I love chestnuts.  Love them, love them, love them. Yum.  Even when they're 12 bucks a jar I love them.  Hmmm.

Just finished making Chestnut and Sausage Dressing; of course, I've twinked the recipe to our taste.

-- Start with only 2 cups of milk, add more as needed to reach your personal preference.  Depending on dryness/moistness of bread crumbs, this will need adjustment.

-- I use only half the chestnuts since other members of the family aren't as crazy about them (no problem, I eat the rest of them!).  Cut the chestnuts in half, so that you notice them, can pick them out if you're not chestnut-crazy like me.

-- The pork sausage can be a bit greasy, depending on your tastes.  We use chicken sausage here, adding more sage to the dressing to compensate for the lighter seasoning in chicken over pork sausage.

-- Chicken broth or bouillon can be added if you want to cut back on the milk; it's pretty tasty with equal parts.  Watch the salt, though, taste before adding any more.

And while this is a tasty holiday treat, it's not worth roasting and peeling chestnuts yourself.  Been there, done that, never, ever again.  Buy them prepared, I beg you.  They're 12 bucks for a large-ish jar at Williams-Sonoma, a little over 9 bucks for 10 oz. can at EthnicGrocer.com.  Go for it.  Invite me over if you have any leftover.

Hubby just sampled the dressing.  Says, let's skip the turkey, this stuff is good enough alone.

  1:27:16 PM    comment []

Thanksgiving Holidays Past…

 

I’ve reached a comfortable spot, between the turkey roasting and the pie baking, to take a little break and think on Thanksgiving holidays past.

 

Two stand out as the most memorable.  One, my belated honeymoon with my husband; the other, a chance to spend time with my mom in unusual circumstances.  Both are holidays I’m sure I’ll recount to my children in years ahead.

 

Ten years ago this week, my husband and I took our honeymoon.  It was two years after our wedding; at the time we got hitched, we couldn’t afford the expense or the time off to go on a honeymoon.  We saved our pennies and our frequent flyer miles, finally scraping up enough to go to Hawaii.  As luck would have it, my parents and my uncle and aunt were also going to Hawaii.  We decided to make it a group vacation together.  (My husband still laughingly tells people how brave he was to invite his in-laws along on his honeymoon…)

 

Dad’s a local boy, a kama’aina, born and raised in the Islands.  He’s also painfully efficient, whether by birth or by years of training as an engineer.  Dad doesn’t just organize a Hawaiian vacation; he designs and implements a “Hawaiian experience” project.  You can expect to spend one day on a big tour item like the Volcano National Park, the next day relaxing on the beach, followed by sightseeing and golfing the day after.  We never had to think much with our local boy running the show; between his knowledge of the Islands and his penchant for engineering and project management, we had not a single unwanted surprise.  Our entire honeymoon trip was a blast, including a surprise for my “parrothead” husband: tickets to Jimmy Buffett’s last concert of the year in Honaunau, in an intimate theater with a capacity of only 500 people.

 

We visited the Polynesian Cultural Center the day before Thanksgiving; the staff members were great showmen, but one could see they were restless and itching for a holiday.  While visiting the Samoan exhibit, we noticed the crew was huddled about something burning.  Intrigued, my family and I gathered around a “hut” which bustled with activity and sent out billows of smoke.  We found the Samoan crew were preparing an imu pit (don’t recall the Samoan name for it, sorry) – a big fire had been lit and allowed to burn down to embers upon large rocks.  The crew placed green palm fronds and then banana leaves upon the rocks, sending small plumes of steam into the air.  Breadfruit were placed upon the hot, steaming leaves…followed by prepared turkeys.  One of the crew, using only two sticks about a foot long, grabbed a hot rock the size of a coconut out of the pit, then stuffed it into the cavity of a turkey.  The rock sizzled on contact with the bird, beginning to cook the turkey from the inside out.  The crew member then picked up the bird, tweezing it between the two sticks, and thrust it under some more banana leaves on top of the pit.  The aroma was tantalizing only moments after the turkey disappeared beneath a green blanket of more banana leaves.  I wished we could stay to see how the turkey looked, how it turned out; the crew told us it would only take an hour to cook a 12-14 pound bird.  Wow, I guess I know what to do with a turkey if I’m in a hurry and the imu pit is ready!

 

Thanksgiving Day was a special treat during this trip; we wound down our vacation by spending the last couple of days in Honolulu, and the holiday fell in the middle of the homestretch.  We met at sunset in the hotel bar looking out over Waikiki Beach, watched the sun sinking into the ocean as we drank mai tai’s, then went out for dinner.

 

Nope, there was no turkey on the menu.  We went up the street to a teppanyaki restaurant.  I had an absolutely fabulous ahi dinner (tuna, lightly seared) that evening, sandwiched between the sunset on Waikiki and many laughs after dinner with my husband and family.

 

I’d do the Thanksgiving holiday this way again in a heartbeat.

 

The other most memorable Thanksgiving found me a few years earlier, before I was married, visiting with my folks.  Mom was working as a staff nurse at what I can only call an “old folks’ home” for nuns, an Ursuline convent with many elderly sisters in residence.  The nuns came to this convent in their declining years, once they’d reached a point where medical attention was a daily necessity.

 

Staying at the house with my inveterate putterer-tinkerer father held no fascination for me; he’d surely drive me nuts with all his pick-at-this-pound-on-that work around the house, abbreviated only by football and more football.  Mom’s day at the convent didn’t sound like a picnic, either (when is working on a holiday a picnic, anyhow?), but the novelty of following her on rounds was more appealing than watching my dad all day.

 

Unintentionally, I helped entertain the sisters, who poked and prodded me with all kinds of questions all day: Are you married? No? Are you thinking about taking the veil?  No?  Do have a boyfriend? What’s he like, is he Catholic? Do the two of you want kids?  Did you go to a Catholic school?  And so on and so on, some of the questions getting more than a little personal.

 

But I guess they didn’t think of it that way – they have nothing since they take a vow of poverty, and they share everything, being sisters in more than just name.  I tried to see it their way…if I couldn’t have managed that, I’d have been useless and angry.  They offered to pray for anything personal I could think of that needed attention.  Who could hold a grudge against them when they offered all they had to give?  Who could hold any ill will against women who’d given their entire lives to service, as teachers and aides, only to find themselves without other family and with only each other at the twilight of life?

 

Some of them were a total hoot – easy tempered, quick humored and light on their feet; some were completely incapacitated.  One nun was 99 years old; I helped move her in and out of bed, feeling how very much like a bag of flesh she was, just a sack of bones.  She had no real comprehension that a stranger was helping her; she’d spent her entire adult life cloistered with women, barely more than a child when she joined the order.  Amazing: she’d spent more than 80 years in her vocation.  The rest of the sisters were praying for her, hoping she’d make her hundredth birthday so she could be on the Today Show in the morning, her name announced by Willard Scott.  (Hmm, perhaps some things are just not meant to be, not important enough to keep us here on earth, I’d thought at the time…her name didn’t cross Willard’s lips, as she died only weeks before her 100^th birthday.) 

 

Another remarkable sister was a spry woman of 80, a former school teacher, sharp as a tack with a biting wit.  Sister Mary Thomas took to me like a shadow, insisting I sit with her during the Thanksgiving lunch.

 

I helped sit the elderly women, fetch drinks and tableware, getting them settled in at the table.  It felt like herding preschoolers.  A small wizened hand grabbed mine as the sisters finally eased into place; it was Sister Mary Thomas, tugging on me like a kindergartner tugging at a teacher.  Wordlessly she pulled me to a seat next to hers.

 

As one of the senior sisters in the order called us to bow our heads and pray over our now-filled plates of turkey and fixings, Sister Mary Thomas whispered to me, This is one Thanksgiving you’ll never forget.  She punctuated her whisper with a wink, blessed herself along with the others, then tucked into her turkey and gravy.

 

The rest of the day was uneventful, more assisting nurses on rounds, more visiting with the inquisitive sisters.  Then home to Dad and more turkey at the end of the shift.

 

Yup, Sister, you were right, I’ve not forgotten yet and I’m sure I won’t ever.  Happy Thanksgiving to you wherever you are now.

 

Wish the rest of you many reasons to give thanks today, and a memorable holiday.

  12:09:39 PM    comment []

There's definitely something flaky going on with Radio Userland.  I can see my update, it's on my page, but the list of updated blogs doesn't reflect this.

Hope this isn't a portent of things to come, like the disastrous loss of old posts at She's Actual Size, Nationwide...Kat took it graciously and resumed posting quickly.  Unlike Kat, I'd be hard pressed to be so calm.  I'm operating on too little sleep, would be liable to rip the heads off smally animals if Radio eats my blog.

Any other bloggers have tips or pointers on this kind of problem, updates not documented at Recently Changed Weblogs?

  7:10:41 AM    comment []