Happy Belated Thanksgiving

Time is flying by... and I'm exhausted just from trying to keep up.

We had a lovely Thanksgiving at our friend Jane's house. It was a small gathering: Jane, her two sons Elliot and Sam, Elliot's friend John, us, and our friend Nancy (and Nancy's daughter and two friends for dessert, later). Good friends, good food, good wine. Lovely day.

Yesterday we did our traditional day-after-Thanksgiving: we slept in and then walked downtown to take in the sales at Herbergers. We have a fairly strict rule for "Black Friday:" we don't shop anywhere we can't walk to. Traffic is just insane in this town, especially on big shopping days. It's like every family from a hundred miles around comes to town and rushes between Fleet Farm, Wal-mart and the mall. Mayhem.

After we returned home with our purchases I started soup. I had loaned Jane our turkey-sized Romertopf for cooking the bird, and I brought it home with the carcass so that I could make soup. I came up with a great recipe to share. Hope you enjoy it too.

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Day-after-feasting Soup

Face it, you’re still psychologically full from Thanksgiving, yet your stomach tells you it’s hungry. This soup is perfect. It’s very light and won’t leave you feeling overstuffed, yet the broth is so exquisitely flavorful that you feel spoiled. This is my creation, with a tip ‘o the ladle to Lynne Rosetto-Kasper.

2 Tbsp each butter and olive oil
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
2-3 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
2 stalks celery, including leaves, chunked
2 carrots, chunked
2 medium tomatoes, coarsely chopped
1 cup dry sherry (Use real sherry, not the “cooking sherry” you find in the grocery store aisle next to the vinegar. It would be better to omit the sherry completely than use that stuff.)
1 turkey carcass
Filtered water

1 Tbsp butter
2 carrots, peeled and thinly sliced
2 stalks celery, thinly sliced
A couple handfuls of good quality egg noodles, preferably something thin like spaghetti or vermicelli

Heat butter and oil in large soup pot. Add onions and garlic and sauté until fragrant, about 5 minutes. Add carrots and celery and cook another 5 minutes or so, until beginning to be tender. Then add tomatoes and sherry. Bring to a boil and reduce for several minutes, until liquid begins to thicken.

Add turkey carcass and 2 to 2 ½ quarts water to soup pot, enough to fill pot but not overflow. Bring to a boil. Turn heat down slightly to keep stock at a low boil and reduce until half the liquid is gone. Add water to fill pot and reduce to half again. Add water and reduce to half again. This will take 3 to 4 hours, and by the end of that time your broth will be richly fragrant and flavorful.

Strain soup to remove all solids. Skim fat from broth. Bring liquid back to boil and add noodles (not too many as the broth is the star attraction). Melt 1 Tbsp butter in saucepan and sauté sliced carrots and celery until just tender. When noodles are cooked through, add carrots and celery. Add salt to taste and serve at once.

Better Housekeeping Through Cats

Cleo is on a diet.

She is eleven and getting stiff, arthritic shoulders. She walks like an elephant lumbers, and you can hear her on the wooden floors from across the house. Occasionally she limps on both shoulders so that she waddles like a drunken sailor, her tail doing a most inelegant jerky twist that mocks every myth of cat-like grace. She weighs 15 pounds, despite all our best intentions to get her weight down. So. It's time for a serious diet.

And, so the plundering of counters and cabinets has begun.

As soon as we leave the kitchen, she is in there sniffing, searching out bread crumbs, bits of cheese, or just the yummy leavings on a butter knife. She's not picky. She jumps up on the counters and the butcher block table, hoovering her way along.

What she's really looking for is butter. The cat loves butter. She has broken a couple of butter dishes by knocking them off the counter. We finally found a Cleo-proof dish that is plastic, unbreakable, and fully enclosed so she can't knock it open either. We keep the butter, and the bread, in the cabinet with the dishes and glasses.

So she figured out how to open the cabinet.

We've come home from work and ~ ooh look! who could have done that? ~ the butter dish is in the middle of the kitchen floor, the bag of bread is ripped open. (We're pretty sure Rosie helps with the bread but the butter is all Cleo.)

So we now make sure we push the cabinet doors all the way closed. We now make sure we remove all the prep dishes from the counters before sitting down to a meal. We wash or put away every dish every night. We are becoming neat-freaks for our cat's sake.

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Yeah, I'm back. Thanks to many of you for your well wishes and thoughtful hugs. The passage of Prop 8 in California sent me into quite the tail-spin of sadness and brought up a lot of stuff that I thought had been dealt with and done. Here's to lessons in humility and forgiveness. But I'm feeling more like me again, finally.

Way to Go Wanda