Thursday, December 6, 2012

A Winter Woodland Walk

This is an appendix of sorts to Thanksgiven. The day after Thanksgiving, I took a walk around the property of our rental house with my mom and my sister, and this is what we saw.






Intrepid explorer, Haley Bechtel, scouting the frontier with only her hoop, her wits, and her adorable hat

      Treasures:











Thanksgiven

I was going to stay home in LA this Thanksgiving, but I got a wild hair to fly to VA and surprise everyone. Turns out no one was really that surprised, but I'm glad I did it anyway. My trip there was relatively painless. I seemed to bypass all the madness of traveling the day before Thanksgiving, and the rest of the trip was ever so relaxing. I didn't even mind so much that it was bloody freezing outside.
This was the lovely rental house we stayed in on a GORGEOUS Thanksgiving day.

Thanksgiving with my parents means Etaturk, a gathering dating back to my mother's days at Elon College, when the students in the liberal arts forum got together to eat and drink and carry on in a sort of high brow low brow fashion. The Etaturk group and ritual has fluctuated and evolved over the years, but it still involves eating at midnight on Wednesday and dressing up in costumes. You may recall from my previous post how much I love Halloween. Well, I love it so much, I do it twice!

Does this costume look familiar?

My sister with her roommate, Tierney


I love this photo. It looks like some bizarre 19th century French play

Mikey giving a traditional toast


Larry in a turkey coma. Not sure why he's got my wig.

My favorite thing about doing dinner Wednesday night is that Thursday, when everyone else is cooking and being busy, we just laze around and eat pie, cozy in the knowledge that we're loafing while people elsewhere are working hard.

The ceremonial Thanksgiving morning MFK eggs. The ceremonial pie has already been eaten.




Perfect.

Friday I was back to the grind a bit. I spent about 6 hours launching the fundraising campaign for my album from my laptop in the dining room. It was sort of grueling, but it really needed to get done. If you haven't heard about this already, check out our page: http://www.kapipal.com/thepictureandtheframe, and - no pressure - maybe give a little if you've got it.

So once the work was done, I got back to the serious business of having fun. Mom and I made dinner with some help from Haley and Sunil. The idea was to use up everything in the fridge before disbanding the next morning. I think we did pretty darn well. There was left-over split pea soup, more turkey, ham, and stuffing. Mom made a nice mess o' greens, and I made a what's-in-the-fridge soup that was out of this world. I was inspired to make something vichysoisse-esque with the leftover mashed potatoes and cauliflower, but that was just a jumping off point. I added leeks, turkey bacon, white wine, and a little buttermilk, and it was divine!

Mom makes greens next to my magical wonder-soup

Sweeties. I forgot to mention they made a souffle and some cornbread.

The Spread, aka, Larry Carves Another Turkey

Results!

Consequences.

I would be remiss if I did not mention a couple more things before I draw this to a close. We have a time-honored tradition at Etaturk of writing an illustrated verse about each year, in the voice of Etaturk himself, the turkey king. It is presented before dinner by the artist, Renny Johnson, and the bard, none other than Larry Bechtel (though Larry took up the mantle only a few years ago). Here is ETA XLV:


The other thing I thought important to acknowledge was the presence of our canine companions:
Lucky

Lilly

and Buddy, who lost his leg to a flock of angry geese.


Three cheers!