walkingshadow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walkingshadow) wrote2005-11-30 07:30 pm
walkingshadow) wrote2005-11-30 07:30 pm
Entry tags:
everyone says i'm paranoid on this island
hey, remember thanksgiving? i don't know if everyone else's attention span is contracting like a puddle on a sunny day, but mine sure is! already thanksgiving has faded into the fuzzy past; it could have been years ago. but we had thanksgiving, thanksgiving was lovely. and by "thanksgiving" i mean the extended holiday weekend remix stretching from tuesday night to sunday night. during which time there were eight family members in town, plus ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gjstruthseeker who i hadn't seen in AGES; and we used all the bedding in the house putting everyone up, and we ate, seriously, SO MUCH FOOD. do you want to know what we ate? oh my god, if you care, i will tell you:
+ on tuesday we made vegetarian chili and macaroni and cheese (the latter especially for those who don't eat a. tofu, b. chili or c. either of the above) and sour cream chocolate chip cookies. my mother has recently caught on to the method of using a disher to portion out cookies on a cookie sheet for baking, resulting in cookies of perfectly identical size and shape and roundness, and these were so perfectly round and even and smooth that they looked like little ALIEN COOKIES rising through the oven door.
+ on wednesday we ordered massive quantities of chinese food from our patron chinese restaurant—the one where the proprieters ask after the family and we do the same.
+ on thursday—oh, thursday—we were eighteen people and we had curried carrot soup with three kinds of seasonal cake-like breads (which at the last moment i was called upon to make signs for, so everyone would not constantly, constantly be asking which was which, and i whipped them up out of computer paper, a sharpie, toothpicks, and scotch tape; they were DOUBLE-SIDED, and for a moment there i won at life); and turkey—
okay, a word about turkey. everyone does different things to turkey, and everybody's got their traditions and family recipes; deep-frying has been popular for a couple of years now, and last week somebody wanted to know if everybody was brining their turkeys now, and there's all kinds of rubbing and stuffing and dressing you can do. my mother roasts the turkey. she puts it in an enormous roasting pan with thinly-sliced onion and a little carrot all under a loose aluminum-foil canopy and she sticks it in, like, a 325-degree oven for a few hours, until the thermometer pops, and it's amazing. it's moist, it's perfect, it's the best turkey you will never eat in your life, unless you come to our house for thanksgiving one of these years, and you are all welcome! also there is the gravy, which is equally amazing, and involves the aforementioned onions, stock from the bones, etc., and, um, other things—the gravy process is a mysterious one. but SO GOOD.
—and candied sweet potatoes and brussells sprouts (no, you would like these, i swear, there's a sauce involving mustard and something something, i wasn't involved with the brussells sprouts production, i just ATE THEM) and string beans that were roasted with honey and garlic and finished with sesame oil, and also stuffing—the stuffing doesn't go in the bird, so technically we should call it dressing, but then i feel like i've wandered into a nineteenth-century english novel's dinner party, and i know i'm not dressed for that. and then, dear lord, DESSERT, consisting of pumpkin pie, cherry pie, pumpkin-cranberry cake, and two kinds of cookies.
+ for shabbat on friday we had meze, a mediterranean salads course, consisting of hummus, cucumber salad, several eggplant salads, tabouleh, carrot salad (garlic, olive oil, and cilantro), lots of roasted peppers, fish balls (a sephardic recipe, almost identical to traditional ashkenazic gefilte fish, except you season them with garlic, etc., and you cook them for twenty minutes instead of three hours; also you do not eat them with horseradish), and homemade challah; for dessert there was cheese—mmmm, cheese— and all the pie and cookies we didn't finish the night before.
+ saturday we had breakfast on hollywood beach and dinner at an indian restaurant; and sunday we had an early dinner (at the beach again, with a surprisingly chilly breeze blowing briskly off the water) before everyone had to catch their flight back to atlanta.
for breakfast and lunch we were mostly on our own, making eggs and heating up leftovers; dinner is where we really shine. except for the the restaurant food (including the eggplant salads, some of the roasted peppers, the tabouleh, and the hummus on friday night), my mother made everything—from scratch; we don't do mixes in this house—with minimal help from her flighty kitchen minions. as cousin m. is fond of saying, if my mother were in charge of hurricane relief efforts, everything would get where it needed to go (and it would be tasty when it got there).
the five stages of holiday eating1 are cyclical and i passed through them many, many times; until i found myself stalled at a previously un-categorized sixth stage, which goes something like, "please oh god, if i ever have to take nourishment again may it only ever be intravenously," and is characterized by not just a complete lack of appetite, but an actual revulsion from food. i'm just not used to eating like this. plus my metabolism has slowed to a crawl since i've been avoiding the gym for the past month, so it was all, what am i supposed to do with these many thousands of calories? and i think by saturday i was just fried, the same kind of burned-out i get when i'm around too many people for too long, no matter how much i love them. on saturday night i sat at one end of the table in the indian restaurant and couldn't bring myself to look at the menu even though i was hungry; i told everyone i was exempting myself from the decision-making process and asked my mother to order something on my behalf. everything that came was delicious2, but i just didn't want to want it. i've been in a kind of recovery mode since they left, easing myself back with cereal and soy milk, fruit smoothies, salads.
1. which go something like,
in the odd moments when we weren't eating we were being entertained by my two and a half year old nephew (extremely vocal, extremely energetic, extremely bossy, so cute); catching up with each other; reading—we firmly believe that the family that reads together stays together. at one point there were five or six of us spread out in the living room with our respective books; i managed to finish the man who mistook his wife for a hat, but much more on that later.
on friday we saw the ice harvest: brought to you by the state of kansas tourism board! except so, so not. there are some incredibly unhappy people in wichita. everybody is unhappy in wichita. wichita is so bleak they had to film the movie in waukegan. if i were the state of kansas, i would sue, even if every word and sad life and strip club were true. i'm just not sure what the point was when i could see everything that was going to happen from fifteen minutes in. were we *ever* supposed to think renata was sincere? or that billy bob thornton wasn't creepy and double-crossing? or that there was some uncertainty as to who was writing as wichita falls, so falls wichita falls on every available surface? the best scene was the final scene, when oliver platt sits up in the backseat of john cusack's car, rubbing his face and blinking at the world like he's never seen it before, and wants to know where they are or where they're going. you saw it coming an hour ago, but you're still warmed, you're still thinking, "these people are getting out of wichita and therefore might one day be happy! perhaps as soon as they cross the state line!"
gjstruthseeker and i managed to watch most of season one stargate: atlantis, but there is much, MUCH more on that to come. we were up until five a.m. on saturday night but we still had to skip a couple of episodes and we didn't make it to "the siege," part II; though i did make sure we saw "trinity" before she left on sunday morning. we had some technical difficulties and some platform incompatabilities which means she'd downloaded "the hive" but couldn't transfer it to me by hook or crook; it's hopefully in the mail. i have a folder of episode reactions and spoiler-ridden fic on my desktop, and i created another one last night labeled post-EPIPHANY *cries*. i love everyone and their cut tags. you are all beautiful.
between thanksgiving and tai chi i'm two weeks behind on house; i did see grey's anatomy this past sunday (actually i think i'm conflating two sunday's worth), and BOY OH BOY is mcdreamy a dick or what? honestly, i have no idea why addison wanted him back so badly. burke is classy, meredith is whiny, bailey is SO FREAKING AWESOME. (if bailey ever met up with house she would *kick his ass.* until recently i had never spent so much time considering throwing random characters together in a fictional deathmatch and wondering who would win, but it's good times! mostly seattle grace would ask princeton-plainsborough, "where is your PROTOCOL? o.O") honestly, i don't have much of anything to say except that i love the show, though i do not dig the bookmarking voiceovers. where can i get a grey's anatomy icon or three?
gjstruthseeker who i hadn't seen in AGES; and we used all the bedding in the house putting everyone up, and we ate, seriously, SO MUCH FOOD. do you want to know what we ate? oh my god, if you care, i will tell you:+ on tuesday we made vegetarian chili and macaroni and cheese (the latter especially for those who don't eat a. tofu, b. chili or c. either of the above) and sour cream chocolate chip cookies. my mother has recently caught on to the method of using a disher to portion out cookies on a cookie sheet for baking, resulting in cookies of perfectly identical size and shape and roundness, and these were so perfectly round and even and smooth that they looked like little ALIEN COOKIES rising through the oven door.
+ on wednesday we ordered massive quantities of chinese food from our patron chinese restaurant—the one where the proprieters ask after the family and we do the same.
+ on thursday—oh, thursday—we were eighteen people and we had curried carrot soup with three kinds of seasonal cake-like breads (which at the last moment i was called upon to make signs for, so everyone would not constantly, constantly be asking which was which, and i whipped them up out of computer paper, a sharpie, toothpicks, and scotch tape; they were DOUBLE-SIDED, and for a moment there i won at life); and turkey—
okay, a word about turkey. everyone does different things to turkey, and everybody's got their traditions and family recipes; deep-frying has been popular for a couple of years now, and last week somebody wanted to know if everybody was brining their turkeys now, and there's all kinds of rubbing and stuffing and dressing you can do. my mother roasts the turkey. she puts it in an enormous roasting pan with thinly-sliced onion and a little carrot all under a loose aluminum-foil canopy and she sticks it in, like, a 325-degree oven for a few hours, until the thermometer pops, and it's amazing. it's moist, it's perfect, it's the best turkey you will never eat in your life, unless you come to our house for thanksgiving one of these years, and you are all welcome! also there is the gravy, which is equally amazing, and involves the aforementioned onions, stock from the bones, etc., and, um, other things—the gravy process is a mysterious one. but SO GOOD.
—and candied sweet potatoes and brussells sprouts (no, you would like these, i swear, there's a sauce involving mustard and something something, i wasn't involved with the brussells sprouts production, i just ATE THEM) and string beans that were roasted with honey and garlic and finished with sesame oil, and also stuffing—the stuffing doesn't go in the bird, so technically we should call it dressing, but then i feel like i've wandered into a nineteenth-century english novel's dinner party, and i know i'm not dressed for that. and then, dear lord, DESSERT, consisting of pumpkin pie, cherry pie, pumpkin-cranberry cake, and two kinds of cookies.
+ for shabbat on friday we had meze, a mediterranean salads course, consisting of hummus, cucumber salad, several eggplant salads, tabouleh, carrot salad (garlic, olive oil, and cilantro), lots of roasted peppers, fish balls (a sephardic recipe, almost identical to traditional ashkenazic gefilte fish, except you season them with garlic, etc., and you cook them for twenty minutes instead of three hours; also you do not eat them with horseradish), and homemade challah; for dessert there was cheese—mmmm, cheese— and all the pie and cookies we didn't finish the night before.
+ saturday we had breakfast on hollywood beach and dinner at an indian restaurant; and sunday we had an early dinner (at the beach again, with a surprisingly chilly breeze blowing briskly off the water) before everyone had to catch their flight back to atlanta.
for breakfast and lunch we were mostly on our own, making eggs and heating up leftovers; dinner is where we really shine. except for the the restaurant food (including the eggplant salads, some of the roasted peppers, the tabouleh, and the hummus on friday night), my mother made everything—from scratch; we don't do mixes in this house—with minimal help from her flighty kitchen minions. as cousin m. is fond of saying, if my mother were in charge of hurricane relief efforts, everything would get where it needed to go (and it would be tasty when it got there).
the five stages of holiday eating1 are cyclical and i passed through them many, many times; until i found myself stalled at a previously un-categorized sixth stage, which goes something like, "please oh god, if i ever have to take nourishment again may it only ever be intravenously," and is characterized by not just a complete lack of appetite, but an actual revulsion from food. i'm just not used to eating like this. plus my metabolism has slowed to a crawl since i've been avoiding the gym for the past month, so it was all, what am i supposed to do with these many thousands of calories? and i think by saturday i was just fried, the same kind of burned-out i get when i'm around too many people for too long, no matter how much i love them. on saturday night i sat at one end of the table in the indian restaurant and couldn't bring myself to look at the menu even though i was hungry; i told everyone i was exempting myself from the decision-making process and asked my mother to order something on my behalf. everything that came was delicious2, but i just didn't want to want it. i've been in a kind of recovery mode since they left, easing myself back with cereal and soy milk, fruit smoothies, salads.
1. which go something like,
1. MMMM FOOD SO GOOD.2. this in itself is part of the problem: i'm a compulsive eater, the way i'm slightly compulsive about everything. i can't leave food on a plate, i can't bypass food, i can't turn it down, and i can't choose one option when there's more than one in front of me. it's a relief when there's no food around, because then i don't eat it.
2. . . . more food, okay!
3. urp.
4. food coma.
5. "i am never eating ever again oh my god, oh my god. until tomorrow. or later, if there are still cookies."
in the odd moments when we weren't eating we were being entertained by my two and a half year old nephew (extremely vocal, extremely energetic, extremely bossy, so cute); catching up with each other; reading—we firmly believe that the family that reads together stays together. at one point there were five or six of us spread out in the living room with our respective books; i managed to finish the man who mistook his wife for a hat, but much more on that later.
on friday we saw the ice harvest: brought to you by the state of kansas tourism board! except so, so not. there are some incredibly unhappy people in wichita. everybody is unhappy in wichita. wichita is so bleak they had to film the movie in waukegan. if i were the state of kansas, i would sue, even if every word and sad life and strip club were true. i'm just not sure what the point was when i could see everything that was going to happen from fifteen minutes in. were we *ever* supposed to think renata was sincere? or that billy bob thornton wasn't creepy and double-crossing? or that there was some uncertainty as to who was writing as wichita falls, so falls wichita falls on every available surface? the best scene was the final scene, when oliver platt sits up in the backseat of john cusack's car, rubbing his face and blinking at the world like he's never seen it before, and wants to know where they are or where they're going. you saw it coming an hour ago, but you're still warmed, you're still thinking, "these people are getting out of wichita and therefore might one day be happy! perhaps as soon as they cross the state line!"
gjstruthseeker and i managed to watch most of season one stargate: atlantis, but there is much, MUCH more on that to come. we were up until five a.m. on saturday night but we still had to skip a couple of episodes and we didn't make it to "the siege," part II; though i did make sure we saw "trinity" before she left on sunday morning. we had some technical difficulties and some platform incompatabilities which means she'd downloaded "the hive" but couldn't transfer it to me by hook or crook; it's hopefully in the mail. i have a folder of episode reactions and spoiler-ridden fic on my desktop, and i created another one last night labeled post-EPIPHANY *cries*. i love everyone and their cut tags. you are all beautiful.between thanksgiving and tai chi i'm two weeks behind on house; i did see grey's anatomy this past sunday (actually i think i'm conflating two sunday's worth), and BOY OH BOY is mcdreamy a dick or what? honestly, i have no idea why addison wanted him back so badly. burke is classy, meredith is whiny, bailey is SO FREAKING AWESOME. (if bailey ever met up with house she would *kick his ass.* until recently i had never spent so much time considering throwing random characters together in a fictional deathmatch and wondering who would win, but it's good times! mostly seattle grace would ask princeton-plainsborough, "where is your PROTOCOL? o.O") honestly, i don't have much of anything to say except that i love the show, though i do not dig the bookmarking voiceovers. where can i get a grey's anatomy icon or three?
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dude. that's like, some black market turkey there. must be the valentine's day candy effect at work; i guess no one wants turkey once thanksgiving's over.
honestly, i'm not sure what my mother does with gravy (it's definitely not southern and i don't think it involves butter or flour, though there might be a blender), but *canned* gravy sounds HORRIBLE. o.O