Thanksgiving
Nov. 29th, 2020 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_tectonicWe stayed home for Thanksgiving this year.
We'd been planning to anyway, but then the week before my Mom & Larry had a potential exposure from Leslie, who's working at a group home. Everyone's tests came back negative, happily, but we all agreed that it was best to just stay home.
I took Wednesday off, so had a full five-day break, which was nice. We did a bunch of cooking Wednesday and only had a few things to finish off Thursday. Ate dinner at around 2, and otherwise just had lots of downtime.
I made a pork roast instead of a turkey because we had one in the deep freeze, neither of us is all that enthused about turkey, and it takes a lot of effort to do turkey well. It was a little over-cooked (the recipe said two hours in a 250-degree oven to get to 140, and when I checked it after an hour and a half it was already up to 150. :-/ ) but otherwise good. I made very satisfactory gravy from the drippings to go along with the mashed potatoes Jerry made. He also roasted up a bunch of Brussels sprouts.
I also made sausage-apple-walnut-sage dressing, which was great, and swankified green bean casserole. (Use frozen instead of canned green beans and cream instead of milk; add some wine and fry up some extra mushrooms and garlic.) We had the traditional log of cranberry jelly, and I also tried out Mama Stamberg's Cranberry Relish, which is frozen and has cranberries, onion, sugar, sour cream (sub Greek yogurt) and horseradish (sub wasabi). It was good and packed a punch. I also make the cranberry curd tart from Cook's Illustrated, which was (as is often the case) a lot of work but produced a really good result. I liked it a lot better than pumpkin pie.
We did a couple evenings of online gaming with Joe Z and Chris. And a zoom birthday gathering for Ian a week ago. Otherwise, mostly just a lot of downtime. I read two books! (Books 2 & 3 in Dennis Taylor's Bobiverse.) Which warrants an exclamation point because 2020. I'm feeling better since the election, but still run out of mana a lot.
We still have snow on the ground from... Wednesday, I think? Poor Panthro only goes on brief walks before his little feet get cold. Also, sunset is before 5 pm, which I hate.
Overall, it was not a bad holiday. There are a lot of things I'm missing, but I still have a lot to be thankful for.
We'd been planning to anyway, but then the week before my Mom & Larry had a potential exposure from Leslie, who's working at a group home. Everyone's tests came back negative, happily, but we all agreed that it was best to just stay home.
I took Wednesday off, so had a full five-day break, which was nice. We did a bunch of cooking Wednesday and only had a few things to finish off Thursday. Ate dinner at around 2, and otherwise just had lots of downtime.
I made a pork roast instead of a turkey because we had one in the deep freeze, neither of us is all that enthused about turkey, and it takes a lot of effort to do turkey well. It was a little over-cooked (the recipe said two hours in a 250-degree oven to get to 140, and when I checked it after an hour and a half it was already up to 150. :-/ ) but otherwise good. I made very satisfactory gravy from the drippings to go along with the mashed potatoes Jerry made. He also roasted up a bunch of Brussels sprouts.
I also made sausage-apple-walnut-sage dressing, which was great, and swankified green bean casserole. (Use frozen instead of canned green beans and cream instead of milk; add some wine and fry up some extra mushrooms and garlic.) We had the traditional log of cranberry jelly, and I also tried out Mama Stamberg's Cranberry Relish, which is frozen and has cranberries, onion, sugar, sour cream (sub Greek yogurt) and horseradish (sub wasabi). It was good and packed a punch. I also make the cranberry curd tart from Cook's Illustrated, which was (as is often the case) a lot of work but produced a really good result. I liked it a lot better than pumpkin pie.
We did a couple evenings of online gaming with Joe Z and Chris. And a zoom birthday gathering for Ian a week ago. Otherwise, mostly just a lot of downtime. I read two books! (Books 2 & 3 in Dennis Taylor's Bobiverse.) Which warrants an exclamation point because 2020. I'm feeling better since the election, but still run out of mana a lot.
We still have snow on the ground from... Wednesday, I think? Poor Panthro only goes on brief walks before his little feet get cold. Also, sunset is before 5 pm, which I hate.
Overall, it was not a bad holiday. There are a lot of things I'm missing, but I still have a lot to be thankful for.
