Day in the Life of an Idiot

 I am deep in revisions (again? Still?) but I thought I'd poke my head above water to check-in. 

I'm not sure if I even remembered to report that I'd finished a draft of the book? Yeah, that happened right before my birthday, November 18. I sent it off to a couple of beta readers right after that in an insane hope that I'd have time during Thanksgiving break to work on the revisions. In a surprise to no one but me, I never cracked those documents open, not once. I mean, sure I could have forgone puzzling or playing 500 games of Boggle, but I see the people who come for Thanksgiving once a year. I wanted to spend time with them.  We, in fact, had a lovely meal and days and days of delightful company. I wouldn't trade it for the world. 

So, here it is the Monday after a week-long vacation and I'm finally sitting down to get started. I don't think it's going to be too bad a process although I wrote myself a note that simply reads, EMOTIONALLY CONSISTANT. 

Which, you know, is very fiddly. 

Anyway, I know sabotabby has had a rough time of it, but how are the rest of you? My American friends, how was your turkey day? My non-Americans, how was last Thursday? Do anything special?

 As many of you know, one of the things I've been doing to shed nerves during the pandemic is quilting. Mostly, I've been piecing. I have probably "finished" piecing three or four quilts, but over Thanksgiving, I actually finished one of them.


Image: Willow standing on a brightly colored quilt made up of blue, green, orange, and yellow bird-patterned squares.

Some of the details are hard to see, but I quilted the batting and backing onto the pieced section with buttons. They are probably easiest to see on the solid colored squares, because they kind of otherwise PERFECTLY match the cartoon bird yellow squares. The birds' eyes are very reminiscent of buttons, as it turns out. Anyway, it was a big project, but now I am looking at my other quilts and thinking about edging and batting, etc.

It should be noted for the record, that for reasons of pandemic (and not being comfortable with sewing machines) this was entirely done by hand. Even the quilting. Witness my quilting frame/hoop (plus cat)!! 


Image: Buttercup sitting on the quilting frame/hoop.

Tomorrow Shawn gets her second eye done--cataract surgery. She's looking forward to being able to see the same strength (or thereabouts) through both eyes. Will catch you all up on how that goes after tomorrow.

Hope all my fellow Americans had a lovely Thanksgiving (my Canadians, yeah, I'm REALLY belated with this. Sorry.) The rest of the world? Yeah, I dunno, it's a holiday where we eat. Nicely secular, actually. One of my favorites since it is always my made family/friends that I celebrate with. 

 Without our usual guests arriving for Thanksgiving, we are trying some new things this year. 

Firstly, we are going to attempt to home make our lefse. Because it has such a fearsome reputation, normally, we just buy it. For my out of town and international friends, lefse is (as cribbed from Wikipedia): "Lefse (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈlɛ̀fsə]) is a traditional soft Norwegian flatbread. It is made with potatoes (often, but not always), flour, butter, and milk or cream. It is cooked on a large, flat griddle. Special tools are used to prepare lefse, including long wooden turning sticks and special rolling pins with deep grooves."

This year, we sprung for all the equipment!


Image: A lefse grill, grooved rolling pin, lefse stick (for flipping), and a cloth-covered pastry board for rolling.

For our first year, we decided to buy lefse mix which, purists will tell you is a TERRIBLE idea because the potatoes are flaked and not fresh. I suspect the purists have a point. However, our thought is that we will try this the traditional way once we have a handle on the rest of the process. When using flaked potatoes, you have to reconstitute the mashed potatoes and mix in the second half of the mix and chill it over night. So, we did that part last night.

We formed them into balls and stuck them in the fridge overnight, per instructions.


Image: round dough balls in overnight container.

Shawn had collected a lot of blogs that talked about how to roll the lefse. Most of the advice can be summed up as, "When you're think you're done rolling, roll some more."  The thing you want from lefse is thinness. I managed to roll the lefse thin enough that I could read the writing on the pastry board's cloth through the dough.

Then, you used a fancy lefse stick to pick up the dough.


image: lefse stick under dough. Dough rolled so thin "your in-laws will never come back"

Then came the truly tricky part, moving the lefse onto the lefse grill. We had this set up so that I could roll out right next to the stove. On the stove we had tinfoil down over the burners, our pizza stone on top of that, and then the lefse grill. We were warned that the lefse griddle would be hot--500 degrees to be precise, so we did not want any accidents. The trick with lefse is that it's rolled so thin that it rips really easily. So, you need to get it on the gril fast and somehow flat. Shawn learned the trick is to roll it off the stick.



Image: Shawn's fancy rolling technique in action.

We did about a dozen of these--there was only one complete failure. The rest looked right and the corner of one we tasted, tasted right. So? I think we have lefse, folks!


Image: a blobby mass of Norwegian flatbread. Our first lefse--not exactly my most round one, nor our best fried--but not bad!

Even if this doesn't turn out to be the greatest lefse ever made, I'm not sure we will care. Neither Shawn nor I have a Norwegian grandmother who would sit in judgement of our from the mix lefse, and both of us mostly like lefse because it is a vehicle for sugar and butter So, I feel pretty chuffed about our first attempt.  Because we weren't sweating all day over potatoes, it was actually also a lot of fun and didn't take all that long. I could see doing this again!

Before you ask for the recipe, there isn't really one. We followed the directions on the lefse mix. We bought our griddle and mix from: lefsetime.com

 I would apologize for not posting here in a while, but we've had a house full of guests.  Before that, I was cleaning like a fiend to be ready for them.

Thanksgiving has become my all-time favorite holiday.  I don't even quite know how it happened that Shawn and I decided that Thanksgiving belonged to friends, made-family, rather than our families of origin, as it were, but it was by far, the smartest thing we ever did. 

I feel so sad when I hear people talking about how they dread Thanksgiving because it means Yet-Another-Family-Gathering where they're not accepted for who they are, or where they have to suffer through crazy, drunk uncle Bob's horrible racist/homophobic/misogynist politics. I wish I could give them all the fortitude or means or whatever it would take to say, "So, don't do it. Make this ONE holiday yours." After all, it's not like so many of these same people aren't going to end up having to go back to the same awful situation a month later for Christmas.  And even if your family doesn't celebrate Christmas there's usually some other 'can't miss' holiday that's basically required family gathering.  So, why give them Thanksgiving too?

I absolutely love having my house filled, once a year, with the people Shawn and I picked--our friends and their family.  I love cooking them a huge meal, even if, this year, I had to figure out how to make a bunch of my staples vegan.  I love putting together the puzzles, having the competitive board gaming, etc., etc., etc.  I even love that my crazy guests always make a pilgrimage out to the Mall of America for Black Friday. (Hey, you know, if I were in Dublin for some uniquely Irish Cultural Event, I'd want to participate in it too. Even if my native friends were like, "Nope. No way.") 

So that's the sappy way of saying, I had a great Thanksgiving.  Our friends and their family are now coming from both ends of the U.S. and Ireland (one is in Oregon at Reed College, two are in Virginia at William & Mary, and two live in Dublin.)  They all arrived en masse on Wednesday.  Luckily, they were able to find an Air BnB just up University.  They've stayed in a downtown hotel before, but that isn't nearly as homey--and this was very convenient (I picked some of them up there on Saturday to take them to the airport.)  Funny story about that, though. I was given the wrong address at first and so I ended up knocking on a door two doors down. Thank GOD no one answered, though I did spend a lot of time wondering why no one was letting me in.... this is where cell phone are actually a GOOD thing.

Anyway, we ordered pizza from Pizza Luché because they have tons of vegan options, and even make an in-house vegan cheese, while also serving plenty of delicious carnivorous options as well. I think we were off to a good start with the vegans since at least one of them was actually a little overwhelmed by all the choices... since, more often than not, restaurants have only one or two.  

Turkey day itself went very well. It took a bit of planning to have vegan options and/or adapt existing recipes. I'll be honest. A big part of my secret skill as a chef is that I'll put bacon drippings and cream in ANYTHING, given half the chance.  But, we managed to find a good butter substitute and we'd been trying out various dressing recipes for months. Shawn even made a vegan pumpkin pie (as well as two types of cookies and a vegan cranberry-orange sweet bread), and, after several trips to a number of different stores, I managed to find a commercially produced vegan soy whip as an alternative to my homemade whipped cream. It was a lot of work for two out of eight eaters, but, in the end, we could feel good about our hosting skills.  In exchange, I heard no complaints about the dead bird on the table and there were no attempts to proselytize about the vegan lifestyle's superiority. So, I think that was a fair trade.  ;-)

On Black Friday, they all went about their separate ways, but took Mason along.  That meant Shawn and I had a chance to physically recover (I napped... A LOT! I'd feel bad, but it's a full day in the kitchen, since I get up early to make French bread from scratch) and, according to Mason, they all checked out the Herbivorous Butcher for lunch. We had a little snafu about whether or not we were going to brave the Black Friday Mall of America traffic, but in the end everyone hopped on the light rail (Mason always carries his Go-To pass, so he flipped the bill.)  So, it all worked out, plus our Irish guest got to check out what passes as public transportation in Minneapolis/St. Paul. (He and I actually extolled the virtues of trains.)

Saturday, people started drifting off to various airports, though we kept our Oregon guest at our place one extra night. That day was spent playing with the Nintendo Switch and he's ONLY a vegetarian, so cooking for him was much easier. I made my favorite broccoli-curry soup, which I will type out below because another friend has asked for it:

From the Ovens of Brittany Cookbook by Terese Allan:

6 tablespoons of butter, divided
1/3 cup flour
3/4 cup finely chopped onions
1/2 cup finely chopped carrots
1/2 cup finely chopped celery
2 cups of coarsely chopped broccoli stems and tops
1 teaspoon basil
1 (or more) teaspoon of curry powder (I use Penzey's "sweet" curry)
1/2 teaspoon of paprika
1/2 teaspoon of thyme
1/2 teaspoon of celery salt
1 cup of milk
1 cup half-and-half
2 1/2 cups of vegetable (or chicken) stock
1/4 teaspoon of ground white pepper (though black will do in a pinch)

They want you to make a roux with three tablespoons of the butter, heated, to which the flour is added.  I've found you can do this, their method is not that hard, but if the idea scares you, you can just skip the extra butter and mix flour with a little water to make a paste and add it in place of the roux.  Both methods work equally well, IMHO.

Melt remaining 3 tablespoons of butter in a large, heavy pot. Add onions, celery, and carrots. Cook until tender.  Add broccoli and spices and cook a little longer. Add the stock to the vegetables, bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer, add milk and half-and-half. Once that's warmed add the roux (or flour mixture).  Simmer until thickened and the flavors have mingled, but the broccoli is not overdone--10-20 minutes.  Adjust seasonings to taste and serve.

You can see why the vegetarian can eat this, but not the vegans.

On Sunday, we shuffled our last house guest off to the airport, and the had Mason's GF over for our traditional post-Thanksgiving wild rice soup. Of course, she's also a vegetarian, so she got the same soup, only minus the shredded turkey bits.  I made popovers.  It was wonderful.

But, oh my gosh. I'm not normally the sort of person who needs a vacation after a vacation, but this might be an exception. However, I wouldn't have traded a minute of it. Such a good time was had.

 The guy isn't even in office yet....

Meanwhile, I'm still struggling to find things to *do* that feel honestly effective.  Yelling about things on the internet, specifically on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, don't feel productive.  The subsequent arguments that inevitably follow also just make me feel more anxious.  I'm still waiting for my Planned Parenthood volunteer orientation, so that's in limbo.  I haven't heard back from Quatrefoil Library, which I also offered to volunteer at... so again, that feels stalled out.

But I did find a couple of Facebook events that seem worthy of my time and energy. The first is a solidarity with immigrants march on Wednesday, November 23 here in the Twin Cities. They are meeting at Lake and Nicollet at 5 pm. https://www.facebook.com/events/199733550476396/.  I have not yet taken to the streets and so this might be a place to start.  Hopefully, I will actually get my butt out the door and attend.  That'll be the real trick.

The other thing I found seems kind of innocuous and probably won't actually have an effect is a "postcard avalanche" to denounce Bannon: https://www.facebook.com/events/174763619653288/. Will Trump car? I doubt it.  On the other hand, I love sending postcards and it will give the post office something to do...? I don't know know.  This is where things get really difficult.  

Years ago, Shawn and I actually successfully ran a postcard avalanche for a local issue. We made pre-printed postcards for our neighbors to send in to the city council. I think this was for allowing our neighbors to have a variance for parking, though it might have been part of our push to get the roundabout at the end of the block planted.  (Both of those were successful, partly because they were super localized and specific and if ten people show up to a city council meeting it's a big f*cuking deal, as our Vice-President would say.) Somehow I don't see this having the same kind of effect, but my feeling is that at least it's more concrete than reposting some article or other or signing a petition... I mean, maybe petitions can work? But, every organization seems to have one already. Still, I don't see it does harm, so I'm signing all the ones that seem legit.

Okay, well, I'm headed off to go get groceries.  We're out of everything and Thanksgiving is looming.  So it's going to be a huge list.  Our friends the Jacksons came early, but we LOVE Thanksgiving and so we've invited our friends Eleanor and Patrick to join us.  It should be fun, or will be if we have enough potatoes....