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

Finished enough

Ah, happy day. The study is finished enough for us to relax... well, no. It's finished enough for us to turn our attention instead to the yard, and the myriad chores left to do there. One of which is to find a lawn mower to borrow. Ours has decided that it has better things to do than start. You will not believe how grumpy we are about this.

However, let's talk pretty, happy things.

Our adinkra looks wonderful behind the desk. It makes me so happy to have the cloth up, even though I can't find the "cheat sheet" we brought back from Ghana to tell us the significance of the different stamps. This cloth, with its incredible detail and geometric patterns, was our first purchase together after we had decided to make a home together upon returning stateside. For fifteen years it has been in storage. Now it makes me giddy every time I look at it.

And here is one of the most colorful blankets that we brought back, looking right at home behind the sideboard that is decorated with toys made from tin cans. The motorcycle, train and vespa are all from Togo, as is the clay pot in the center. The two wooden figurines are from Benin, I believe. The wire airplane on the shelf is from Zimbabwe.

And last, but definitely not least: the craft hutch. Bracelet and necklace ideas are tacked up on the doors, and the former keyboard shelf is now home to my bead board and the felt pieces I use to lay stuff out while I'm playing with ideas. I have three fabric-collage bookmarks that I've been playing with tacked up in front. And storage beneath. There are places for most of my stuff ~ although I still need a separate rolling storage bin for ribbons, trim, purse handles and other various things.

There are still things to do in the room: re-upholster the two side-chairs (I'm thinking claret red velvet would be so cool), put up a few more things on the walls (pictures, a clock, etc.), and find some place for at least one kente strip. But it definitely feels homey and comfortable as it is.

Last night Gabi and I were both in here, she planning her week (AP Physics is as hard, if not harder, for the teacher as it is for the students. Send my sweet girl happy thoughts, please!), me playing with beads (although I was too tired to anything more than lay them out and look at them. The ideas came at 5:00 this morning). It was nice, listening to music and being in our new space, and the house still smelled like baked chicken and squash from dinner. A lovely end to what Gabi called, "the fastest weekend in history."

Paint and other short-term delights

So, here I am, looking out the freshly-painted window of our study at the grey and chilly garden outside. It's nearing Halloween and we haven't mowed up leaves, cut down lily stalks, cleaned up perennials, emptied and winterized the rain barrels or taken in the fountain. No, we haven't done any of that very, very necessary garden work, because we've been painting.

This is what we started with: old bedroom furniture, green walls, and a paint-effect-sky ceiling that came with the house (the best part was the glow-in-the-dark stars).

Honestly, I don't know how the HGTV shows do it, when they come in with three artsy designer folk and repaint, remodel and rejuvenate a room in a day. Seriously. Do they have a small army of house-pros in the background? Ten nimble-wristed painters just aching to cut in trim? And the part that adds insult to injury: they have time to design and make these fun fantastic decorator elements. Not enough cash to purchase a work of art for that wall? No sweat! The nice guy with the dark hair will throw something together... just some MDF, willow branches, a jig saw, paint and some funky copper nails and *voila* you have an original masterpiece you can tell all your politely dubious friends about.

Say good-bye to green and hello cafe au lait.

For us, unfortunately, there is no army and I'm no longer particularly nimble-wristed (I am, however, aching in some interesting places). But, the painting is done. We have successfully transformed our lovely green spare bedroom with the little computer hutch into a study and craft space: cafe au lait walls with white trim, a new desk and sideboard from Ikea, and that old computer hutch is in the process of becoming my craft hutch. I haven't had a chance to do much to it except claim the space by putting my sewing machine where the computer used to be. I have big plans, but so far have been too tired to actually do much with it.

Did I mention just how much trim there is in this relatively small room? Crown molding, a picture rail, two windows, two doors and baseboards all around. Lots o' trim.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I am the biggest instigator of all this exhaustion and achiness. I do love to paint: we paint at least one room a year. I'm so hopelessly caught up in this cycle that, in spite of my better judgment, I'm already starting to plan how to redo the bathroom next year. And, we haven't even finished the study yet.

The painting is done, with the exception of a small amount of retouching on the closet door. This is so big. The trim is done. We are known for not finishing the trim. I can't overstate this. We have rooms we painted two years ago that have paint splotches on the trim because we never went back to that. We almost never finish the second coat on the trim. We just get used to the splotches and uneven paint job and figure that we'll be repainting the whole room in a few years and, well, we'll get to the trim then.

But not this time!

My sense of accomplishment is enormous.

Two old chairs that Gabi found at Savers in Minneapolis a couple of years ago look right at home next to the new sideboard from Ikea. I will re-upholster the chairs ~ eventually.

Next step: bring out the textiles that we've had in storage ever since we got back from Togo. We brought back these lovely things and then discovered that their fabulous yellow, orange and green colors just really didn't go with anything. So last year we decided that we wanted them out, dammit, and we designed the study around them. The neutral walls and white, sort-of-contemporary furniture, should be a great foil for the colorful blankets and wall hangings.

We'll pick up some curtain rods to put on the two open walls so that we can hang our beautiful adinkra from Ghana as well as a bridal blanket from Mali. We also have some kente strips ~ some vintage ones that we picked up at the blow-your-mind-it's-so-big market in Kumassi, Ghana. Also, in the process of digging out all our textiles I found a beautiful little piece from Pakistan. It was given to me by a friend of mine who worked in the embassy in Lome, but had been stationed in Islamabad before that.

All work was supervised, of course, by Rosie.

So, now comes the cleaning up and the putting away of painting supplies until next year. I'll share pics of the completed room as soon as the pretty stuff is up.

Tip 'o the billfold to Bachmann

Ah, dontcha just love campaign season...

We are giggling tonight in spite of our fatigue (busy weekend redecorating our spare room, but more on that when we're finished). It seems our embarrassment of a representative, Michelle Bachmann, went on Hardball on Friday to blast Obama. She suggested that he might be "anti-American" and that voters should get to know him better.

Her ridiculous statements have resulted in $450,000 in donations coming in for her DFL opponent, Elwyn Tinklinberg.

What strikes me about this is that in the news Bachmann's campaign just reiterates the same line about voters needing to get more information about Obama ~ that they should know how he would lead the country. However, Bachmann and her campaign spokespeople don't seem to realize that the problem is that Bachmann is suggesting not simply that Obama would have very different priorities than McCain. No, she's suggesting that he's anti-American because he has different priorities. It's the same thing that I wrote about last week ~ making your campaign tactic the tarring of your opponent as an enemy. This is wrong. Theoretically, we have a democracy. So doesn't that mean that there are people who will disagree and that we should all be able to voice our opinions without fear that we will be scapegoated and hung out as traitors?

Seriously, of course Obama has different priorities and would lead the country in a different direction. And we should be having a vigorous debate on whose policies and priorities would best serve the country in these troubled times. That's sort of the point of the whole campaign thing. But it's just beyond ludicrous to suggest that either candidate is unpatriotic, anti-American, or a similarly dangerous threat to the welfare of the country.

I think that the surge of donations to Tinklinberg would suggest that many Americans, like myself, are just disgusted by these divide and smear tactics. That is what is making me truly hopeful right now.

And, I have to say, I apologize for the political shift lately. I have no desire to have a political blog. But it's hard not to be thinking of these things right now when we are getting hammered by campaign ads ~ I'm so fed up with Coleman, Franklin, Paulson and other ads that I can barely stand to watch TV. Just over two weeks to go, and then they can start fundraising for 2012.

A little media analysis

Thanks to TiVo we just watched the October 10th episode of Now with Bill Moyers. In this episode, Moyers talked with one of my favorite media analysts, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, about the untruths and deliberate misrepresentations in attack ads by both Obama and McCain. It's a very informative and revealing discussion, andI would highly recommend it to one and all. It's not about partisan politics, but about holding candidates and their campaigns to basic standards of ethical behavior. Very, very good.

You can find the discussion here. (Sorry, I couldn't find a way to embed the video into the blog.)