Thursday, November 26, 2015

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  On a Thanksgiving Day morning.  Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

We've got about 3" of snow on the ground, and the forecast says it's going to stay below freezing for about four days.  I know from past experience, though, that the driveway will melt early – and then freeze into ice.  So at daybreak I'm going out to do a little snowplowing.  It's 28°F right now, and it will likely be another degree or two colder when I get started.  Brrr!

Yesterday we started our Thanksgiving Day cooking.  We made a pumpkin pie with a recipe new to us, and we're not at all sure whether the result will be edible.  The appearance is ... different.  I'll let you know how that turned out :)  We also did something new (for us) with the turkey: we brined it.  The brine recipe we used is really weird sounding: lots of salt and water (expected that), but also lots of honey, garlic, thyme, parsley, and pepper (didn't expect them!).  We're soaking it in the brine for 18 hours; it comes out at 7 am this morning (about fifteen minutes from now, as I write).  From then on out the cooking of the turkey is pretty conventional, but that brine step is really weird.  If we don't like it, we've got plenty of great frozen meals to fall back on :)  Debbie also made some chocolate pudding, from scratch.  It's extremely rich (this is Debbie who made it!), and almost black with the dark chocolate in it.  I got a caffeine buzz just smelling it!  Tastes good, though, but I couldn't eat very much of it.

We've been enjoying a fire in our living room fireplace for the past couple of days (photo above).  We haven't yet got our fireplace door, but Debbie's sister had the brilliant idea of just getting a fireplace screen (they don't cost much on Amazon!).  We did that, and now we've had several mornings and evenings with the pleasure of a crackling fire to sit in front of.  We're going to run out of firewood soon, though :)


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