Light and Momentary

30 x 15

Happy last day of November, my friends! Thirty days of daily posts, for the fifteenth time. Thanks for reading and I'll see you soon!

Thanksgiving food, ranked

Julie said we should rank Thanksgiving food from most to least important, so here we go:

1. Gravy is the most important Thanksgiving food. This is, I know, a controversial choice, but hear me out. It is the very essence of the festive roasted turkey, combined with stock I made earlier in the week. It tastes like celebration and preparation. I serve it piping hot and it binds together the holiday flavors so that they are harmonious and still distinct. It's also a pain to make, so its presence on the table proclaims THIS IS A SPECIAL DAY.
2. Pie is the other thing that says HI IT'S THANKSGIVING. Pumpkin and pecan, forever and ever, with piles of whipped cream.
3. Mashed potatoes are the most important non-dessert solid food (or, okay, semi-solid). Hot, fluffy, buttery, perfect -- I missed them keenly yesterday. NEVER AGAIN, my friends. Last-minute mashed potatoes or bust.
4. Stuffing is next. I make cornbread stuffing because I am a child of the South, and because my youngest son loves it. "Will there be enough stuffing?" he always asks plaintively. "There's not usually enough stuffing." Don't tell my grandmother, but I have started making my cornbread for stuffing with a leetle bit of white flour. It holds together better when I am combining it with the veggies and herbs.
5. Okay, I guess we have to put turkey somewhere in the top five. If the turkey somehow fell over on the kitchen floor during its resting time, and the dog licked it all over before I noticed, I wouldn't be too very sad. It's fine. It's pretty. I'm no longer intimidated by cooking a turkey (note to Future Jamie: big turkeys are juicier with convection and the faster cooking is useful on a busy day), but the drippings are the bit I'm most attached to. Can't have truly excellent gravy without drippings.
6. Cranberry sauce is next. You need that color on a plate that is mostly ecru/beige/gold/orange, and the tartness is pleasantly bracing. (If you ever have Thanksgiving dinner at our house, be sure you take small bites of the cranberry sauce. It's pretty assertive.)
7. Sweet potatoes have somehow twinned themselves at our house, and now we have a sweet version (pineapple, pecans, warm spices, a little orange juice, and an astonishing amount of butter) and a spicy version (chipotles in adobo, lime juice, whipping cream). 
8. Second-string Thanksgiving desserts: always cranberry cake, usually key lime pie.
9. Everything else can be tied for ninth place. We usually have a couple of green things (often roasted Brussels sprouts, maybe some kind of creamed spinachy thing, maybe some kind of salad), maybe some beets, maybe some kind of bread. This year Pete made the most gorgeous loaves of sourdough AND sourdough rolls. They were beautiful, and at the same time they are not a sine qua non for me at the Thanksgiving table.

Huh, I am still tired from making that much food for that many people yesterday. Maybe tomorrow I'll come back and add some links. Please share your own rankings in comments, or post a link to your own site if you decide to blog about it. Just one more day of NaBloPoMo! 

Lesson Learned

For many years I have done my Thanksgiving mashed potatoes in exactly the same way. But I started to wonder if perhaps I was being a little rigid about it. I saw all these social media posts about people making their mashed potatoes early and leaving them in a crockpot all day and i thought to myself, "Hmm, am I making avoidable trouble for myself?" 

Also Pete told me that Adam Ragusea disagreed with every single thing I said about making mashed potatoes, and Adam Ragusea is the king of pointing out unnecessary rigidity. 

"Guess what, kids," I said, "I'm branching out. We're trying an Instant Pot version this year. I'm going to do them early and keep them warm"

This was a mistake. They weren't, like, dismal. But they were very far from celestial -- kind of funny-colored, kind of dense. When I was fretting beforehand about whether it was a bad idea to branch out, the kids said, "Mom, it will be fine. Potatoes plus butter -- people will eat that." 

I was sitting next to Pete at dinner and we agreed on the inferiority of the Instant Pot version. I asked him about the Adam Ragusea video and his conviction that I had been needlessly emphatic about my approach to mashed potatoes; we had talked about it before he tried the recipe but not afterward. He said, "Adam Ragusea's conclusion that his mashed potatoes were the same as your mashed potatoes was wrong. All of his points were valid. But your mashed potatoes are better."

We might have to make the One True Mashed Potato Recipe later this weekend.

Still reading fat books by men

You might remember that I decided to read a string of hefty books by men, kicking it off with Trollope novel #25. The Claverings tells the story of a woman who marries for money and immediately regrets it. There are lots of people in Trollope novels who are busy weighing up the financial assets of prospective spouses, but Trollope goes all in on the heartlessness of Julia Brabazon's choice to marry Lord Ongar. The book is mostly about the subsequent choices of her spurned lover, Harry Clavering, in an era when breaking an engagement was a much bigger deal than it is these days.

We spend part of our time with Harry's family; his father is a Barsetshire clergyman whose elder nephew is the current Lord Clavering. This elder nephew is distressingly boorish, and his younger brother is comically inept. I've read a lot of Victorian proposals in which a fellow tells his sweetheart that she will make him the happiest man alive if she says yes, or at least the happiest man in all England. Cousin Archie says he'll be the happiest man in London, which seems to say, "I mean, yeah, I like you, but let's be real." (His would-be fiancee declines.)

This book seemed a little unpolished. There are some veiled allusions to the circumstances of Lord Ongar's death and his relationship with a Polish count, and perhaps I was supposed to know more about how to read between the lines. Instead it just felt murky, as if maybe Trollope hadn't wanted to bother with fleshing out that facet of the plot. There's a deus ex machina episode that felt a leetle too tidy. The Kindle edition is full of typos, with a bunch of weird differences in chapter divisions vs. the Project Gutenberg version. But Julia Brabazon is a memorable character, as is her Polish-French friend, and overall the book is a satisfying blend of funny and serious.

***

Now I'm reading Wellness, and I like it. I haven't been completely sucked in, like I was with this author's first novel, The Nix. I was surprised to find that Gladlyville makes a brief and unflattering appearance. So far it's the story of a couple who fell in love as young adults and hit a rough patch twenty years later. Hill's writing voice is engaging and the story is the same kind of mix of funny and sad that I enjoyed in The Nix. I'll keep plugging and tell you more as I get further in.

3/5

Joe and Pete are both home tonight, and planning to stay through the weekend. The two oldest kids will be home on Thursday. The three oldest kids are all bringing their girlfriends to Thanksgiving dinner, and we will have assorted in-laws and friends as well. It will be a busy few days here, but it's so nice to have everybody together.

20%

This is day 9 of my 45 / 45 / 4.5 plan, and it's going all right.

I've gone to three hourlong dance-based fitness classes. On four days I combined brisk walking or elliptical time with yoga. One day I did a 45-minute yoga video. I lifted once.

The fruit is easy to fit in but the vegetable serving sizes are kind of dumb and frustrating. I am sympathetic as to the difficulties of writing usable public health content. You have to speak to a broad audience; you have to be reasonably specific and reasonably flexible. If you're writing for US-based readers, you're writing for people who mostly think kitchen scales are arcane appurtenances. But COME ON, what is a cup of broccoli spears, exactly? I keep thinking about using the Archimedes method -- filling a pint measure halfway with water and then adding broccoli spears until it's full. But that seems ridiculous as well as messy. 

ALSO why does a 2-cup portion of salad greens count as 1 cup of vegetables? I mean, I sort of know but also I find it irritating. If you're going to switch from counting servings of varying sizes to counting allegedly consistent measures of volume, then why are you being inconsistent about the measures of volume? 

I looked at the British guidelines, thinking they would be measured in grams, and in places they are even more annoying. "Three heaped tablespoons" -- pfft, I say. 

There's some utility in measuring because it does highlight for me that my default level of vegetable consumption is lower than the recommended level of vegetable consumption. The recommended level isn't unmanageable, but I do have to pay attention. I've been starting at breakfast, adding a half-cup of spinach to a smoothie or a half-cup of pumpkin puree to a cottage cheese or yogurt bowl. Then it's just a cup of veggies at lunch and another at dinner, which is doable but not my default setting.

And how is working? I am not exactly a wellspring of good cheer and impressive equilibrium, but I'm hanging in there in the face of a substantial grading load, a bunch of lingering around-the-house tasks to catch up on, and an impending holiday dinner for 16. I'll take it, I guess. Onward we go.

Chocolate Cloud Cake

This is a Nigella Lawson recipe that I made for a visiting friend today. It comes together in a trice.

Spray a 9-inch springform pan with nonstick spray and preheat your oven to 350.

If you have a 10-ounce bag of good quality dark chocolate chips, you will need 90% of it for this recipe. Precision is not essential. If I don’t want to weigh them I just pinch off ~10% of the bag and shake the rest into a microwavable bowl. Add a stick of butter and melt them together. I use the 80% power setting but my microwave is old. (Full power could scorch your chocolate.) Stir them together until they are smooth and glossy, and set them aside to cool.

Separate four eggs. Beat the 4 whites until they’re foamy, and then gradually beat in 1/3 c. sugar until they are stiff.  Add two whole eggs and 1/3 c. sugar to your 4 yolks. When your chocolate-butter mixture is cool enough that it won’t scramble your eggs, beat in the yolk mixture until well combined.

Add a healthy dollop of beaten whites to the chocolate mixture to lighten it up. Beat it in vigorously, regarding its deflation with insouciance. Scrape the chocolate mixture into the whites, and fold them together gently but thoroughly.

Pour this mixture into the springform pan and bake for 35 minutes. It should be risen all the way to the center; it might need a few more minutes to get there. Pull it out and let it cool. It will deflate dramatically.

Fill the crater with whipped cream and a delicate dusting of cocoa powder if you like. Or just eat it straight out of the pan with a spoon — baker’s choice.

Productive

Today it dawned on me, after almost 12 years in this bedroom, that it is a terrible use of space to have old letters and pictures on our closet shelves at the same time that we are short on places for clothing, and so I cleared off those shelves and moved the memorabilia to the upstairs bedroom that is going to become a craft space now that its inhabitant has been gone for a while.

I washed and put away a bunch of bedding that had been sitting in empty kids' rooms, even though washing lots of bedding is a pain. (It's so easy to get an unbalanced load when you're washing comforters.)

This week I pulled the trigger on cheerful plates to replace the aging plain dishes we'd been using for our whole marriage, and I spent some time today rearranging the kitchen cabinets.

I finished Trollope novel #25, The Claverings, about which more soon. I also spent some time talking to Pete, who will be home on Tuesday for Thanksgiving. (OH MY, do I love that boy and miss him when he is gone.) 

I have only exercised for 25 minutes of my prescribed 45, though, so I am going to squeeze in a quick yoga video. (Probably a person cannot reasonably spend 20 minutes in savasana and call it exercise, you figure?)

Beauteous Golden Soup

Do you need a quick soup recipe? I have a quick soup recipe.

Coarsely chop an onion and a stalk of celery. Cook them in olive oil over medium-high heat; you want them to get brown. While they are sizzling, peel and seed a small butternut squash, and then cut it into chunks. My chunks were probably in the range of 1.5 inches, and I had about 1.5-2 cups of them. But this is a forgiving recipe, so do what works for you. Toss them in the pot and let them brown while you peel and core and chunk a nice big apple.

Deglaze your pan with a half-glass of white wine. Add the apple and about a pint of stock. Cover and cook on medium heat until you can mash the apples and squash easily with a fork. This won't take a long time; you can check them after 10 minutes, but be advised that they might still need a little more time. Sprinkle in some warm spices -- I added one shake apiece of ginger, allspice, and cardamom, along with some pepper. Add a splash of cream and salt to taste, and hit it with an immersion blender until it is smooth.

If you are feeding this to company, you might want to garnish it with something green, like chives or a sprinkle of parsley.

Snippets of Science: Spit, Strength, SoDs

How's that for an alliterative title? Shall we talk about science, my friends? 

Link #1: Toddlers know that spit-sharing predicts "thick" relationships. One-year-olds can infer reliably that the people we share saliva with are likely to be closer to us. The particpiants observed interactions among human actors and puppets. They expected that the spit-sharing relationships (i.e., people who shared a kiss or "non-partitionable food") would be the ones in which help was available in a distressing situation. Pretty smart, huh? Press release is here, or the study is available here if you want more details.

Link #2: Bronze Age women were stronger than previously suspected. I originally saw this on Upworthy (sorry), which framed the findings as "Bronze Age women were JACKED!!" Farming is hard, and ordinary Bronze Age women appear to have been stronger than contemporary athletes. The actual study is here if you are curious.

Link #3: After posting about my Spiral of Decrepitude last night, I almost cried when I saw this NYT article today about musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. (That's a gift link, so it should work for you whether or not you're a subscriber.) I have talked to three other women today who have said, "Yes! That's me! I feel seen!" I haven't read their paper but it's here if you're interested. i think SoD (for Spiral of Decrepitude) is a catchier name, with the benefit of capturing women's feelings about that whole pile of nonsense: sod* that! 

*I'm not sure if I have any British readers at the moment, but if so please excuse the vulgarity. I was surprised to learn, when we lived in Scotland, that "sod" was considered especially crude, more obscene than some of the language that's barred from US TV. Here in the US "bugger" means "something small, possibly cute, and mildly annoying," and "sod" mostly makes us think of lawn management. Language is a funny thing.