[Sca-cooks] HAPPY THANKSGIVING

[Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise]

> Anyway, maybe my daughter and i can cook in 2006 (my bro's mom-in-law 
> hosts next year). Then at least it will be edible and my daughter and 
> i can hang out with each other. We enjoy cooking together and we 
> actually like each other and doing things together.

Ok, for contrast with Anahita's family thanksgiving-- I had thanksgiving 
at my mom's. My mom is a good plain cook, who suffers from the same kind 
of food overachievement I do. My baby brother just got married and moved 
to Texas; my middle brother is in catering and works Thanksgiving at the 
buffet. So it was me, my mom, my Christopher, my baby brother's gay 
ex-roomate, and the ex-roomate's seven year old son. At Christmas it 
will probably be the same crowd, plus two couples who are friends of 
mine. My middle brother stops over for leftovers around the time we roll 
out for second slices of pie.

The food-- turkey, mashed potatoes (my brother and I will happily eat as 
much mashed potatoes as we can get away with), standard salad, filling, 
pickled peppers (no pickles this year, that will be taken care of for 
christmas), three kinds of cranberry sauce (I love the relish type, but 
the stuff from the can is also required), a broccoli cheese bake, 
steamed green beans, and some other stuff-- was all good. There was a 
wierd variant of armored turnips (my mother loves them but if I don't 
get there in time to cook them she always does somethng a bit odd-- this 
year it was bread crumbs on top...)

My mom was busily being age-appropriately constructive with the 
ex-roomate's kid (the ex-roomate had the hunted look of Dad Out To 
Dinner With Child and fussed about the boy's behavior a lot). This kept 
her from her usual serenade about my kid brother, and we didn't even 
have to call him on the phone this year. *whew* My mom and Christopher 
got into one of those wierd conversations about parenthood in which 
Christopher tried to explain that he was raised by Wolverines, and NO, 
my mother was not a wolverine, and shouldn't think she was... Because 
neither of my brothers were there, we didn't have the usual holiday 'do 
you remember when Dad...' [followed by some hair-raising story of life 
with the mentally ill] stories... And since exroomate and son had to 
leave, we didn't make the pilgrimage to see the petting zoo by the 
Candle Outlet this year; however, we did spend most of the afternoon and 
late into the night piecing a 1000-piece puzzle.

Then we got up, shopped for a feast, and went to Darkover. :)

You know, I love my family. Really I do. But there's something extremely 
surrealistic about our holiday traditions.

-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 
"The toad beneath the harrow knows/exactly where each tooth-point goes,
The butterfly upon the road/Preaches contentment to that toad." 
			- Rudyard Kipling