Foul play

I'm exhausted. The last of the 25 guests who rolled through our mountain house to celebrate Thanksgiving with us have just left. Makena is asleep, the kitchen is trashed, and Tiger is collapsed on the couch with a rawhide hanging out his mouth and bloated with gas from having been fed too many scraps.

If you are wondering where Jack and daddy are, they are in town in a clean house, asleep, and getting ready for school and work tomorrow. I've stayed back a couple of days, to put the house back together and await new appliances (pictured,) especially, the new dishwasher. The old one broke the day before T-day and was repaired -- with a lot of begging on my part -- but ultimately, I was told that it wouldn't last ten more washes.


I did two sacrilegious things this year to mark Makena's first Thanksgiving with us: I ordered an "already cooked" Turkey AND a half-gallon of gravy. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE to cook, I'm the type of person who gets excited when she opens a set of Le Creuset pots or stainless steel mixing bowls for Christmas. My idea of a good souvenir is to come back with a cookbook from the places I visit (which reminds me that I didn't get one in China!) I love food. I love Iron Chef --my sister, on the other hand, would use those gifts as a weapon and clobber you over the head with them for even thinking about getting her that, but I digress...

I've never committed high culinary treason before --I've also never had two children or twelve guests (plus three extra dogs) spend three days with us-- so ordering the bird made sense at the time. And, I'll be honest, I wasn't sure that my first husband would pull off frying the turkey (at altitude), so I wanted to be safe. I say "first" husband because he was deservedly insulted by my lack of faith in his frying abilities and gasped when he found out that I couldn't even own up to the gravy.

Well guess who ate crow? Moi. Not only did his, not one but two, fried turkeys come out perfectly cooked and delicious but my overpriced bird was RAW. Sure, it looked golden and mouth-watering on the outside, on the inside it, was uncooked and cold. There was a collective gasp from the crowd and they sort of looked at me with pity. I even tried a bite of "sushi turkey" hoping against hope that it wasn't as bad as it looked. Adding further insult to injury, the yam risotto that I had proudly prepared before coming up (to save myself the trouble of cooking in the mountains) was still frozen! I was 0 for 3. Thankfully, since the rest of our friends were serious foodies, there was no shortage of amazing side dishes or dessert (a special golf-clap to Tamara for her Yam pie with caramelized Cabernet sauce and whipped cream.)

Jack stuck to the turkey and freshly baked pumpkin bread (not made by me, of course) and the only one who actually ventured to eat my, subsequently defrosted and disastrously microwaved, risotto was Makena (who thankfully didn't throw it up.)



Our place was a revolving door with groups of friends arriving as others left and it was fantastic -- all be it exhausting. Although Makena handled it all beautifully by day, by night, it was awful. I realized too late in the game that all the festivities (and three new dogs in the house) had her overly stimulated to the point where she couldn't sleep. I spent two entire nights with her sprawled across my chest in an effort to help her. But the only angle that was acceptable to her was upright. So I contorted myself in an armchair and pretended I was on the flight back from Guangzhou and that I could do this. I could find that zen place between delirium and nervous breakdown and make it through the night. Thankfully one of my girlfriends handled making breakfast for everyone on those two days and Makena and I got to sleep in. Tragically. I didn't pack my make-up so I could have looked better.

I wouldn't change a thing about the weekend (except to have my concealer on hand and maybe serve everything on paper plates so that I wouldn't spend so much time washing dishes.) I want Makena to be able to hang with us when we have large groups of friends around -- as Jack does -- and I am thankful that she doesn't seem to have held these disruptions against me. I'm thankful for Makena and Jack's brilliant personalities and extremely thankful that I wasn't served divorce papers for dessert -- although I have been suspended from cooking duties for next year's meal.

In the meantime, I plan on having a serious word with the grocer who sold me the raw Tom Turkey because I suspect that was foul play!

Is - on a diet.
PS Makena spent a great part of the weekend chasing, Earl, our friend's hairless chihuahua (pictured above.) Makena's friend Josie had a bublebath together. Last, our friend Tony also helped her ride a skateboard for the first time. Look for Makena in the XGames of 2017.