The Joy of Cooking Fairy: Thnaksgvign????!!!??

I’m sorry, thanksgiving is in how many days????? (4).

Last Monday, I worked, selling spices to people stocking up for the BIGGEST FOOD HOLIDAY OF THE YEAR, oblivious to the actual calendar. The next day, my day off, I crack open my computer and see an IM from Jedi Jasmin:

“THANKSGIVING IS IN NINE DAYS!!!”

It’s ok, this is my Specialist Subject. I majored in Holidays.

I looked ahead on the calendar and saw I worked the next day and then had off until the next Monday and Tuesday then had off the day before Turkey Exam Day.

Then I was called in to work on Thursday.

J and I had worked out the guest list, somehow comprising 20 people, even though it was just family. Twenty people??? This shindig will have to go down at my pad, so the Never Ending Redecorating Project will have to move on to the Tidy the F*&k Up phase fast this weekend.

Then we made up a menu, and decided what we were gonna tackle and what to delegate. Not so bad, I’ve done much, much, much more on my own in tiny, inadequate kitchens. Now the sticky part: Since that’s the way I’ve always rolled, now I have to break my recipes down into actual ingredients with actual amounts and procedures.

Huh? You say.

This is rub for your Fairy, my friends. I learned to cook on my own. I buy by approximation, I fabricate by eyeball. Every single recipe I have created here I have had to sit down and corral my unconscious lizard-brain to formalize. Whereas I just grabbed several boxes of chicken stock because I had on my list “Stuffing and Gravy” and I know in my mind’s eye how much that requires, now I have to do it on military scale with standards and protocol. Oik.

So this is a new experience. One I am most thankful for, because on Thanksgiving Day 20 people I love very much will enter this house to plonk down and eat and talk and laugh and pass out from Stuffing Overdose. A lot of people have been posting lately the things and people they’re thankful for, and quite a lot of people have been posting about dropping out of the holidays to avoid the stress and cliché and commercialism. After two years of seasonal affective disorder, something just snapped in my head round about October and I am once again filled with absolute joyful abandon, and some stress, but mostly the enthusiasm of combined 5-, 12- and 20-year-olds. I am childish in my love for presents got and given, just old enough to relish my freedom and time off, and suddenly aware of my ability to make this anything I want to.

The boys are once again grilling the meat, allowing them to (hopefully) sit outside, drink beer and not-quite-set-things-on-fire. Other people are bringing veggies and desserts. I'm making a mountain of sourdough bread stuffing, enough mashed potatoes to feed the Pacific Fleet, some pie and a cake. It almost feels like cheating. But in a good way.

Thus, every day or so, as work permits, I will post a few snaps of everything I am thankful for this year. As I sit here listening to oven-dried bread cubes crackle as they cool, I begin with the most wonderful to happen to our crazy family: Our shiny, new, crazy little Danger Mouse: