hudebnik

For the first time this year. (Technically, I saw a dusting of snow on the ground two days ago, on Thursday's bedtime dog-walk, but neither of us had seen it fall, and it was gone by morning.) There appears to be an inch or two on the ground now. Not much more is forecast to fall, so it's just enough to be pretty without posing a major heart-attack or navigation danger.

Yesterday afternoon I retrieved the snow shovel, ice-breaker, ice-melting-salt, and solar-powered Xmas-tree-looking sidewalk-lights from the garage, exchanging them for the leaf-rake, the soil-tilling morningstar, and the spade, none of which I think we'll need for a few months. The sidewalk-lights have been shoved into the ground, and all but one of them lit up successfully last night. Between those, the cone of white lights on the climbing-vine trellis in the front yard, and the fresh coat of snow, it actually looks like a proper Christmastime.

On the schedule for today: wrap Christmas presents, cook, eat, play some music, watch something seasonally appropriate on the tube.

We had our traditional Christmas-eve dinner of beef Wellington, with creamed spinach and honey-glazed carrots and various kinds of Christmas cookies. Watched the Grinch and Rudolph, then Midnight Mass broadcast live from the National Cathedral, so we weren't out driving or interacting with hundreds of H. sapiens on Christmas eve. Walked the dogs, started the dishwasher, and got to bed only a little after midnight.

I woke around 8 AM, did some exercises, ate "first breakfast", checked the dishwasher, and found on triage that about half of the items therein were clean, while the other half looked as though they had just come off the table after a large meal. So I hand-washed the latter, leaving the drying-rack and the stovetop piled high. I emptied the filter, and can try different combinations of dishwasher powder and drying solution, but there may be a new dishwasher in our near future. Anyway, made some charitable donations in other people's names, then started on poffertje batter.

Eventually shalmestere woke up and we made and consumed our traditional Christmas-morning brunch of poffertjes, bacon, and blood-orange mimosas, then opened some presents. Of course, the big "present" from us to us arrived a week ago: a Prescott Renaissance C-bass recorder. (Insert photo here.) But other notable prezzies included (from her to me) Kees Boeke's edition of the works (certain and alleged) of Solage, and (from me to her) a well-reviewed novel based on the life of a 13th-century Irishwoman. And chocolate -- lots of chocolate. Happy Jolabokaflod!

Dinner, of course, was latkes. shalmestere doesn't believe in applesauce, and we didn't have any sour cream in the house, so we topped them with butter and Greek yogurt. And just to make clear that we're not really Jewish, we had (pork-and-beef) kielbasa coins sauteed in butter as the protein source for the meal. Played some Solage together on F-bass and C-bass recorders, watched "A Child's Christmas in Wales", walked the dogs, took out the trash, and went to bed.

Today I'm officially back to work, although not going into the office. Today's holiday rituals include delivering assortments of Christmas cookies to the neighbors and donating more money to worthy causes.

Two friends are coming over tomorrow and/or Saturday to play early music, so we have house-cleaning and pre-cooking to do.

Tuesday afternoon we drove to Brooklyn to pick up our pre-ordered, spatchcocked heritage turkey. This required driving to Brooklyn, which is always a pain. It was nine miles away as the crow flies, and took us almost an hour each way. But the pickup went smoothly, we got home and found room for the bird in the fridge.

Since both of us have been sick on-and-off for the past month, we planned to keep things relatively simple: no guests, no dishes we haven't made before.

Wednesday evening we made carrot slaw, and I made an almond-meal pie crust, filling to follow.

Thursday morning I woke late, almost 9 AM, made cranberry custard, filled the pie crust with it, and baked it. Then sliced a bunch of onions and put them in the oven to roast. shalmestere woke up an hour later, came downstairs, and (since it was Thursday) fired up the TV to see this week's installment of "Lower Decks". Browned some sausage, chopped up more onions, celery, and peppers, and sauteed all that together for stuffing. Added breadcrumbs and turkey broth and put the stuffing in the oven, taking the onions out.

While the Macy's Parade was playing on the living-room TV, I prepared the turkey and set it to roast on top of a bed of onions, taking the stuffing out, while shalmestere assembled the giblets, onion skins, and celery leaves and put them on the stove to simmer with turkey broth. Somewhere in there I took a shower, got dressed, fed and walked the dogs. (Kibble with raw turkey juice, yum!)

Every Thanksgiving there is at least one ingredient that we discover we're out of at the last minute. This year it was red wine for the cranberry sauce. Fortunately, the liquor store three blocks away was still open: it tends to have staff who know even less about wine than I do, but the guy behind the counter was able to guide me to the wall that has red wines, and I bought some Merlot for the cranberry sauce and some Cabernet Sauvignon for less-fruity applications.

While the Dog Show was playing on the living-room TV, I made cranberry sauce, then cleaned, stemmed, and sliced Brussels sprouts and set them in a frying pan to brown. Eventually took the bird out of the oven and moved it to a cutting board to rest. Put the stuffing back in the oven to brown on top, and put the pan of Brussels sprouts into the oven for a few minutes, then took them out, added salt, pepper, and Balsamic vinegar, and reduced that on the stovetop while shalmestere made gravy in the roasting pan.

Dinner was about 5:30, by which time most of the accumulated cruft of the past two months had been moved off the dining room table. Turkey was moist, flavorful, and gorgeously browned. Gravy was luscious and flavorful. Brussels sprouts were tender, tangy, and caramelized. Carrot slaw was bright, tangy, and sharp. Cranberry sauce was tangy, mulled-wine-ishly spicy. Everything worked well.

After an hour or so to let things settle, we each had a slice of cranberry-curd tart, which also worked well. Walked the dogs, fed them again, and had hot chocolate while watching the traditional WKRP Thanksgiving Turkey Drop episode.

Put away leftovers, loaded the dishwasher, had a quiet, laid-back evening.

Friday: house-cleaning, grocery shopping, pre-cooking, printing sheet music for music party on Saturday. One of the four people (plus one greyhound) invited reported a COVID exposure, and bailed on the music party.

Saturday: more house-cleaning, more cooking. People started showing up a little before 11:00. Walked dogs in the park (three greyhounds rather than the usual two). Emptied, filled, and ran dishwasher. Served lunch: lentil soup with smoked turkey (the latter of which had been in the freezer for a year, and this was a delicious way to use it up), garlic toast. Got out recorders, viols, lute, and played various Christmas-y music for several hours. Walked dogs again, played a little more Christmas-y music. Served dinner: roast turkey, turducken hand-pies (with turkey left over from Thanksgiving, duck left over from Christmas Day, and chicken to make sure there was enough, seasoned with ginger, dates, and dried cherries), carrot slaw. Set out a plate with ~five each of six or seven different kinds of homemade cookies, and sent guests home with packets of cookies. Emptied, filled, and ran dishwasher. Put away leftovers. Decompressed. Watched animated Christmas specials. Walked dogs again.

Sunday: Buy bubbly for midnight toast and breakfast mimosas. More house-cleaning. Walk dogs in the park. Give away a bunch of money. More cooking -- single-serving Beef Wellingtons with potatoes and either green beans or Brussels sprouts for Sunday dinner, not sure about Monday. Package and deliver boxes of cookies to neighbors. Watch Christmas-y stuff? Play shawms on the front steps at midnight?

Monday: More house-cleaning? Walk dogs in the park? Watch Christmas-y stuff? Watch non-Christmas-y stuff?

Monday:
Mid-day Trader Joe's run, no line to check out. WFH FTW. ✓
Made cranberry sauce Monday night. ✓

Tuesday:
Mid-day grocery run, no line to check out. WFH FTW. ✓
Made cranberry curd tart Tuesday night. ✓

Wednesday:
Acquired heritage turkey. ✓
Bought and installed chest freezer ($200 for a 7-ft³ freezer, top-rated by CR.), which we've wanted for years but which is especially appealing during leftover-generating season. ✓
Made chocolate pecan pie Wednesday night. ✓

Thursday:
Mass slaughter of onions has begun.
Anointing turkey with butter and sage before cooking.
Next up: sausage stuffing, green bean casserole, roasted carrots, gravy.

Yesterday: made two batches of cookies, a batch of "June-bug" chili (with whole almonds playing the title role), and a loaf of sourdough bread. Watched a Festival of Lessons and Carols from York Minster. Watched "Rudolph". Got to bed close to 1 AM after watching Christmas Eve service from the National Cathedral. Up at 2 AM to walk a sick dog. Up again at 8 AM to walk a sick dog. He'll probably be over it by tomorrow, but today bodes ill.

I dreamed that I had written a filk song (to some Simon & Garfunkel tune) and was premiering it before an audience, with some anxiety over whether they would get it and laugh at the right places, and I discovered that if you use the wrong word here, it confuses the audience so they don't get the joke there.

Today: make and eat our traditional Christmas-morning poffertjes/aebleskiver. Open prezzies. Make sausage stuffing, make some kind of green vegetable, heat a smoked turkey and eat that for dinner. Walk dogs a couple of times. If it stops raining, play some medieval Christmas music on shawms from the front steps. We have out-of-town friends coming over for dinner tomorrow night, so there will need to be cleaning and grocery-shopping, of which the grocery-shopping can probably wait until tomorrow.

We were invited to a friend's house for Thanksgiving dinner, but neither of us was particularly up for socializing this year so we declined, and planned a relatively-small, relatively-simple Thanksgiving dinner for two. We were both working Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, so the only thing that got pre-cooked was the roasted green beans with red onions, garlic, and balsamic vinegar.

About ten years ago we got a heritage turkey from a farm at the Greenmarket, roasted it for Thanksgiving, and were astounded by the flavor. Ever since then we've been pre-ordering a turkey from a farm at the Greenmarket, and they've been good but not OMG-wonderful-didn't-know-it-could-be-like-this. And it turns out they haven't been heritage-breed: they're pretty much the same turkeys you would get at the grocery store, just slightly better fed and more-humanely raised. So this year we switched suppliers and made sure to get a heritage-breed turkey, which I drove into Brooklyn to pick up on Wednesday. The butcher offered spatchcocking for no extra charge, so we took that option. Dry-brined it Wednesday evening (all the recipes say "at least 24 hours", but I figured late was better than nothing). The bird weighed in at a little under 11 pounds, so I figured the cooking time would be less than recommended in our usual recipe for a 15-16-pound turkey, but I wasn't sure how much less. I turned on the oven about 10 AM, roasted some sliced onions in the pan (sliced thicker this year so they wouldn't scorch as easily) for an hour, applied butter and sage leaves under the skin of the bird, and added it to the roasting pan on top of the onions around 11:30 or noon.

And somewhere in there I browned some sausage, added onions and celery and peppers and seasoned croutons and broth, and put the stuffing in a casserole dish.

After the bird had half an hour at nominally 425°F (according to the oven thermostat; the two third-party oven thermometers usually agree with one another that it's about 50°F below what the thermostat says), we turned the oven down to a convection-aided roast at nominal 350°F, added a cup of broth, set the timer for two hours, and I walked to the grocery store for the traditional Thanksgiving-day One Missing Essential Ingredient And If You're Going To The Store Anyway You Might As Well Get All These Other Things Too. It was a gorgeous day for a walk, even with a bag of groceries.

Somewhere in here shalmestere mixed up ingredients for cranberry-jalapeño-apple salsa (a change from the usual mulled-wine-spiced cranberry sauce, because for Reasons we had about two dozen apples of various varieties in the fridge), and I washed some baby potatoes, poured them into a small baking pan, sprinkled them with ground salt and pepper, and dabbed them with duck fat.

The stuffing went into the oven on the rack above the turkey when there were about 20-30 minutes left on the timer, followed a few minutes later by the potatoes. The timer went off, I pulled the turkey out, stuck an instant-read thermometer into the thigh, and it already said 175°F. In another place, it said 185°F. And similarly in a couple of other places, so I announced the bird was done and dinner would be at least half an hour earlier than planned. I cleared and set the table while shalmestere made gravy from the pan drippings and giblets and the bird rested at room temperature.

Verdict: the turkey was more flavorful than usual, but some of that was salt -- perhaps insufficiently-absorbed rub because it hadn't had long enough to dry-brine? It wasn't as moist as we would have liked, but OK, and we've certainly had drier turkey-breast many times in our lives. The salsa was a hit. The gravy was good, if a little on the salty side. The green beans were OK, although I think they should have had more time to come back to room temperature. The sausage stuffing was as good as it has been every year of our married life. We split a bottle of "Hotspur" cider (from Trader Joe's?) (shalmestere had used another bottle of the same in the gravy), and that was tasty.

After dinner we put away the leftovers, started the dishwasher, and took the hounds for a walk in the park. Dessert was raspberry-crumble bars (to which we had added a layer of chocolate because we could, and which had been in the fridge for weeks) with vanilla ice cream.

There are a lot of Orthodox Jews in our neighborhood. I don't know how many of them celebrate Thanksgiving, but it occurred to me that Thanksgiving is basically the same as most Jewish holidays: "They tried to kill us; we survived; let's eat!". Although the "they" for early-17c European settlers in North America was not a malevolent enemy but a morally-neutral combination of starvation, disease, and weather.

Saturday late morning: shalmestere and I went into Manhattan for a Viola Da Gamba Dojo concert at St. John's in the Village, a cute little church where we've heard a couple of early-music concerts before. Then went around the corner to a barbecue restaurant for dinner. Came home, tired. I don't know why this relatively mild schedule should have been so tiring -- at least shalmestere was actively playing music, while I spent most of the time just sitting in the pews reading or doing Google-work. But I made a start on this year's income taxes, which I think I can do without paying Turbo Tax or anybody else for the privilege.

Soaked Moongrrl's foot. The corn seems to be emerging a bit.

Sunday: I woke up, earlier than I intended to but later than usual, with Moongrrl panting. I thought she might need to go out, so I took her downstairs, whereupon she lay down on a nest and stopped panting. I offered her some water, because I'd been pretty dehydrated overnight, but she wasn't interested. So I started soaking the Romertopf to bake bread. (I had fed the starter Thursday night, made a sponge Friday night, added eggs, salt, and more flour Saturday morning, and formed a loaf Saturday night.) Fed dogs, walked dogs, set a beef roast to lying in salt (which should ideally have happened the night before), baked bread, and went back to work on the taxes. shalmestere woke up, and I made pancakes for brunch.

We both had showers, and the drain clogged: I got some hair and gunk out of it with the plunger, but it was still clogged, so I went to the basement to get the snake. Which also didn't seem to make much progress, although I eventually got the water level low enough that it wasn't standing in the tub (but left a bunch of gunk in the tub). In the evening, I tried to rinse out the remaining gunk, and it didn't go away, but at least the water drained more quickly. Still need to do some scrubbing and apply some drain-clearing compound.

shalmestere did several loads of laundry. I soaked Moongrrl's foot again.

I didn't make any progress on the (first) bedside table, but retrieved from the basement the thrift-store lamps we were planning to put on the bedside tables once both of them are built: confirmed that (a) the electrical connections work, (b) both lamps will need some gluing before I feel secure putting bulbs into them, and (c) both lamps need shades, but currently have no harps onto which to attach shades.

I made more progress on the taxes. We make too much money to use free-file, but we can use "free file fillable forms", in which there's minimal software support but at least you can fill out the forms on a computer, it does much of the arithmetic for you, and you can e-file. At the state level, we make too much money to e-file without paying a tax-prep company for the privilege, but there are forms one can fill in on a computer, it does much of the arithmetic for you, and you then print out the forms on dead trees and mail them in, because e-filing would hurt the business models of the tax-prep-software companies. And some of the forms have bugs. There's a line on Federal Schedule 1 that says "please attach Form 8889", and it'll automatically fill in the 1040 line from form 8889, except that form 8889 isn't actually available on-line -- I presume because the relevant law was changed in December, and they haven't finished implementing it in software yet. And on State form IT-196, line 42 is supposed to be auto-computed from lines 40 and 41, but in fact it ignores line 40, so line 42 is always zero, and I can't fill it in by myself because it's auto-computed, so the subsequent lines are wrong.

Mid-afternoon: the bread had cooled enough to try some. Much tastier than the previous batch: not only did I remember the salt, but I think I gave it a longer rise time. Yum!

Made and ate dinner -- roast beef and Brussels sprouts, both producing leftovers.

After dinner, we (mostly shalmestere) took most of the ornaments off the Christmas tree, found the appropriate boxes to put them in, and played Tetris to get those boxes into bigger boxes and the bigger boxes onto a shelf in the basement until next December.

Also looked at Moongrrl's foot. With a nail-trimmer, I managed to remove a majority of the corn that's been in her toe for months. Maybe she'll limp less now. Still needs more soaking to get out the remainder.