Gratitude

The holiday weekend was excellent.

We had a lovely time with our Baltimore friends. Despite beating me at Scrabble, they are very good house guests and are more than welcome to come back and stay anytime they'd like. It felt really good to have friends we've known (and loved) for years come to share the holiday with us, and meet and get to know our little Liam. We sent them off this morning with muffins made from the leftover custard from my Pumpkin Pie, and we're looking forward to their wedding this August.

Of the four pies I made there is little less than half of one pie left. Next time, I will slice the lemons for the Ohio Shaker Lemon Pie much, much thinner (when the recipe says "paper thin" one should oblige) and let them macerate a bit longer. My favorite pie this Thanksgiving was, hands down, the Chess Pie, a sweet-rich-tasty pie very closely related to the Pecan Pie and every bit as Southern.

The feast itself was a delicious success. I managed to include all the traditional favorites (with the exception of green bean casserole) and correctly prepare Marcia's rolls, an heirloom recipe I can now include in my own repertoire.  I highly recommend the shield and baste technique for preparing any large bird as it resulted in terrifically tender and flavorful meat. While it may seem like I'm just raving about the meal because I prepared it, I really am a humble cook genuinely impressed with my ability to churn out a full-on Thanksgiving meal with an active, six-month old son clinging to my breast. I'm excited to do it again next year.

And since no Thanksgiving would be complete without an expression of thankful reflection, here goes.

I'm thankful for the eggs, the milk, the butter, the flour, the turkey, the yeast, the nuts and fruits of our meal, and for the earth it all came from. I'm thankful for our wonderful companions, and for our families so far away. I'm thankful for my husband and his Super Daddying and dish-washing. I'm thankful for our boy. I'm thankful for our friends and the lovely brisk weather and for my dog. But what I am most thankful for is the simple realization that I have so much to be thankful for and the opportunity to express my gratitude. 

Pie Dough and Poultry.

I've been reading about Turkey.

It's my first time preparing Thanksgiving dinner. Seriously.

It's not a holiday I remember celebrating as a child. But, once Lane began inviting me to his family gatherings I developed a new appreciation for the Thanksgiving feast. We're a small group in comparison to my side of the family--the six of us fit nicely around the formal dining room table tastefully decorated with inspiration from Southern and Midwest Living. Dad reads from The Book of Common Prayer, and we eat. It's a lovely holiday and I thoroughly enjoy spending it with them. This is our first year celebrating Thanksgiving in Chattanooga and away from our family.

It's also our first Thanksgiving with Liam. He'll be eating "solid" food for the first time. I'll be serving him rice cereal prepared with fresh milk. We also have great friends coming from Baltimore to spend the holiday and stay the weekend with us, with cameo appearances from a few of our favorite Chattanooga people. I have been working on the menu for the last three weeks and have already begun the preparations. The turkey has been thawing since yesterday morning. The orange-balsamic cranberry sauce was last night's project. Tonight I made pie dough for four pies and have bright lemons macerating on the counter. Tomorrow I'll be assembling the stuffing, baking pies, and starting Marcia's rolls.

Can you tell how excited I am?

I have also decided to roast the turkey using a traditional shield and baste method from The Joy. My fourteen pound bird will be rubbed all over with a mixture of butter and olive oil, salted and peppered inside and out, set ever-so-gently on a roasting rack to have its breasts covered with a cheesecloth soaked in the butter and olive oil combination. Then it's into a three-hundred and twenty-five degree oven for the better part of Thursday morning, basted every with its own juices every half hour.

I'm looking forward to a delicious meal and quality time with fantastic people. While I love and miss our families dearly, we'll be back in Michigan soon enough.

A Very Happy Half Birthday.

Tomorrow is Liam's first Half Birthday. The last six months have been absolutely incredible. I am amazed every day at how much this boy changes and grows, and at my own hyper-acute awareness of each new thing about him. I'm also blessed with a wonderful, thoughtful, attractive husband who happily changes the dirtiest diapers and mops the floors on his hands and knees. Together we're happily settling in to the serial ups and downs of parenting. 

For selfish reasons I've decided that Half Birthdays should to be celebrated in much the same way that Whole Birthdays are, at least for the first few years of the child's life. A gift, a cupcake (not this year of course), maybe a party hat... the general festivities of birthdays, twice a year. Since he's not old enough for cake yet, Liam's Half Birthday will consist of spending the day with Mommy and his new Fisher Price Laugh and Learn Learning Puppy.

You may be wondering what my selfish reasons are for giving him this wonderful experience.  Well, as you can plainly see Liam was born in May. He came five weeks early on the Saturday we were planning to begin packing up our tiny one-bedroom flat to move into a much larger three-bedroom home. What you don't see is that my husband's birthday is in May as well. In fact their birthdays are only eight days apart. So, naturally they'll get to celebrate their birthdays together. I figure if I institute the Half Birthday ritual now, I'll be able to share my November Whole Birthday with Liam's and Lane's November Half Birthdays, and they'll be able to share their May Whole Birthday's with Mommy's May Half Birthday!

Who knows, maybe this newly forming tradition will stick and the children of my children will have the pleasure of celebrating their Half Birthdays too... who doesn't like more cake?

No, I'm Not a Poet.

In the tenth book of Plato's Republic, Socrates warns against allowing poets admission to the ideal city. He says to Glaucon, "For if you grant admission to the honeyed Muse in lyric or in epic, pleasure and pain will be the lords of your city instead of law and that which shall from time to time have approved itself to the general reason as the best." Now, I'm no poet, and it's likely I'm no one's muse, but despite my poetico-philosophical mediocrity, I do have a penchant for Plato.

So, the title for this blog.

I am at this late point in the evening waiting for my soon-to-be-6-month-old, Liam, to wake up for his midnight snack. It's too late to attempt sleep now for as soon as ear meets pillow Liam will stir with pangs of hunger.  On most weekend nights my generous husband will wait up for the midnight snack so that Mommy can catch up on the sleep she lost during the week but alas, tonight he is asleep before me. I decided to write a blog instead and (of course) had to name it. I pulled my well-worn Collected Dialogues of Plato, the Hamilton/Cairns with the green cover that I used in graduate school, and serendipitously opened to this particular scene in the Republic. It was most certainly one of those grab-the-nearest-book-and-open-to-a-random-page situations.

Apropos? you ask. Well, in a way, yes and, in a way, no. I dedicated some of my graduate studies to Plato's scattered commentary on the poets and on poetry and still enjoy ruminating on the subject. But, in no way do I think that reading this blog would be for anyone what Plato thinks poetry would be to Kallipolis.

I intend to share my thoughts here. Some poetic, others philosophical. I'll share my photos, and talk about my family, my food, my varied research, and my life, and pass along the good things I come across to you. For now, since Liam has been fed and put back to bed I am going to head off myself, there are only a few precious hours for sleep before I wake with him once again.