TD Report

The remaining dishes from last night's dinner have been washed, leaving the kitchen almost free of signs that a massive cooking event took place there last night.

My wife cooked turkey and dressing, along with two types of cranberries (congealed out of a can for her...from her childhood...and real berries cooked on top of the stove for me), and fresh green beans.

This is the first Thanksgiving of this semi-traditional sort we've had in awhile. She did not use our old-style recipes for the turkey and dressing, though. She used recipes for both that she got from the Food Network or its website. The dressing had no cornmeal (a first for us) and used various other things we'd not used in dressing before, including dried cranberries. Oh, and it had enormous amounts of leeks.

The turkey was stuffed not with that dressing, but with apples and oranges and onions and assorted other "stuff." She painstakingly placed a melange of several fresh herbs under the skin of the turkey breast before baking it.

All in all, it was good, but we both agree that, despite our love of things new and different, we prefer our old traditional recipes, handed down to us by our respective mothers and modified to fit reality today's preferences.

When we bought the turkey, it looked tiny in comparison to the 20 and 30 pound monsters around it in the huge freezer case in the grocery store. But, an eleven pound turkey that has been carved to serve just enough for two looks like it's the size of a small automobile when it's put in the refrigerator. There's no doubt that it will provide meals for us for a while to come. If history is any guide, we'll be having turkey soup before too long...a good thing, since the weather turned downright cold yesterday. It snowed a bit just west of us and the forecast is for much colder weather.

Speaking of meals, the turkey dinner was in stark contrast to our much earlier meal of the day, dim sum at a Chinese dim sum spot. We looked rather out of place among the sea of Asians, but that's part of the reason we like the place. We never had a clue what we're getting, because the people who push the dim sum carts around the place speak either no English or very limited and heavily-accented English. We can always count on having an unusual meal there...usually very good, but occasionally a bit too far from even our very broad comfort levels. One of the most pleasant aspects of going to the place is watching the people. Anyway, yesterday was good.