Thanksgiving Dinner

For Thanksgiving this year it was going to be down to the four of us, so I invited some friends from school, and Corrine and her husband Ryan came, and we had a really good time!

Here's what we ate:

Turkey: I didn't have any room in the refrigerator to thaw my turkey, so I cooked it from frozen again. This works amazingly well. After about 6 hours I took out the neck and stuffed a bunch of herbs (sage, rosemary, and thyme) in the cavity. See the Recipes page for the timetable.

Rolls: Of course. I made it with half white flour so they wouldn't be so dense since I was serving them to company. They rose so fast I wondered why I bothered.

Mashed potatoes: I decided no one would complain about having too many starches on Thanksgiving. I do need to remember that the steam shorts out my hand mixer, though. I was glad it was mostly mixed by the time that happened. And that it recovered in time to beat the whipped cream.

Sweet potatoes: 4 sweet potatoes, peeled and hacked up (the turkey was sitting on the cutting board by this time so I didn't have a surface to cut on. Bad planning, 2 apples peeled and cored and sliced (thank you Naomi!), and a spoonful of brown sugar. Oh, and I poured maybe a third of a cup of apple juice for moisture over it, and popped it into the microwave until everything was fork tender.

Salad: I made a big green salad to fill up my plate and remind me I didn't need three helpings of everything. It mostly worked.

Cranberry sauce: Corrine did an excellent last-minute job standing watch over the cranberries since I forgot to do it ahead of time.

Jello salad: It came out runnier than I like. I think next time I'll reduce the water a little from what I posted in the recipe. But not down to jello jiggler proportions.

Gravy: I have never successfully made gravy on my own before, but Corrine told me Ryan really likes gravy, so I found a recipe and it came out great! I sprinkled the flour over the juices instead of shaking it, so there were some small lumps, but by the time I got it to the table I don't think anyone noticed, including me.

Pies: There were three pies. Corrine made an awesome Chocolate/Peanut Butter Pie, very rich and yummy! And there was pumpkin pie, which came out about as perfect as any I've ever made. And I found a recipe I had to try, even though it brought the person/pie ratio to 2, for cranberry cheesecake pie. I highly recommend this pie, even though mine came out of the oven with lots of cracks and it wanted to stay in the pan. Maybe I should have cooked it a few minutes longer, but it's yummy anyway!

After dinner we sat and talked and had a great evening. I hope your thanksgiving was as nice as ours!

Recipes

Over the course of the next day or so I'll be posting some family recipes under the recipe tab for easier finding and dissemination. So far I have put up the roll recipe. Enjoy!

Swimming

So, I decided I needed to up my exercise time fairly significantly recently. Since my exercise of choice is running, I was concerned that this might lead to injury, so I decided to diversify a bit. I found out there's a big student rec center on campus, which includes a weight and cardio room and also this pool, among other things. And one of the very nice things about being a student is realizing that this is free (well, if you forget the pile of money that went into student fees).

So I swam this week, twice, and it wasn't so bad. One of the things I dislike about swimming is that the scenery doesn't change. And, well, the scenery still doesn't change. I can look at the floor of the pool, or I can look at the ceiling. I suppose I could swim on my side and look across the surface of the water, too. If I could keep my goggles from fogging up. One nice feature of this pool is the lines on the ceiling. I spent much less time swimming into the floaties that mark the lane when there are lines on the ceiling to follow, I found.

Another problem is that I'm deaf in the pool (not too big of a problem if you're swimming alone, but occasionally someone wants to say something, like when the guy in the lane next to me left and told me I could have his lane if I wanted and I didn't realize he was even talking to me until he was at the door).

Luckily I can see well enough to read the clock on the wall if I take my goggles off and squint. What is it with the clocks at pools anyway? They only have second and minute hands, but the minutes bear no relation that I can tell to the time outside of the pool. There are two clocks at this pool, and they don't even agree with each other!

I have to say, though, that I've enjoyed swimming this week as much as I ever have. The pool at the Johnson Center is clean, quiet, and open all day long for lap swimming. I wasn't sure if I'd want to keep going regularly, but I think I will for now.

Fall in Albuquerque

Fall in Albuquerque is more beautiful that I would have thought! First come the balloons. Well, actually there have been balloons in the sky pretty much every morning since we got here, but the first weekend in October is the big balloon festival. This year our schedule didn't allow us to get up close and personal with the balloons, but I did get out and shoot a bunch of pictures. Unfortunately that meant shooting into the sunrise, but here are a few of my pictures. Those spots aren't a dirty lens, and they're not a dirty screen, they're balloons.



This one went right over me!


Then, just as I was feeling sorry for not having fall color in the mountains, the bosque (that's the trees along the river) turned gold. Intense, bright gold. No pictures, as my camera's currently not working, but trust me, it's beautiful.

Then I found out that sandhill cranes winter here. A couple weeks ago the newspaper had an article on them, saying they stayed in the refuge by Socorro, which is a couple hours away, but then I found out they are here, about five miles from my house! We went down this morning and saw them. They sound like tribbles, and they look like elegant paintings on silk. The open space preserve plants grain for them to eat, and there were about 150 of them this morning, standing out in the field. We went on a little hike down to the river with a bird guide who pointed out lots of other birds, too, including flickers and a red-tailed hawk and a kestrel, and a flock of cranes flew over us. When my camera's working again I'll go back and get pictures.