Father carves the turkey for four generations gathered at the dining table.

 There, I've paid homage to the second in my trinity of Thanksgiving favorites, Cornbread Dressing, Cranberry Sauce, and Pies (Chess and Pecan being my favorite although I make some darn delicious Pumpkin Pies too).

My recipe for the Cranberry Sauce included here at a post at Dewena's Window back in the day, when I also showed a new haircut.

That's all for today. Please don't underestimate the joy that a card in the mailbox brings your senior citizens, and please forgive said senior citizen when she has a mental block about sending out cards herself. Just remember that she did it for many a decade. Thank you. I love you! 

[Day after Thanksgiving 2022: including a picture of this year's Thanksgiving Cranberry Sauce that was so much prettier than the one above--I cooked it at a lower temperature because I wanted it more saucy and less gelled. So good!]

 

 

My Cornbread Dressing and Two Grand-Doggies

 

I probably should have cropped RH's leg out of this picture but who's going to notice it anyway with our two beautiful granddaughters in it?

This picture is from last year's Thanksgiving Day that was held at Zack and Court's house (our old Valley View). That's their handsome Forest posing with the girls. 

I had to post this picture first because I couldn't lead off a post with a package of meat, could I?

 

This is a post of one of three dishes I took last year to Thanksgiving at Zack and Court's house because the younger set is now doing the cooking. There are three things I still make or it just wouldn't seem like Thanksgiving to me or RH.

The Cornbread Dressing, the Cranberry Sauce, and a couple of pies--Chess and Pecan. Here they are, for myself and RH and perhaps for Mimi's Family Cookbook someday for grands and great-grands.

For wonderfully rich turkey stock, rub the turkey parts of your choice with olive oil, salt, and pepper and roast till golden. These could have stayed in the oven a little longer.

 Put them in a stock pot with carrots, celery, onions, and garlic.

 Add water (distilled water makes the clearest stock), fresh herbs you still have growing outside, salt, whole black pepper pods, bay leaves, any dried herbs you want to include. Cook all day long.

And you have beautiful stock at the end of the day! Strain and store in fridge for up to five days or freeze for longer.

 Make two pans of buttermilk cornbread the day before Thanksgiving and sit unwrapped till next day. Hopefully you have made buttermilk biscuits a few weeks earlier and frozen 6-8 of them, set out to thaw, unwrap to dry. Add 4 slices good white bread. Let all the bread dry on Thanksgiving Day morning by crumbling on clean tea towels for several hours.

Melt two sticks butter in saute pan, add 3 cups chopped onion, 1 1/2 cups chopped celery and sauté, stirring until soft, not brown.

[I wash celery when I bring it home from grocery, dry well and chill so it's ready to use.]

[Also good to wash a bunch of parsley and dry well early before chopping. Dressing is one time I use curly parsley instead of Italian.]

 Add 3 tablespoons dried sage or more to crumbled breads in a very large bowl, 2 teaspoons poultry seasoning, 1 teaspoon dried marjoram, a dash of mace, 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper. Also add some chopped fresh sage if you have it. 

Stir in the sautéed vegetables and 1 cup minced fresh parsley. 

 

Stir in 2 cups of the rich broth (warmed up), and stir in 2 beaten eggs. 

Add more stock if needed to be of pancake batter consistency. You don't want it to be soupy but not dry either. 

Bake at 375 degrees F. for about 40 minutes, maybe a little longer if it looks like it needs it. Don't dry it out.

 

Sprinkle with chopped fresh Italian parsley when serving.

Excellent hot with a dab of cranberry sauce. I don't even need turkey if I have these two things.

This was my mother's dressing, with a few changes I've made over the years. I would eat hers in a heartbeat if she were still here to cook it. 

To end with another picture from last Thanksgiving Day other than food, here is another of Zack and Court's fur babies, Peanut Buttah, a rescue from a hurricane in Puerto Rico a few years ago. She's had several eye surgeries and still doesn't see much but she doesn't need to as Zack sees for her.

 

Happy Thanksgiving Day prep to my U.S. friends and family!

 

[Dressing from Thanksgiving Day 2022--It's so much prettier in a glass baking dish!]

 

 

 

Cranberry Sauce

 

A quick post for Cranberry Sauce to go with the turkey recipe I just put up at Dewena's Window...

I always hunt for cranberries from Wisconsin. These are from Tomah, Wisconsin, Habelman Brothers brand, bought at our local Publix. They were beautifully perfect!

I have tried many recipes but always go back to this old one. Yes, it takes a lot of sugar to jell properly but then you only eat dabs of cranberry sauce, not gobs. 

Cranberry Sauce

2 bags fresh cranberries, washed and any stems removed

Mix in pot: 3 cups sugar, 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves, pinch of ginger.

 

Stir in 2 cups cold water. Bring to boil.

Add cranberries and cook 5 minutes only.

Reduce heat and simmer one hour, stirring occasionally.

Remove from heat. Cool. Chill until serving time.

Do Not pour into Grandmother's crystal bowl while hot!

 

 Yum! Made mine yesterday. RH and his brother had to sample it warm from the pot with ham sandwiches for their lunch. We also like a dollop of it on pancakes or even on an omelette. 

A blessed and safe Thanksgiving Day to those of you celebrating it.

 

November Goodbye

The end of the month has come and time to show another soon to be turned page from my kitchen calendar with illustrations by Kevin Dodds.

October is long gone but in a way November seems a continuation of it with the colors that steal my heart every year.

It's strange but I could swear that late October was the time of the most brilliantly colored autumn leaves when I was a teenager, where now they happen in the first two weeks of November instead.

But even when they're gone I still have autumn leaves inside my kitchen, as well as piles of leaves on the ground.

Some things I just want to hold on to and November is one of them, my favorite month of the year.

Everything in November leads up to one day, Thanksgiving Day.

But just like the seasons, Thanksgiving Day eventually changes too. No more for me is the making of multiple pies.

No more three casseroles and a 19 lb. turkey.

No more setting a big table, with a smaller one at the end.

Instead this Thanksgiving Day ended up being one of the ox in the ditch kind of days (Luke 14:5) and instead of even a small turkey, I sliced up some sirloin steak and stir-fried it with peppers, mushrooms and scallions and served it over rice for RH and me after he came home.

There was fresh cranberry sauce and a pecan pie and it was good.

I've had to give up my Gladys Taber ideas of Thanksgiving Days--

Her dream of Thanksgiving was a cross between a Currier and Ives print and a Grandma Moses painting. She saw people skimming up in sleighs, children gamboling in the yard. Fires burning on every hearth, corn popping, apples toasting, turkey crackling outside, moist and tender within.

Gladys Taber in

Mrs. Daffodil 

Times change as the years go by, our family is far flung now. I really do accept the reality of that and that I'm no longer able to produce a big Thanksgiving meal and neither are my small kitchen and fridge. 

Besides, I have Christmas to look forward to where for the first time in years it looks as if every single family member will be here together for an afternoon before Christmas, depending on whether a new great-granddaughter makes her appearance early or late. 

I am looking forward to that so very much!

Still, I think back to when my own mother had to turn over the reins of big family dinners to her daughters. I remember how she still wanted to cook things to contribute to the meal and how we all really wished she wouldn't--both for her own sake and because we all loved to cook. We were, after all, her daughters.

Here she was at 85, if I remember correctly, at my sister Deb's house. It may have been her birthday celebration. She didn't have to lift a finger, just relax and enjoy it all.

She even has her glass of wine by her chair!

She'd earned her right to relax but I wonder, did she miss all the Gladys Taber Thanksgivings that she and my father hosted? 

I bet she did.

The yearning never goes away...

The yearning never really goes away.

That yearning for a Thanksgiving Day like when the children were young, and at home.

It was Thanksgiving Day of 1986 and we went around the table to say what we were thankful for.

RH went first...

Then our firstborn and his girlfriend who later on became our daughter-in-law...

Our beautiful daughter went next...

Then her shy little brother spoke, reluctantly...

And last it was our little one's time...

I know what his mama was thankful for.

She still is.

For My Vegetarian Friends At Thanksgiving

This post is lovingly dedicated to all my vegetarian friends but especially to Claudia and Don at Mockingbird Hill Cottage [here]. 

Thanksgiving Dinner

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

"I will cook for my love a banquet of beets and cabbages,

Leeks, potatoes, turnips, all such fruits…

For my clever love,

who has returned from further than the far east;

We will laugh like spring

above the steaming, stolid winter roots."

A delicious Thanksgiving Day dinner to all of you! 

I hope you enjoyed the beautiful words of Edna St. Vincent Millay above.

A huge thank you to my cameraman, R.H., who went to the barn in 28 degree weather

this morning for props, spent hours arranging all my vegetables for me

and then photographing them.

[No vegetables were harmed during the filming of this post,

but they will be eaten afterwards!]

1961--It Was Such A Lovely Year

Ah! November of 1961! As a bride of only a few weeks, November of 1961 is a very good month for me. It is autumn, with the holidays ahead to celebrate for the first time as a young married woman.

We have small paychecks coming in from jobs we enjoy. Except for our rent, utilities, food, gas and incidentals, R.H. and I have only one payment a month in these pre-credit card days--$5.25 for a 17-inch black and white television from Western Auto.

On Thanksgiving Day I will wear the going-away outfit my mother recently made me. I had asked for something like this…

Mine is a tailored red wool suit. The jacket is short, to the hipbone, which I can easily find, and Mama covered the buttons with the same red wool and made bound buttonholes. The sleeves are not fur-trimmed but for our honeymoon to the mountains of Gatlinburg, Tennessee she lends me her silver mink stole.

R.H. does not tell me that the white harlequin glasses spoil the sophisticated effect of the suit and mink stole. Love is blind.

When Thanksgiving Day comes, we begin the tradition that is to last for years. We have an early Thanksgiving dinner at my mother-in-law's house and then leave to have another later in the day at my own parents' house. Neither of us wants to give up Thanksgiving dinner the way our own mother prepares it.

And neither of our mothers expects me, the new bride, to cook anything to contribute to the meal. I have just barely learned how to operate my new can opener. I am beginning to cook from my new red and white plaid Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, mostly on weekends.

It all seems like play. Everything does, marriage, jobs, making a home in an attic apartment that I want to look like this…

Earlier in the year, before graduation, I sat in study hall and on television watched Alan Shepard splash down in the Atlantic Ocean after his short sub-orbital flight in space, but I am not worried about troubles building with Cuba, or nuclear testing, or about the United States aiding South Vietnam in their fight against the Vietcong. And sad to say, I am little concerned with news about the "freedom riders" coming to the South, wrapped as I am in a cocoon of suburban white wool.

It is my first Thanksgiving Day as a Mrs., and I imagine we will live the life of Father Knows Best, just as my parents have.

1961 was a lovely year.


[All pictures other than personal photographs appeared in the November 1961 McCall's magazine.]