Our Thanksgiving Day

 Oh dear, looks as if I'm once again slipping in an only post for the month at the tail end of the month. This November calendar page is too pretty not to share.

I know Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. is over and Christmas in our friendly skies of social media has long begun but I'll stop to record our Thanksgiving Day and then try to get with the program.

Our Thanksgiving Day:

There were lots of dishes to wash, even for dinner for two. This was not the year for the clan to gather, due to one thing or another. 

I made buttermilk biscuits to go with our breakfast and saved four of them for my cornbread dressing, making the cornbread the day before and thawing out a few slices of sourdough bread. And my cranberry sauce was waiting in the fridge. 

After breakfast I made the pies up quickly. Pecan, an old favorite recipe that doesn't call for any corn syrup, only a pound of brown sugar, 3 eggs beaten, 2 eggshells of milk, a big splash of vanilla, some salt and lots of pecans. And a chess pie, of course, RH taking some of both to share with family. 

Next we put a turkey breast in to roast, but used my old Bon Appetit recipe where I baste the turkey with a mixture of maple syrup and Calvados. Then I mixed up the cornbread dressing (the onions, celery, and parsley chopped after breakfast) and popped it into the oven as soon as the turkey came out, adding in the drippings from that.

I ended up deleting all my food pictures I was going to use here because, well they were just food, but have to show you my dressing because it was so pretty this year. And so delicious!

We really fudged on the rest of the meal, no homemade rolls, only a partial package of Bridgport rolls in the back of the freezer that I put out to rise after breakfast, brushing them with butter and sprinkling celery salt on them. Try that on your rolls sometime!

There were no family casseroles, something that would have been unthinkable in the old days. I didn't even have the energy left to put the fresh asparagus I'd bought into the oven. By afternoon I did well just to set the table for our Thanksgiving for two.

My vintage damask tablecloth with beautiful pheasants on it was left hanging in the closet and two placemats went on the table instead.

But my very old Spode dinner plates were a given. Here's a good picture of them.
 

Aren't they gorgeous? I found 11 plates of them on eBay over fifteen years ago. Oh wait, here's a picture of the damask cloth and the plates where I set the Thanksgiving table many years ago at Valley View!

And another year there when some of our children must have been dining with the in-laws so a smaller table was set in my kitchen. Looks like a pumpkin tablecloth was used that year.

 Now I'm going all mushy missing those days at Valley View and the kids that sat around the table. Must get back to our 2022 table au deux.

I simply must point out my favorite autumn glasses with pheasants. I dearly love them!

And the cranberry sauce went into the two little bouillon cups that I saved from a whole set of them when we downsized. They're Royal from Austria.

And that's it, folks, our Thanksgiving Day meal, without the casseroles or fresh broccoli or asparagus or homemade rolls. I truly didn't mind because my dressing and the cranberry sauce is always my favorite part of the Thanksgiving dinner.

 We'd kept the dishes washed all day and the dishwasher empty so we put the food away and cleaned up the kitchen quickly, washed up the pretty pieces of china, etc., that I wouldn't put in the dishwasher come hell or high water, and we were done.

Ready to snuggle with the dachshunds in front of the television. Don't ask me what we watched. I'm still too tired to remember.

Don't shake your head. Some day you too might be too tired at the end of the day to do anything other than stare at the television and not remember what you watched. 

In my defense, I've been through two months of worsening back pain, until I can honestly claim it was excruciating. To the orthopedist where an X-ray showed a compression fracture and all the worry that went with that possibility. Next a MRI and then two weeks later a followup appointment where I thankfully learned that it was not a compression fracture! Just arthritis and some degenerative disc damage. My physical therapist was glad to hear that and now has me on more aggressive therapy.

RH will be very glad when he no longer has to unload the bottom shelf of the dishwasher, get the laundry out of the dryer, and vacuum--what am I thinking? There's no way I want to start doing the vacuuming! Not when he's so good at it.

Men should always do the man stuff, don't you think? Like fishing and hunting and vacuuming?