Hope my American friends had a tasty and relaxing day! We were four and it was really nice. I learned you can always make something else (oh? Bourbon-laced sweet potatoes? Why not! Cream biscuits? Sure!), thereby turning a meal for four into something more like dinner for nine.
I had a chance to test the Hockey Puck Biscuit Theory.
Previously, I have been embarrassed and annoyed that any time I tried to make cream biscuits for a holiday meal, they were epic fails. Hockey puck biscuits. While my more private baking adventures are not uniformly good, I often manage to produce tasty and flaky biscuits.
Until yesterday, I figured the tension and pressure of putting out a dinner for a crowd foiled my efforts. But yesterday, we were four. There goes my theory.
So what, then? A post-turkey oven is not hospitable? Sitting on a cookie tray for three hours jinxes the dough? Anyone? Maybe the cut dough needs to be refrigerated until oven-time.
I mean look at that thing! It’s practically two-dimensional.
Everything else was good, I’m happy to report including the cookies (talk about going overboard. I’d already made a pumpkin cheesecake).
It’s cold. It may or may not be raining. If not, it will be raining soon.
Lastly, I came upon two share-worthy creators this morning. The poem by Bernadette Mayer (below) offers a master class in the use of repetition and captures my mood of late. The collage artist, a 75-year-old woman living on one of the barrier islands along the South Carolina coast, takes my breath away. Some of her pieces are huge. Aldwyth.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49736/failures-in-infinitives
Being able to start eating the pie on Thanksgiving Eve counts as a silver lining this year. As does sitting here typing instead of running around in a dash of last minute clean up and then prepping for hours in advance of the big meal. I enjoy the latter, but still, this is nice. I slept til nine.
Given Finn’s propensity for fowl thievery, the brined bird is airing behind a barricade of coleus cuttings. The other side is a staircase to which he has no access. Ha! Look at us! Dog people who finally learned a thing or two.
Why a whole bird for two people, you ask? I was gonna keep it simple: breast only, one-ingredient side dishes. Well, I couldn’t find breasts at the critical moment and pomegranate seeds and walnuts are demanding to be partnered with Brussel sprouts. Maybe a maple glaze?
There will be two zoom calls and episodes of Money Heist. Twitter. Maybe a fire, even though it’s warm enough to rain.
We had a semi-typical TG meal last week when C was here: stuffed Cornish game hens, homemade cranberry sauce, wilted cucumbers and roasted butternut squash.
Braised lamb shanks and root vegetables served on Parmesan / rosemary grits with garlic baby bok choy and more of that homemade cranberry sauce.
Per usual, I found a great Bon Appetit 
One to the other. Season. Place. Ground and sky. A flight back to Colorado later today. Special china’s been put away but the folding chairs — not yet.
I called this patchwork a “whimsy” elsewhere. An unstoppable doodle. Irrepressible play. Now that the pile of these is growing, I probably ought to figure out what to do with them. Maybe make longer panels for the hall double hungs upstairs? Facing east, those windows get blasted by morning light, so the cloth’d be like glass for a few hours a day.
