food – Page 5 – My Truant Pen

Peach butter and babies

You know, in my day job I’m all professional. I knowingly use acronyms. The word “synergy” unironically passes my lips. I’m actually a technical professional, which ups the number of acronyms like 50% from everyone but finance, who has a vocabulary entirely made up of acronyms. Real grownup professional. I swear. Ok, yeah. I don’t buy it either.

Right now I’m sitting at my kitchen table. Monday, my double-fruit share from Farmer Dave showed the ugly side of a bumper crop, when my take-home number of peaches hit thirty-two. 32. That’s THIRTY TWO PEACHES (on top of 8 nectarines). Nearly ten pounds of peaches, people. Now, I’ve made my fair share of peach pies this summer. (Mmmmm…. peach pies.) But 32 peaches is like 4 peach pies. Or maybe three. And I didn’t have TIME for four peach pies. Or pie starter. I knew that I needed to can it. To my surprise and chagrin, peach jam was quite a disappointment last year. It was sugary and crystallized after opening. But apple butter was a delight. So tonight, peach butter. Why not?

Of course, it’s easy to airily say “Why not?” before you have peeled and cubed about 20 peaches, but whatever. I bought a big canner pot this year, for the apple butter. I usually jam with pectin, because that’s how my mom does it, but the butters don’t use pectin. Just sugar, lemon and time. I’m caught between hoping it’s good (did I mention how amazing the apple butter is on corn bread?) and hoping it’s not so that I’m not on the hook to make it every year. I mean, a family can only eat so many preserves, and this is my seventh? Eight? batch of something this summer, and I MUST still make damson plum jam and apple butter. I think I need to buy more jars. And make more friends. Be warned, if you enter my house…. better yet, I have never once met a non-fruit-eater, so don’t you go thinking your dietary constraints will save you. Muahahah!

Anyway, in other news, the big boy bed. Guess what? It’s NO PROBLEM. It’s like Thane hasn’t even noticed that there’s been a change in his bedtime routine. You put him on the bed. You give him puppy. You leave the room. You hear from him again at 6:15 in the morning. One can hope that maybe he’ll start to play a bit in the mornings — specifically Saturday mornings. But it was a complete non-event in terms of disruption. Man, I love that kid.

Ok, I better make sure the butter isn’t burning. I wonder if it will be good on pancakes, maybe….

The first of the jam is setting

On a ninety degree June day, on the shortest night of the year, I have set aside my first batch of jam for the year. It’s strawberry — a dark, extremely ripe batch of strawberry jam, with berries coming from a farmer’s market in Cambridge (our fair city).

Last year I made seven batches of jam: two blueberry, two strawberry, one peach, one plum and one apple butter. (OK ok so apple butter isn’t jam. So sue me.) For all the real jams (not the apple butter), I use the simplest canning method: liquid pectin. Ah, Certo! What service you give me! Anyway, each batch makes about 6 – 10 jars of jam, depending on size.

In my cupboard there are currently 9 jars of jam: five blueberry, two peach, one strawberry and one apple butter. If anyone wants blueberry jam, let me know. After years of having made it I’ve finally reached the conclusion that it’s simply not worthwhile. The only thing the spoiled people around here are willing to use blueberry jam for is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and then only if I sneak it in. The peach jam was really a disappointment. Instead of being a whiff of my favorite fruit, a glimpse of the brief moment of summer carried throughout the winter (what I hoped), it ended up being an overly sugary, sugar-type-substance. It crystallizes in the jar if left too long (not a problem I’ve encountered before) and is generally eh. Clearly, the highest best calling of a peach is a tight race between eating it over the kitchen sink (if you don’t need to eat it over the sink it’s not a good peach) or peach pie. Mmmmmm peach pie.

The strawberry is the old standby of jams. It’s fine in most everything. It is the staple of my cupboard, for sandwiches or spread over my husband’s toasted bread at night before we retire. The apple butter was a revelation. It has found it’s true calling spread thickly over cornbread. That might not permit you to get through about 12 jars of apple butter, but a fortnight does not pass but we have chili and cornbread. And the apple butter makes a favorite meal even more a thing of joy!

But the plum. Oh, the plum! The tartness, balanced with delicate perfection of the sweetness of jam. It dances on the tongue, bringing delight. Just the memory if it scintillates my taste buds. There were some wonderful nights this winter, blooming tea in the glass teapot, sugar cubes next to the porcelain teacup, hot toast with butter and plum jam, and a rousing game of St. Petersburg. Delight, my friends. I have to admit that, to me, the farm share was worth it if it only presented me with a quantity of plums that needed something to be done with them, to this result.

My family agrees. You will note there is no plum jam in my “left over” count — the only kind of canning I’m completely out of. And unlike my other batches, I shared nary a jar of the plum with anyone. I parcelled out peach judiciously, strawberry with grace, and apple butter with the corn bread recommendation. But the plum I kept to myself.

So this year, I have already made one batch of strawberry jam. Fear not, sons of mine, your PB&Js are secure. I’ll probably make another batch with farmshare strawberries. I will make two, maybe three batches of plum jam. Because really, it was that good. I thought, in addition, I’d made an apricot jam this year. I’m on the hook for another batch of apple butter, no doubt. I’m hoping that maybe one of my friends wants to come and make it with me, because peeling that many apples and the stirring required is lonely work without a chatting partner.

I can’t help but think, though, that there is room to continue to grow in this canning endeavor. I think I’ve mentioned that canning is a family heritage. My great-grandmother was in her 20s during the Great Depression. I remember a neglected apple tree near our home. My grandmother spent hours, hours upon hours, peeling, coring and cooking those apples to make applesauce, only because she couldn’t bear to see such good food going to waste.

When my brother was about Thane’s age, maybe a little younger, my great grandmother, Grandma Finley, came to stay with us for a month or two during the summer. I can still remember the exact threes in our backyard: the raspberry bushes (for jam – I distinctly recall getting chastised for having eaten the bushes bare when mom planned on jamming that weekend), the Politician’s elm, the crabapple tree, the two dogwoods, and the stand of slender white birches in the middle.

I loved the dogwoods, I climbed the elm, I admired the paperlike bark of the birches, but I’d never really noticed the crabapple. My great grandmother, on the other hand, knew just what to do with it. She made crapapple jelly. I remember being amazed by the color of it – this incredibly clear red. Like plums, the crabapples were quite tart, so the jelly danced between tart and sweet on the tongue. I wonder if she had a recipe, or used pectin? I wonder if that was just the sort of thing a hard-working Christian woman who’d lived though the depression knew how to do.

What I really wonder, of course, is whether I can get my hands on any crabapples this summer.

PS – if anyone does have a crabapple tree nearly and would let me glean, let me know!!

Farmer Dave’s CSA in Burlington

One of the projects I planted during the winter that is sprouting this spring is setting up my church (Burlington Presbyterian as a farm share distribution point for Farmer Dave’s farm share. I participated in his farm share last year at the Lawrence pickup location (conveniently located in my building!), but changing jobs meant living too far away to pick it up.

We’ve been talking about stewardship a lot lately in church. Sometimes the word “stewardship” is a churchy way of saying “We need more money.” This is often true. But true stewardship means a lot more than that. It means taking care of the people who bring the mission of a church to life. It means fostering the connection and feeling of belonging with everyone who is a part of our church family. It means carefully looking at how the church’s financial resource are spent, as well as how they come in. It also means having careful stewardship of the world entrusted to our care.

This drive to stewardship is therefore affecting things big and small across our church. We had already done some things. For example,we use fair trade coffee, use CFLs where possible, avoid paper/plastic dishes, recycle religiously (get it?), and offer our parking lot for commuter parking with public transit. But we’re trying to take it the next step: installing timed thermostats (apparently we have high voltage something-or-others that make this more complicated) and looking to see if we can install solar panels on our beautiful big roof (if there’s anyone out there who’d like to help us with this drop me a line!).

Offering fresh, locally grown, sustainable produce to the community seemed like an excellent way to contribute to the cause of Stewardship, while also creating a relationship with people who might otherwise not know our church exists. Furthermore, for any shares that aren’t picked up (because the person is on vacation or forgets or something) we’ll be donating those shares to the Burlington Food Pantry. Fresh produce is one of the hardest things for a food pantry to offer.

Anyway, I’ve been pleased and amazed at how the distribution has come together. We’ve ironed out nearly all the kinks, and are now accepting registrations! We’re in a big push now. We need to have a minimum number of sign-ups for the site, or it won’t work. So if you or a loved one lives in the Burlington Massachusetts area and love fresh produce, sustainably grown and harvested the morning it’s delivered to you, please consider signing up!

The Marathon

Sometimes your schedule sneaks up on you. Husband gone for 5 days, no problem! Hosting 20 – 30 people for pie? Sounds like fun! Bring it on! Church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night? But of course! Regularly scheduled roleplaying game? I do love some Deadlands (this game in particular)! But then all of a sudden you look at your calendar, and you realize that these things are happening back-to-back-to-back-to-back, with no unscheduled or off days in between. Oops.

I’m just getting off of one of those. While I could outline exactly why I’ve been super duper crazy busy every single night for the last week and a half (and every day of the weekend), let’s say that last night at 7:30 was the first full hour I could sit down and do something non-productive in about 7 days. And booooy was I ready for it!

On the upside, most of the stuff I’ve been so incredibly busy doing was a ton of fun. I’m happy to report that Piemas was a success. (Of course, you’d have to be an idiot to have Piemas be a failure. Make pie. Have other people bring pie. Eat pie. It’s not rocket science.) There was, to my great surprise, a preponderance of sweet pies. I thought that the savories would be overabundant, but no. They went quickly. There were also, as will surprise no one who has attended any sort of gathering at my house, a number of games going on. We did a quick an innovative redesign of the kitchen layout to permit the epic 2.5 hours of Agricola in which I was fortunate enough to get my hat handed to me.

My only regret with these fake holidays I love so much is that I don’t get a chance to talk to all of my friends in as in-depth a manner as I would wish.

In other news, my job is going super duper well (I think). The analogy I’m using is that I’m like a plant that’s been repotted. I was root-bound in my last position. Switching jobs has taken me out of that pot, broken the old root ball, and put me in this new, larger pot. In response, I’m throwing out new growth from all angles. I love it. It’s making me super happy. In the three weeks I’ve been here, I’ve met probably 150 people, learned an entirely new programming language and paradigm (and delivered real code to production!), participated in oodles of meetings, done the voice-acting for a quarterly presentation for the web team (which, for the record, I am not on), asked an apparently high profile question at the Town Hall meeting when we met the folks who will be our new bosses, and been asked by the Sustainability Director if I’d be willing to be in a video employee highlight discussing the role sustainability played in my decision to sign on here. New people, new tools, new technologies and I feel like I’m thriving. Hopefully my boss feels the same way!

The boys are doing pretty well. This was not my finest parenting weekend. I keep telling myself that as long as the boys do get focused attention, are loved, and it isn’t the only way life works — that learning to entertain one’s self is not a bad skill to work on. Grey seems to mostly really like his new preschool. It has the ups and downs that relationships with other children do have. Someone calls him a name and he’s down in the mouth. He plays tag with a new friend and he’s jazzed. But academically it seems superior. He’s just so much more alert to the social aspects, that he’s bound to spot any problems.

The DS is usually restricted to car use only

Thane. Ah, my Thane! What a giggly joy you can be. How frustrated you are getting. This was a hard weekend for him. He wanted to play the board games too! (Note: dice are a fantastic choking hazard!) He wanted to be with me at all times. He wanted to be down, he wanted to be up. I suspect he really wants to get out of the house. The deluge of rain this weekend was not amenable to this.

Anyway, we’re all doing well! I’m having a fantastic time professionally, and my life personally is full full full of love, joy, friendship and board games. I wouldn’t have it any other way!

Today is Piemas

The Saturday closest to 3/14, at 1:59 pm, is Piemas. This is a very complicated concept, but basically Piemas is a day dedicated to the eating of pie. For the purposes of Piemas, a pie is defined as a circular food object with at least one crust: so quiche, shepherd’s pie, cheesecake and tartes would all qualify. We usually have nearly equal number of savory and sweet pies. And basically we sit around all day and eat pie.

It’s a fantastic holiday. And it starts in about an hour. I made only four pies this year: lemon merangue, pecan pie (which is practically cheating it’s so easy), and two chicken pot pies which are in the ‘fridge to cook as appropriate. Everything is in readiness for a long day of dedicated pie-consumption.

Let the pie begin.

I love data

I usually think of myself as a liberal arts kinda girl — all about poetry and language and music and history. But back in high school, I took the ASVAB (the military’s aptitude test) in order to get out of class and (this is the real reason) because I always liked taking standardized tests. (I know! I’m sorry!). Anyway, the results of this test weren’t wildly surprising except one: I aced the code-breaking section. According to the military and my fuzzy 15 year old memory, I was unusually good at translating one list to another. It indicated that I might be a capable computer programmer. I scoffed.

And here I am, a computer programmer. Go figure. I guess what I’m saying is that my image of myself as a words only person is just that: an image. I actually do have this well of unappreciated ability in the less subjective. One of the places this shows up most is in data sets.

I just cannot resist real numbers. If it can be measured, it makes me happy. For example, as you may recall, I carefully measured and calculated my milk production while pumping at work, doing my best to note and avoid problems with my data set. Why? Um, because data is cool? And of course, halfway through you think of other data you should’ve collected (time spent pumping, quality of audio book being listened to, frigidity of server room and impact on milk production).

So for Christmas my brother bought me a Wii fit. It plays exactly into my weakness. Oh, the Wii throws off fantastic data! It has charts and graphs. How much of the time I spent in my workout was done using strength training exercises? How consistent have I been? How many calories did I burn doing X activity? What is my BMI, with a precision of 2. Love! Love love! Data! It gets even better for me, because I find data highly motivational. Give me a measurable objective and watch me make it and then exceed it by a little bit because, um, that’s just how I roll. So fantastic, right?

Well…. there’s just one problem. Let’s say I have half an hour to workout (aka: a miracle has occurred). Which activity is likely to produce the best fitness results: Wii fit, or a half hour fitness workout (I have a Bollywood dance workout DVR’d I’m dying to try)? Chances are the non-Wii workout will get my heart rate higher longer. But! But but! It won’t provide me with the delicious, delicious data I crave. I’ll have to go by estimates and feelings! Bah!

Exercise isn’t the only place where I face this conflict between the measurable and the likely more effective. This happens all the time in food. For example, which one of these is probably all-over better for you: the delicious turkey-burgers my husband made for dinner last night, or a frozen Healthy Choice dinner? Right. Homemade food from actual ingredients has numerous benefits over prepackaged “food” products – not the least of which is taste. Now, which one of these is easily quantified? That would be the prepackaged one, of course. On the other hand, this “from scratch” food may have nutritional surprises. I’m pretty sure that the turkey-burgers were pretty healthy, but what about the chili that I make about once every two weeks? I think it’s pretty decent nutritionally, but I could be wrong.

So I can rigorously and accurately count calories, or I can make my food from scratch.

The last time I set about losing baby-weight, I accomplished it through rigorous calorie counting in both intake and output. I believe that I switched the way I ate from a mostly home cooked to more prepared. That’s harder now, because there are more people eating the food we cook. I don’t think I’m willing to do that again. (Also, the site I used for calorie counting is still stuck in Web 1.0 and has a painful interface. Oh, for an iPhone with a food and exercise log app!) It will be interesting to see whether I can pull this off: reduce calories and exercise regularly without constant data streams and numbers. So motivational do I find numbers, I’m actually not entirely sure I can.

What about you? Do you love data or find it irrelevant or constrictive? What pointless data sets do you obsessively maintain? What are other circumstances are there conflicts between an optimal outcome and a measurable outcome? Which one do you pick when they are in conflict: optimal or measurable?

No-knead wheat bread

My husband’s recipe for wheat bread was called for after my post yesterday, so here I am being obliging.

We have some dedicated gear for this. My husband makes it in batches of two, so we have two large Rubbermaid containers for rising it in. I apparently lack the vocabulary to force Target.com or Amazon.com to disgorge the exact version, but it’s kind of circular, tallish, has those snaps on the side, maybe 3 quarts, and has a red lid. That should do you. We also have two dutch ovens (they’re expensive, but I got one for Christmas last year and another one at Costco for cheaper – I bet they’re a dime a dozen at yard sales).

He usually makes the dough in about 15 minutes at night, and then bakes it on his work-from-home day so he has fresh bread for lunch. Tough life.

It makes FANTASTIC pressed ham sandwiches and toast. Also, for reasons that are unclear to us, the whole wheat version of this bread seems to stay soft and tasty much longer than the regular version. This bread is a rock-star with a good soup. Enjoy!

No Knead Bread
Ingredients
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups bread flour
1/2 Tbsp salt
1/2 tsp active yeast or bread machine yeast
1 cup very warm water
1/2 cup beer (I use Budweiser, Sam Adams light is also nice)
1 Tbsp White vinegar

Instructions
Whisk together dry ingredients and then stir in wet ingredients until all ingredients combined and a shaggy ball of dough forms.

Leave in a large, airtight container in a warm place to rise for 8 – 12 hours (I leave it overnight).

On a lightly floured surface form dough into a ball and knead 15 times.

Shape into a ball, spray surface of dough with oil, and leave to rise on a piece of parchment paper. While rising, put a large pot with lid (I use a cast iron Dutch oven) into oven and preheat to 500 degrees for 30 minutes.

At end of 30 minutes, reduce heat of oven to 425 degrees. Slice shallowly through top of dough and, picking it up by the ends of the parchment paper, place it inside the preheated pot. Re-cover pot and replace in oven.

Bake for 30 minutes. Remove pot lid and bake uncovered for an additional 20 minutes.

Remove bread immediately to wire rack to cool.

Note: if you want to make this recipe without the whole wheat flour, replace it with 1 cup of bread flour and reduce water to 3/4 cups.

Foodie identity

Yesterday’s post on hospitality actually started out as a foodie post. On Tuesday, as we have done so often since the week my husband brought me home as a blushing bride, we gamed. And as we have since that August of 2000, I made dinner for the gamers.

When I first got married, I couldn’t cook. I was both proud and defensive of this fact. I recall joking at our nuptials that I picked my husband so he could cook for me. This was entirely untrue. I really picked him so that I’d have someone else to get up with the kids in the morning. Anyway, suffice it to say, I had very little practical experience in the kitchen. My first job out of college was as a telecommuting programmer. Ah, 2000! What a time you were! This left me home alone a lot, with practically no responsibilities. Out of boredom and cheapness, I started cooking. The weekly arrival of other people at a game provided a motive and opportunity for me.

Looking back on those early meals, I flinch. I recall one attempt at alfredo where a guest pithily asked if I had just poured a jar of mayonnaise over some noodles. I couldn’t blame him for wondering. But gradually, I got better.

I now have an extensive collection of well-thumbed cookbooks and collected favorite recipes. I have fallen head-over-heels for America’s Test Kitchen and everything they’ve ever written. Their Best 30 Minute Recipes was an exceptional find for my lifestyle. (Note: Just plan on buying fresh thyme every time you go grocery shopping.)

I’ve branched out from those early days. I specialized then in, er, mostly cheap meat slowcooked for long enough that you didn’t notice it was cheap since non-cheap meat can’t stand up to that sort of treatment. I still almost never serve dishes where a cut of meat stands alone. I’ve come to revel in the breadth and depth of casseroles — the housewife’s delight. I also make a lot of soups, that go delightfully with the chewy no-knead bread my husband makes once or twice a week.

Tuesday night was a culinary masterpiece (in addition to a role-playing gem). I made this Pork and Prune dish from the 30 minute recipe book. It sounds… unlikely. I would not have eaten it 10 years ago. I would not have made it 5 years ago. It was gobsmackingly good. Even Grey offered a hesitant compliment. (It was so good I have every intention of making it again tonight. Yum!)

A while ago I served a meal to my family and looked at what was on the table:

Main dish: home made from scratch
Bread: Adam’s no-knead whole wheat bread
Butter: produced from Grey’s whipping cream experiment
Jam: the plum I put down this summer
Veggie: from the farmshare

Stepping back to look at it, I marveled. How did I end up being this and doing this? I survived entirely on pizza pockets my senior year of high school. When did I decide that food was so important? I don’t have time to read books for fun, but I produce 3 – 4 meals a week that would’ve been past my ten-years-ago best effort. I make my own jam. We almost always have home made bread on hand. I have a jar of homemade pomegranate molasses in the fridge, and recipes to use it in. My slowcooker gets more use than my Wii.

I’ve started to wonder what role this all plays in my identification of myself. For example, I don’t consider myself a foodie. This could be because I don’t know what a foodie is, but I do know that I still enjoy Arby’s and Pizza Hut on rare occasions, and therefore I can’t be one. I seek novelty in the dishes I eat and serve, but I am by nature a novelty-seeker. (It took my FOREVER to realize that not everyone was.) I take pride in what I serve guests, and am glad to see my sons eating what I cook. On the other hand, once every week or two I look with despair at my recalcitrant 4 year old and food-tossing baby and wonder, “Why the heck did I put this much energy into feeding THEM this tasty stuff?” Or worse, I get knocked back significantly when a recipe doesn’t work out, especially when I’ve invested heavily in making it. And obviously, not all recipes work out.

What do you think makes a “foodie”? How do you feed yourself or your family? Do you eat out? Have prepackaged meals? Do you cook simple things? How often do you cook complex things? Is it the same stuff regularly, or do you love branching out? What’s your favorite source for new recipes? I’m not sure I know what “normal” is for feeding a family!

Hospitality

When you, dear reader, think of Christian values, which ones do you think are at the top for importance? I’d forgive you if you said sexual purity — some days it seems like all you ever hear from Christians in the media is talk about sex and how it’s bad. But no. Jesus says hardly anything about sex.

Some of the values I see most when I read the New Testament are:
– Being loving to all, including yourself
– Not being a hypocrite (especially not a religious hypocrite – for an example, Matthew 23:13 “‘But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them.”)
– Sharing what you have
– And today’s topic… hospitality.

As I understand it (and it should now be noted that I != Biblical scholar), hospitality was a critical virtue in the ancient world in which the Bible was written. There were few inns, and pretty much no restaurants, quickie-marts, C-stores, or even cars to take shelter in. The earlier you went, the rarer the inns were. So if you had to go anywhere, you relied on hospitality and that hospitality was a sacred rite and obligation.

For example, in Genesis 19:6-8, Lot welcomes two angels into his home: “Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him, and said, ‘I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.’” Lot’s obligation as a host here trumps his obligation as a father and caretaker to his daughters (harsh, huh?).

Throughout the New Testament there are stories of hospitality. Jesus’ very first miracle (by tradition — this miracle is only recorded in John) was helping a groom out of a predicament when the wine ran short at his wedding – a failing of the expectations of hospitality. Jesus then goes on the ACCEPT the hospitality of the unacceptable. He sits down with and eats meals with sinners, prostitutes, soldiers, tax collectors (who were probably as popular as drug dealers are for us), turncoats and traitors. When the disciples go out to spread the good news, they are told to shake the dust off their feet from any town which does not offer them appropriate hospitality.

Hospitality is harder than it was, because we’ve lost the habit of it. We don’t invite the homeless to come eat dinner with us because they might be sociopathic kleptomaniacs who will sleep in our front lawns for the rest of our lives if they know where we live. Strangers to our land, the aliens who also populate the Bible, do not expect a welcome to our homes. Instead they book rooms in Motel 8 and buy food from the “Excellent Mart” we’ve never been to; and we glance away across the gulf of culture at each other on the rare instances our paths cross.

I think about this imperative to welcome and nurture when I set the table for company. We do sometimes feed others, although it is usually friends. I wish that I had more courage to be more outrageously hospitable, and welcome the too-talkative, the kind of weird, the left out, the unknown to share a meal with my husband and I, and our two screeching sons. I meet people in those few margins of intersection, and I wish it was ok for me to say, “You look cold. Would you like to come in and have some dinner? There’s plenty.” I’m afraid to. I’m afraid that they will be offended. What if they’re perfectly well off and see my offer as pity? I’m afraid of the disruption in my tightly slotted life. I’m highly cognizant that culture is constantly telling me to be more afraid than I am. I’m supposed to teach my four year old “stranger danger” and it’ll be all my fault if he’s abducted by a dangerous pedophile because I never taught him that people he doesn’t know are enemies until proven otherwise.

Still, I’m haunted by the hospitality I don’t offer. There was the man and his two children, trudging up the hill our house sits on too late at night. Where was he going? Did he have a place? He seemed so quiet, and they so subdued. Would he have welcomed some warmth in the darkness, or was he just going on an evening constitutional?

There was the other man with the Santa beard — his name is Hal — at the grocery store. He was there the entire time I was. I bought $175 worth of nutritious produce, milk, meat, cereals — a veritable bounty. He, after looking in the scratch-and-dent section and walking all through the store… he bought a jar of sauce. Was he lonely? Bored? Hungry? Broke? Did he have a place to go? I wish I had the courage to ask him to come home with me, and I would fix him up a nice dinner and we would talk and he could be filled with company and food.

Did you know that is simply not done? And as a woman and a mother, it is particular verboten for me to do it. Risking my self (and my sexual purity and property) is bad enough. Exposing my sons to such risk, and my husband to such inconvenience? Keep it to a smile and small-talk. Even that, I’m told, is risky and only marginally appropriate.

I’m afraid to even pray for the courage to offer hospitality, because what if that courage arrives? Never ask the Holy Spirit for gifts you will not accept.

I don’t know how to end this rather rambly essay on a snappy note. I will say this, however. If you tire of the tropes of Christianity, why not pay attention to a different virtue this holiday season? Instead of being sparkly pure and blameless, like I know you are, why don’t you try to be courageously hospitable? Risk a little in the cause of kindness. Whether that’s eye contact where you would usually look away, or asking the homeless person you see what their name is, or even inviting someone to share your meal with you, tell the tsking voices to be silent for a moment.

The turkey mocks back

On November 6th, I made this wise statement: After years of panicking about cooking, I’m now confident that a) there will be enough food b) I know how to cook a turkey.

Ah, hubris!

Also, this might be a good time to mention that I try very hard not to be superstitious because I do not believe in superstition. It’s totally a load of crock, in my humble opinion. Also, I TOTALLY JINXED MYSELF WITH THIS STATEMENT. That was nearly as bad as talking about a no-hitter, people.

I changed two things about how I cooked my turkey this year.

1) I bought a new pan. My old pan always stuck to the top of the turkey, and pulled flesh off when I went to baste it, and was really too small for the behemoth birds that occupy my oven on Mocksgiving day. So I saw a new, bigger pan that didn’t have a lid but did have a cool little rack thingy and I went for it.
2) I read Cook’s Illustrated. Their November edition had some neat ideas on roasting turkeys. I didn’t do the pork one only because I couldn’t find the pork. I didn’t do the brining because I’m really lazy. I didn’t do the baking powder crispy skin bit because I have a hunch that the extra oil I add is needed to make the amount of gravy I produce.

But I did try the temperature thingy. I cooked the bird at 325.

And here are the results. Glorious, no?

Quite possibly the finest-looking bird I've ever cooked

And completely underdone. The breast was done, mind. The popper thingy popped out. The temperature was right for that breast meat. But the bottom of the bird — the dark meat and thighs, etc? Totally undone. Completely.

I hadn’t flipped the bird. I’d cooked it right side up. And since the skin looked so amazing, I didn’t crank the heat up (note: I actually think that was the right call).

We had let the bird set for half an hour, as recommended, and everything was on the table when my husband started carving and we realized that we had a turkey-disaster on our hands. Thinking fast, we pulled out cookie sheets and put turkey parts on the sheets to cook that way. It actually worked out ok. And frankly, I’m not sure that anyone would’ve even noticed if I just failed to put the turkey on the table period. There were so many fantastic options that the turkey was, well, gravy. Mocksgiving was by no means ruined by the total turkey FAIL.

Additionally my gravy was also a fail. I’m good at gravy. I make gravy all the time. But the open-topped pan allowed for much greater evaporation of delicious turkey-juices, so I kept adding water to the drippings. I added too much, and it came out as weak sauce. I actually usually (shhhh) add chicken boiullion (however you spell it) to my turkey drippings when they start to percolate to increase the volume of gravy. Since it cooks with the turkey for several hours, it ends up tasting like turkey gravy. But this time, it just tasted weird. If I want to use the open pot, I’m going to need to come up with a better plan for gravy. Of course, the fact that the turkey wasn’t COOKED might also have led to a diminution in drippings and subsequence chickenosity of the gravy.

Lessons learned:
1) It’s probably a good idea to start the turkey wrong-side up and flip it halfway through
2) Wrap the entire pot in tinfoil before cooking, not just turkey, to prevent evaporation
3) Maybe cook a larger turkey at 350 instead of 325.

I’m actually half-tempted to make a turkey on Thanksgiving just to tinker and figure out what I did wrong. (I can hear you saying “WHAT? Thanksgiving IS turkey day!” Not for me. If I can’t cadge an invite to a Thanksgiving dinner someone else cooked, Thanksgiving is likely to be a pizza night.) Also, the turkey and gravy didn’t come out well. This means NO HOT TURKEY SANDWICHES FOR ME. This, friends, is completely unacceptable.

As an additional Mocksgiving note, I made this Cranberry sauce ahead of time. More than 50% of my motivation was that I’d previously made pomegranate molasses for a recipe I didn’t end up making and it was lurking in the ‘fridge making me feel guilty. This was a fantastic make-ahead dish. It tasted excellent and looked amazing. If you need to bring a dish to a Thanksgiving, I’d heartily recommend this one. I doubled this recipe, and really. Don’t double it. All 28 of us having a serving barely made a dent in it.