thanksgiving! i made a tart! and also jane and i spatchcocked a turkey!
i made a pumpkin pecan tart from martha stewart that i was highly skeptical of because it used sweetened condensed milk. i should’ve know martha wouldn’t have let me down. it was delish! 5 stars; would make again. i bought a tart pan specifically for this, and it worked swimmingly. perhaps i’ll be making more tarts in the future!
now on to the turkey. i wanted to make a spatchcock turkey last year, but i just didn’t get to it. so this year, i made a point of doing it. i brined my turkey like usual, then jane i hacked away at the spine to get it out. and you know what? a flattened 20-lb bird is darn big. so we cut down the breast bone as well so we had two halves of the bird.
then, i seasoned it using my herbs de provence recipe like always, then shoved the two halves into the oven on two different baking sheets. still took up a lot of room, but at least the oven racks were in reasonable positions.
the nice thing about a spatchcock turkey? it was done in about an hour and a half (and probably could’ve come out earlier).
mmmmm! turkey was a success!
i’m baffled that it’s almost december. in my head, it’s barely mid-october; my halloween was interrupted, and the weather sure isn’t helping. so now that thanksgiving is over the the department stores have decided it’s christmas time, i’m wondering how that even happened.
on the plus side, the days start getting longer in a little less than a month, and shortly there after is actual christmas. maybe by then the weather will have settled into a colder pattern and there might be snow on the ground. (speaking of which, i need to figure out if my snowblower runs.)
i know where november went; i just wish my internal clock would catch up with the news.
seasons wax and wane
bud to leaf to husk to sleep
it’s november yet
tonight we’re taking a break from charlie posts to write about what we’re eating tomorrow for thanksgiving. i like t-day because it’s my time to shine! i love cooking.
spatchcock turkey (we’ll see how this goes)
dressing
potatoes/gravy
squash
sweet potato casserole
green vegetables of some variety
rolls
cranberry orange sauce
pumpkin pie
pumpkin pecan tart
jane came tonight and the dressing, cranberry sauce, and squash are done. i made a pie and a tart last night. maybe i’ll try to get some pics tomorrow!
welp, liz is still contracting with no baby out yet. charlie is sleeping 18 hours a day. and we’re going to have thanksgiving on thanksgiving, i guess! we’ll see how jane and i do.
(i know we’ll do fine. i did thanksgiving on my own back in 2011. that may have been the easiest thanksgiving ever! i ate at the time i wanted to eat, took pictures along the way, and it was grand.)
tonight i made a pumpkin pecan tart for the first time ever. we’ll see if it was worth it to replace the pecan pie. then i decided to make two pumpkin pies for the heck of it.
why? cuz we like to eat (that’s why i run), and although life has thrown a lot of crap at us the past month, and i mean a lot (5 other things on top of cha), there’s still a TON to be grateful for.
let’s spatchcock this turkey. BRING IT ON.
while charlie was in high school, i was out in the world working and dealing with crappy roommates and meeting nate and all that jazz. i wasn’t in new london and hearing everything that happened to charlie on a daily basis.
oh sure, i heard the highlights. his friends drinking cough syrup and him abstaining (“i don’t need cough syrup to get my jollies”); his encounter with a girlfriend’s enraged father (i hear he barely made it out in his skivvies [heh, barely]); the summer from hell in colorado helping paul hardwick stripping wallpaper (…or something…).
and then there were the cars.
i think it all started with liz’s buick. (yes, liz had a buick. this is what happens when norm wallace decides to buy you a car: he buys you a car HE wants.) charlie crashed the buick, on an icy patch if i remember correctly. this turned out happy for liz because she got to put some money toward a car SHE wanted (a white mazda), but it started a chain of events that were undeniably weird.
then during the prom parade around green lake, charlie ran his buddy jimmy’s cadillac into the car in front of him. granted, they were only going like 15mph, but he still did some damage.
and then there was the time he ran into a deer with the jimmy’s pizza owner’s van while delivering a pizza. (NOT technically his fault.)
after all that, my parents decided it was a good idea to buy him his own car for some reason (all their daughters had to wait until college to get a car). i had put a good amount of money into my chevy celebrity to fix the rack and pinion, but i was still looking to buy a new car. so dad bought my celebrity that i would have sold either way, and charlie got my old chev celeb. which he then ran into a light post in the local lutheran church parking lot.
and EVEN THEN, the parental units got him another car. (i dunno; at this point it may have been prudent to think about letting him ride with friends or suffer the indignity of driving the wallace safari van.) (also, there is something weird about this. it kind of irks me. but you can read about that here.)
the next car was a nifty little manual black mazda, sunroof, drove well, for $500. good little car! well, cha decided it was a good idea to race his buddy (jimmy again, i think) around green lake. along the northeast end, there was a holding pond next to a curve and an intersection. charlie had passengers, and took the curve too aggressively and ended up crashing the car into the pond. after many people looked at the crash site, they all agreed it was a complete act of god/higher power/allah/earth mother that they didn’t end up upside down and all drowning.
that’s what it took. charlie didn’t get another car until after college. biking works.
so you can see the complete irony here with his car accident. here’s hoping his next car will last him a very long time, and he’ll be able to sell it to some teenager when he’s ready to upgrade.
when it rains, it pours?
so here’s what’s happened in the last 23 days.
charlie, obviously, is the huge one. now that he’s home, it’s weird looking back and thinking his entire ordeal so far has only been 23 days. unreal.
my cousin on my dad’s side had been battle cancer for a long time, and they quit chemo last month. just two weeks ago she was given one-and-a-half to two weeks to live. she died last tuesday and her funeral was on friday.
liz is at the hospital as we speak ready to give birth to a kid. at least this one is a big positive!
so yeah. not quite sure why everything is happening right now. wow. at least we’re in the home stretch?
guest post by jane!
Living in Austin for the first 7 years of my life didn’t leave many memories. I have more memories of living in New London (and almost none from living in Spicer).
But one specific memory (and possibly more will pop up as I write this), involved Charlie, myself, and a couple of tractors. We were gathering for something or other at Colettie’s home away from home on the George and Kathleen farm, a little half house connected to the garages set back near the barn and silo. Charlie and I were young. I couldn’t put an age to it; younger than 10 but older than 5. I’m not sure if we had already moved north, or were still living at the Red House down the road. What I do know is we were not old enough to drive tractors.
Being of small body and short-spanned mind, Charlie and I got bored with the adult talk at the gathering and asked to go outside. I believe it was summer because I don’t remember wearing a coat out the door. One of the main attractions on Kathleen and George’s farm is the barn, where all the hay is stacked, the cows eat, and the tractors live. I even got to name a cow once, but that’s another story. I wonder what happened to Red.
I digress. Charlie and I bee-lined it for the barn, saying hello to the cows that were lunching, breathing deeply to take in the strong hay and slight manure smell that comes with any farm. I might have suggested playing on the hay bales. I may have even suggested naming another cow. Charlie had a better idea. Let’s play on the tractors! There were at least two, one for each of us, and I took the front one. Charlie took the one behind, and wouldn’t you know, someone left the keys in it. I protested the idea of turning it on, but Charlie must have had a convincing argument. Or he did it without asking.
the scene of the crime
Either way, the tractor was on, and Charlie pushed the buttons in the right order to make it move. Who knew tractors could move so fast! Before I knew it, Charlie had rammed his tractor into the back of mine, jolting us a bit. I’m sure we had looks of panic on our faces. I’m sure we were nervous about getting in trouble. Before we could do more than blink at each other, a horde of adults stormed the barn with their own looks of panic and nerves. I remember George leading the pack with a look of terror on his face. Knowing tractors like he does, the noise we’d created probably brought the worst to mind.
We were quickly collected from the tractors and given a stern talking to about not playing around the farm equipment. At that point, I’m sure we were corralled back to the homestead away from anything that ran on gas.
I don’t remember much else about the day, just that we were lucky we didn’t injure ourselves. That might have been Charlie’s first run in with a vehicular accident. Who knew it would preface a lifetime of such events? (editor’s note: lifetime indeed – more on that later.)
the last three times my phone screen broke, charlie replaced the screen for me. it flew out of my hands onto the floor the other week, and the screen cracked again, so i bought a replacement and attempted the replacement myself.
welp, that didn’t go as planned. i think the directions i was following were not the greatest, because either it or missed a connection, which broke even at the slightest tug (i suppose when it’s been messed around with five times, it’s bound to break sometime). i think it was the earpiece, but we’ll see.
now i’ve put it together and i’m waiting for the battery to kick in. i’ve got it plugged in waiting to see what happens, but so far nothing.
might be phone shopping tomorrow 🙁
after charlie was in his accident and we weren’t sure if he was going to make it, something started unfolding on the interwebs.
for a couple people, those in the immediate know, it happened that same day. over the next couple days, the rest of his friends caught on, and it spread.
whenever i logged in to facebook, and it was a lot because i needed some sense of otherworldlyness and community, slowly but surely, many of cha’s family and friends changed their profile pictures to one they had with charlie. one after another, i started seeing charlie everywhere in profile pictures, and it was so comforting to know he had so many people rooting for him.
it almost makes me understand the france profile pictures, but with charlie, his friends actually did stand with him and not just put a good face on. they visited. they gave money. they sent things in the mail. they left him messages on his facebook wall even though he might not ever read them.
****
tonight i went to my cousin’t wake. she had been battling cancer for a long time; this was the third onset she’d had, and it had spread to so many difficult places that it was a relief that she was out of pain.
it was just my dad and me, and my dad goes to funerals to see people he hasn’t seen in a while. at the same time, i saw people who i knew from our austin days and from when i was very young. what was curious is that every single person we talked to that we knew, and even many people we didn’t know, came up to us and asked how charlie was. there were people who knew he was doing great and came up to dad patting him on the back saying it was great news; others asked him how he was doing; even more were completely surprised when we told him or her that he had been released to home. i even had people i didn’t know at all ask me how my brother was doing. i don’t think i talked to one person about my cousin whose wake we were attending.
****
coming together as a community was such a huge part of this experience. one thinks that you just have to handle this on your own. not true. more people care for him than you’d think, and that’s by and far the most humbling part of what happened these past 2-1/2 weeks.
coalescing for charlie.
