 | |
Yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving. I used to only care about Thanksgiving because it meant a paid day off work. That was when I worked Monday to Friday, 9-6 and needed any day off I could get. They call it a statutory holiday, I call it a mental health day. Now I just see Thanksgiving as a good excuse to eat a lot of food. Frankly for reasons I'm not going to get into, I don't care about the meaning of the holiday, blah, blah, whatever. Even in grade school when they constantly bombarded us with tales of 'the pilgrims' and film strips about Canada's heritage, I really only cared about the fact that we got to  interrupt classes to eat food out of plastic bowls. Every year at my school, from grades 1-6, each class would make a dish and parents would send something with their kids, and then someone would go around between the classes and pass out dollops of squash and what-not to all the kids. It was like a giant school pot luck. I didn't go to some fancy private school. This was a regular old public school called E.I. Mccauley, named after some really old dude with the same name who got a special chair in the front row at plays and other large school functions. I have no idea who he was or what he did. Maybe he donated lots of money to have the school built? Who knows. Anyways, Thanksgiving dinner and the fact that the school was all open concept were the two most interesting things about the place.
Now as an adult who doesn't work at some crappy, mind numbing 9-5 job, I can finally enjoy Thanksgiving the way I did as a kid--for the gorging on food. Of course now I have to make it myself, but I actually like that part. This year I even made a pumpkin pie, which is a pretty big deal since baking is a foreign concept to me. I love to cook. I just throw things into pots and make it work. I don't bother with recipes, and when I do I always modify them. I've never been able to follow instructions. I'll make things up before I'll read instructions. Which is why I dislike baking. Baking seems like an exact science to me. Too much following directions. Mixing exact amounts, following exact methods. I get so freaked out about getting it wrong that after every small step I reread the instructions. Over and over again. Davin was getting amused, sitting at the kitchen table, carving gourds,  listening to me repeating ingredients over and over again. Eventually he was reading the ingredients out to me because he had them memorized but I was still referring back to the list, even though I had the ingredients memorized too. I just didn't trust that it was going to turn out right. Well it turned out to be the best pumpkin pie ever. And it didn't have milk or eggs, which meant I could almost eat it without suffering since I'm lactose intolerant.
 I also made corn bread. That's baking as well, but much easier with less steps and ingredients. I even made tons of apple sauce and jarred it up with labels (that I designed) and everything. I was a machine! or a stepford wive... I did all that after watching the second episode of the new season of 7th Heaven on Sunday night. I love that show because I love laughing at shows with puritan moral values. Kind of goes with the Thanksgiving theme doesn't it?
Then on Monday we made the rest of the diner. It consisted of the best pumpkin soup EVER, out-of-the-bird stuffing (we're vegetarian), butternut squash, asparagus, organic greens, roasted root vegetables (parsnip, carrot, mini yukon gold potatoes, sweet potato), roasted garlic, pumpkin seeds and chesnuts. It was all very good. We ate, I got a little extroverted by the wine and told too many loud stories about my bad ass youth, and then everyone went home. Then Davin, my brother and I watched Good Fellas. For some reason I always want to watch Good Fellas or various other Scorcese gangster movies on Family holidays.
Read more about Autumn harvest festivals seasonal stuff here.
Hey if you want to see what I listen to while I work check out Alpha Z a list of graphic designers from around the world and their top 10 albums of all time. Mine is just past halfway down the list.
previous entry
| | |
