Thanksgiving

Today is the U.S. Thanksgiving Day.  We will take a moment or two our of our lives to remind ourselves how thankful we are for the bounty and riches we have.  Among the things for which I am thankful are you, my friends. 

Our current weather conditions are cold and windy but the sun is out shining bravely on the new, clean snow.  There is a path of well tracked mouse tracks along the house side of the back entry ramp.  So far, there are no rabbit tracks in the garden. 

Our family feast will be among only our immediate family.  We have a small fresh turkey which will go into the oven in a few hours.  With it we will have two kinds of dressing, our traditional bread dressing and a cornbread/white bread dressing with chestnuts and maybe some craisins or dried cherries for good measure.  With the two dressings, we will skip potatoes and rolls.  This morning I prepared a pumpkin maple pie which looks lovely; we have eaten almost all of the piecrust cookies made from the leftover crust dough.  We sprinkle the dough with cinnamon and sugar before baking it.  I have also prepared a green bean casserole, not the Cambell's soup recipe, and it is ready to go into the oven at the appointed time.  I also cooked the cranberries that are now cooling on the porch.  It has reached that time of year when the porch becomes a large walk-in refrigerator. 

Last night I baked the perfect little pumpkin only it really was not a perfect pumpkin.  It was extremely stringy inside and had a maximum of a ¼ inch of flesh.  I thought that Roger had planted Sugar Pie pumpkin seeds.  It turned out that he had planted some seeds which came in the post as a promotional offer for something not even related to gardens and gardening.  We had inferior seeds.  If I had only known, I would have gotten some good seeds.  Well, now Roger knows that it does not pay to save some of these freebies.  And yes, it sometimes is a very good idea to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially if it is intended for the garden.