Thanksgiving Day Meal Planning

Nevermind that Thanksgiving is a reminder of a terrible time, of the beginning of terrible treatment of Native Americans.

I love food.
And I love family.

So we're going to feast. And treat each other much better than the europeans treated their hosts. I hope, especially since I'm hosting.

Here're the recipes I'll be using.

The main star, the turkey: Roast Turkey with Herb Butter, thanks to Martha Stewart.

Stuffing: recipe pending. Awaiting response to request sent to my Nana.

Salad: basic tossed salad with red leaf lettuce, tomatoes.

Twice Baked Potatoes: never the same way twice.
This feast will involve: 10 or so largish scrubbed potatoes, 1 lb cooked and chopped bacon, 1-3 homegrown chopped onion tops and bottoms (they didn't bulb up much), about 1 pint of sour cream, 1/2 a cup of butter, and maybe two cups of shredded cheddar cheese. The potatoes get cooked for about 30 minutes in a 400 degree oven. Then they cool. Then they're cut in half, their insides are scooped out and placed in a large bowl, then all the other stuff is mixed in and gently blended. Then the mixture is gently spooned back into the potato shells and topped with the shredded cheddar. Then, you relax because you're making these the day before or the day before the day before. Then on The Big Day of The Turkey, bring to room temp (or bake a bit longer), then cook in a 375 degree oven for about 20-30 minutes.

Cranberry Sauce: from the infamous Martha Stewart

Some kind of green vegetable: compliments of my brother.

Bread rolls: also compliments of my brother.

Hot Apple Cider: (apple juice, 2-3 cinnamon sticks, a couple cloves, maybe a few peeled apple slices, a bit of ginger) heated in a crock pot. Will leave out the whiskey/bourbon spike this year.

Pies: lovingly handmade by my cousin.

Pumpkin Roll: recipe also available inside label of Libby's canned pumpkin. But I'll be using my own baked and pureed pumpkin for the recipe. Next year, I'll even have grown the pumpkin in the garden!

This is a pretty handy page with calculators to help you figure out how many pounds of turkey you need and how long to cook what you end up with. Thank you, Butterball! (Although I must advocate for happy free range birds, which is not Butterball).

Flashback Friday, I haz it.

So. This isn't a far flashback. This is last July. Hearkening back to a simpler time, before a break in the fabric of reality, you can see the joy in a young girl's eyes ... uh...

start over.

This was last July. Before Sophie moved to Georgia. After ChristL recently moved far far away from her home because she loves my youngest brother, and he loves her.

I like the picture. My cousin's kid looks intensely giddy and adorable. ChristL looks curious about something behind me and to my left. Mandee looks mildly disgusted, maybe because being a teenager sucks. And the beautiful girl on the right reminds me that I am secretly jealous of all long-haired hippies and regular folk with long hair.

Plus, it's a moment in time where things were kind of not crazy, which is nice.

Plus, it's sepia toned for the masses to love :D see prevous rant post

I got it a thrift store ...

It was plain, rough wood. Begging to be painted. Begging to be turned into something. Then I stumbled on something that only a BRILLIANT aunt would think of: give the pointy stick thing to your nephew who might be in a stabby mood from time to time!

So:



Maybe he'll like the Raiders. Maybe he likes pirates. Maybe he likes pirate movies. Anyway, I hope he'll like this:

It's in the mail!

or will be soon:

The fiance, surrounded by an army of "what up friends, we're having a wedding, details forthcoming" cards. !!Hot Kawaii!!

belated halloween pictures

Firstly, to emphasize that love is not regulated to ONLY saint V's:




I'm wearing falsies in this picture. Falsies as in eyelashes. Boobs = non-falsies :)
They eye color is real, too.


Yeah, so I can't say I don't have a stitch to wear...


A zombie went a courtin' and she did say...
I'd like to meet a rooster from around the way...


Aw, how sweet. A match made in ... a mad scientist's laboratory?


So there you have it :)

omg omg summer is here

Remember that warm, super gorgeous weekend a month ago? The one where I planted my tomatoes and some other plants outside and then it FROZE the next weekend? Yeah. Well summer weather is here, for real this time.


Who wants to go to Seaside?

Weather it's gonna stay that way is another story. Freezing is pretty much out of the question now, but I do live in the paradise known as Portland, Oregon... there's a good chance of rain and a bit of a temperature drop.

We had record highs yesterday, in the mid to upper 90s. Portland's a funny town, with rivers and valleys and hills and microclimates galore. Guess how hot it can get on an asphalt covered ground near a racetrack? That's right. 101 degrees. That's what my fiance's cousin's truck's temperature registered at just before what felt like the high point of the day. We went down to PIR (before this weekend, I didn't know what PIR was, or that it existed) to watch the cousin and uncle team race. The first chapter in my rally car education. Travis Hanson and his dad, Terry Hanson, have been racing for several years.

Travis is on the left of this picture from 2003. (I need to get some more pictures up!!!)

The prologue was a few weeks ago, when I found out that rally car events and Nascar-esque races have massive differences. Rally car events seem to always have a driver and codriver. The codriver is more of a navigator. There's some book that they get, and honestly I thought at first glance it was someone's homework. It looked like trigonometry written in code. In reality, it's a shorthand description of the raceway. Instead of driving 'round and 'round in an oval, they have less predictable terrain. Yesterday, they drove down the tarmac, flipped around and came back, and flipped a sharp left and drove down what sounded like gravel. Then they drove around to the next part, a dirt racetrack with plenty of curves and dips and treachery. They had watered down that dirt bit, but by the late afternoon it was mostly dry again, and the air around it had a alien landscape feel, dust in the air, strange lights. Covered in salt sweat and breathing in this foreign air, I was in world unlike any I was used to.



Saturday, they move on to Hillsboro and Vernonia. If you're in the neighborhood, cheer for car 523, an electric blue subaru.

**************

Certain conditions bring you back to the past. I am younger, more awkward. We are camping at a lake. Is it trip with my mom's single parents group? I think so, but my brain is foggy. No, not foggy, because that implies cooler weather. My thoughts try to focus, but all I can see is the haze of heat off of sand, off the water, off of scattered cars and nylon tents. I've been playing, running, forgetting to drink. My mom was worried about heat stroke. She gave me water, fed me cheetos.

I saw a large tawny deer that trip. He swam across the lake. I ran to try to meet him on the other side, thinking that since he let me see him swim, he must want to talk to me. I don't know what I thought he would say. Maybe, "I saw you admiring my huge rack. Please tell the hunters to leave me alone please." Maybe it was the heatstroke, or my childhood viewing of Bambi and Snow White talking.

************************************************

The plants seem to be tolerating the weather. The azalea looks a bit wilty this morning. It bloomed a few weeks ago, a riot of hot pink. Hot pink? Something I wouldn't have chosen, but it's beautiful. It's hidden, a surprise, and a bit naughty like a Brazilian bikini wax. That's right. I'm comparing a plant to a painful procedure. The more time I spend with these plants, the more they develop stories. It's not my fault that the Azalea is communicating lurid stories of wild beach parties to me. Go talk to the Azalea yourself and see!



Lurid! Carefree! Azaleas!


The bell like bulbs in the front yard were looking wilty the day before yesterday. They seem to have survived, but we'll see. I gave everyone a preemptive watering this mid morning (I know, but I didn't get up any earlier), and will give everyone a more generous watering tonight.

Did I tell you I have a few corn who came up? I'm so excited. I also put some squash starts in the ground. The ones I had started before a)froze and b)most of the remaining leaves got eaten by slugs. A couple days ago, I put a slug trap out (made with an old sour cream container with windows cut out, and some Joose that my brother's band's base player left. Trust me on this. If any member of a band that practices at your house leaves behind a Joose, it's much better used as slug bait than as a thirst queancher or drunk-maker. It yielded two good sized slugs yesterday, with no new ones today. It also netted a few dozen ants. Gross. After I planted the squash, I surrounded them with crumbled egg shells. I really recommend the egg shell treatment if you have slug problems.


This post is way long enough, and it's time to get ready for the latest PDX Crafty Vixen meetups.

I'm growing these guys:
Caro Rich


and
Tigerella


Black Aztec



Finally, here are a whole plethora of tips, complements of yougrowgirl.com <3!!!

Mother's Day

I love moms. Moms are great. Moms raise the next generation of shorties, and generally the next generation turns out to be relatively tolerable people.

BUT

the time around Mother's Day (when people are in between patting each other on the back for their ability to procreate) has a higher than average inane comment ratio. "It's not too late for you to have children." "You'd make a great mom." "Oh, you're thirty. Well, you still have a couple years."

A bit in the same blood as Sandra Cisneros poem...


*************************
Old Maids
My cousins and I,
we don't marry.
We're too old
by Mexican standards.

And the relatives
have long suspected
we can't anymore
in white.

My cousins and I,
we're all old
maids at thirty.

Who won't dress children,
and never saints--
though we undress them.

The aunts,
they've given up on us.
No longer nudge--You're next.

Instead--
What happened in your childhood?
What left you all mean teens?
Who hurt you, honey?

But we've studied
marriages too long--

Aunt Ariadne,
Tia Vashti,
Comadre Penelope,
querida Malintzin,
Senora Pumpkin Shell--

lessons that served us well.
***********************

I get comments like that from time to time, mostly from patients. They mean well, but I wonder if they've ever read Cunt, or Bust, or any of these delicious books.

No, it's not too late for me to have children. It's also (never) too late to get my master's degree, or visit Korea. Yeah, I would make a great mom. But I'm a really fucking excellent nurse and a pretty decent friend.

Life is about choices. Well, life is about a lot of things, but choices and respecting the choice of others is HUGELY important in the Hybrid Hopes Philosophy of Life. While that includes me making my own choices about motherhood, abortion, and what kind of lettuce I'm going to plant in my front yard, that also includes me respecting the rights of others to HAVE kids.



I got to hear Rickie Solinger speak last year about this topic. She's written a whole book on it (that I have yet to read), Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States.

From that interview with Mother's Movement Online and Rickie Solinger:
The sharp separation of mothers along race and class lines— a divide that determines which women are valorized for their motherhood and which ones are vilified for it— leads Solinger to pose a troubling question: “Do Americans want motherhood to be a class privilege? A life experience only available to middle class women?”

So that got a bit tangental.

I love the crap out of my mom. She didn't have the easiest time raising four hooligans and worked hard to turn us out into functional and decent adults. I think we all fit that bill.



Some years, figuring out what to get my mom for mother's day/birthdays/etc was easy. Here's a little broach that I chose carefully, it's got a rose and says MOM and looks nice and shiny. Here's a little candle in a bunny rabbit holder.

This year, my mom lives on a boat. She has like two square feet of living space and no room for a refrigerator to put our drawings on, no room for broaches that she really will never well, no room for art supplies or a year's worth of magazine subscriptions. Yet again, I turn to etsy. Even a Mom on a boat can take showers! Eureka! My mom likes to smell good! Smell this! I picked up a passionfruit/papaya scented bath set for the moms. Not a bad scent combo for a lady who gave me a bunch of passionfruit seeds! I can't wait 'til she gets it! Thank you, SugarLicious!

This is turning into my longest post so far. I'll blame Sandra Cisneros and her too old cousins.

I'm almost done, I swear.

I work with several nurses that are older than me and also childfree. It's nice. When I do get those crazy, invasive, well-meaning, presumptuous comments and they get on my nerves, they understand. I'm also not the only one in my crew that has had an extended courtship period.

To summarize: yay moms! yay women! yay etsy! yay passionfruit vines! yay coworkers!