Ticking ticky boxes

• Cranberry sauce made -- check
  
• Buffet linens laundered -- check and uncheck (a green-and-white checked tea towel that I thought had been previously washed turned my ecru hand-crocheted edging mint green)
  
• Move buffet table downstairs -- check
  
• Pull apart three loaves of unsliced bread -- check
  
• Find and install replacement buffet linen -- check
  
• Wash two dozen gold rimmed antique goblets, eight dinner plates, eight dessert plates, eight cups and saucers, and eight or ten serving bowls/gravy boats etc -- check
  
• Make centerpiece and mantel decorations out of bits of stuff still growing out back - check
  
• Install extra leaves in dining room table, put tablecloth and centerpiece on table -- check
  
• Put pumpkin pie in oven -- check
  
• Shriek at Roy like banshee on the rag for coming home without whipped cream -- check
  

The pie is...what it is. The crust was rolling out okay but fell apart when I tried to roll it over the rolling pin and then unroll it over the pie plate. Much patching and saying of bad words ensued. Eventually I had something with a facsimile of a pinched crust, necessary to keep the pumpkin mixture in. As I poured the pumpkin glop into the crust, I noticed an egg-sized lump of unamalgamated pumpkin. Oh dear. Perhaps buying a pie won't be against my religion next year.

But it smells pretty good, nevertheless.

Roy went back out to forage for whipped cream. He had stopped at our new corner store to pick some up on his way home, but they'd had a run on the stuff, proving that there really was a market for a nice corner store. After I bansheed all over his eardrums he came back with FOUR CANS of the stuff. That will show me! I don't know what we'll do with that much. We won't have Mr. Darcy hustling into the kitchen every time he hears us popping the Redi-Whip lid...

Brownies next and then...an investigation of the bird to see whether it has thawed or whether heroics will be called for.

Earlier today, I called my friend "the Widow Sally" to compare Thanksgiving notes with her. She is cooking a Thanksgiving dinner, complete with 12-pound bird and all the trimmings, for herself and her little dog. When I called she was surveying her china cabinet, trying to decide whether to get out the Johnson Bros "Friendly Village" or the Lenox "Autumn." I grumbled to her about the mint-green edging on my buffet table cover. Oh, go ahead and use it, she said. No one will know it wasn't mint green to begin with. Wrong, I said. I will know it and every time I look at it I will get annoyed all over again. We both allowed as how if I bleach it a little the mint green might go away and the ecru show up again. Damn teatowel.

Ticky boxes ticked

091125pie
Originally uploaded by lb_philly.

• Pie out of oven and less disreputable than expected -- check.
  
• Brownies out of oven -- check.
  
• Giblets pulled out of turkey and thus turkey defrosted enough to cook tomorrow without heroics.

*Whew.* Now I can chop vegetables and boil sweet potatoes with a light heart.


UPDATE: It is a bad idea to be allow oneself to be lured downstairs and plied with good bourbon while the giblets boil untended in the third floor kitchen. Oh, well. Every good Thanksgiving dinner requires at least one burnt offering in order for the cooking gods to be placated, I guess.