Fowl Feast

I love Thanksgiving. For us it is the low stress holiday. A four day weekend with no presents to buy, and nobody to please but ourselves. We're a first generation American family, so Thanksgiving is just for us.

Over the years it has been marked by feasts with friends, or vacation trips, including a memorable visit to Orlando. There, instead of testing out the well trodden attractions, we went instead to the "Crashorama", a demolition derby, the highlight of which was the 'figure eight school bus race'. You can use your imagination to envision how thrilling that was (no children were involved, I hasten to add). Once, back when I was a single hardworking postdoctoral researcher, I even spent the day in the lab and had lunch at a Chinese restaurant.

But now that we have our own little family we celebrate together, in our own idiosyncratic way. I don't eat meat, so we usually roast a fish. I don't like cinnamon, so we don't eat pumpkin pie. We invariably go up to the mountains and have a nice relaxing day topped with a slightly more special than usual meal.

This year though, we experienced cultural peer pressure for the very first time. Geekygirl is learning about Thanksgiving at preschool. The children are sharing with each other the way each of their families celebrates the holidays. Considering how many other first generation American families there are at preschool I was surprised at the universality of the "Turkey and pumpkin pie fest" that all the other children described. I bought the kids some pumpkin pie at the school bake sale and they absolutely loved its creamy cinnamony goodness. After years of skimming the surface of the holiday, I could feel its cultural gravity dragging us in.

"Why don't we eat turkey at Thanksgiving?" Geekygirl asked. She was unimpressed by my explanation, and by the promise of delicious roast halibut and said "How about we have chicken drumsticks for Thanksgiving?" On reflection this seemed like quite a good idea, and I'm all for encouraging Geekygirl to think for herself, so I promised that chicken drumsticks would be added to the menu.

The anticipation of the chicken drumsticks filled our conversations on the way home from school for subsequent days. "I'm going to hold the bone and gnaw the meat", Geekygirl told me. She has quite an obsession with carnivorous animals and this seems to have carried over into her cuisine choices. During one of these conversation I realized that Geekygirl had never actually eaten a chicken drumstick. Chicken nuggets, chicken sausages and chicken stew are part of my repertoire, but I could not recall ever before having given her a chicken's leg.

"What made you suggest that we made chicken drumsticks?" I asked her during one drive home. "The shopping game" she replied. And then the penny dropped. We love to play "Orchard Games" shopping cart game, and one item on the list is a roasted chicken. When we play we always mime eating or using the various items on the lists, and Geekydaddy would wrest an imaginary drumstick from the picture of the chicken and eat it lasciviously. Geekygirl loves to mimic him, and I guess he was so convincing in his acting that she wants to try one!

We braved the stores on Wednesday night before trekking up to the mountains, adopting the "divide and conquer" approach; geekydaddy did the bulk of the shopping at Trader Joe's, the kids and I picked up specialty items at Whole Foods. As well as a fine slab of halibut, we got a packet of chicken drumsticks. I also decided to bake not one, but two pies, my very first pumpkin pie and a cinnamon free apple.

We have an early winter here in Tahoe, feet of snow already, so after a pre dinner outing to the sledding hill we returned to a house warmed with the smell of baking bird, overlayed with pumpkin and, yes even my bete noir, cinnamon. It smelled wonderful.

Despite carefully marinating the drumsticks in an orange/olive oil glaze, and going online to remind myself how to cook chicken, I fully expected that when presented with an actual meat and bone drumstick Geekygirl would turn up her nose at it. Far from it. She dug into that bird with lipsmacking gusto, as did her brother. They made short work of both the pies too.

I'm finding that it is the children that ultimately drag you fully into your adopted country's culture. Today I'm thankful for our family, our lovely homes, and for the fantastic opportunities and friendships I have found in this great country. Happy Turkey (or Chicken Drumstick) day!

And this year we are thankful for....propane.

I know, it isn't exactly politically correct to be thankful for fossil fuels, but I have good reason.

I'm also thankful for the regular things too, of course my family, our jobs, our good health, and our home. We're lucky, and I"m grateful for it.  The kids even managed to sit at the Thanksgiving table for  oh, at least 6 minutes, none of which I was actually sitting down, mind you, and they even tasted a few mouthfuls of the sweet potato casserole and the fennel and orange baked halibut (no turkey for us, I"m a pescatarian) in between blowing bubbles in their chocolate milk and complaining that they wanted their ice cream. They at least enjoyed the spiced apple cake that we miraculously manged to create despite a) the recipe, Gorden Ramsey's, being in metric weights and my only having American cups at hand, (thank you google converter), b) the kids adding the baking powder without my supervision c) not having the right shaped cake tin, and d) baking it at 7000ft.

That takes me back to the propane. We are celebrating our Thanksgiving at our cabin in Tahoe. Geekydaddy and I bought this millstone vacation home the year we married, gazing starry eyed into a future of gamboling dogs and giggling children growing up together in this mountain hideaway. This was back when buying real estate in California seemed like a good idea. We love the house, we bought it to use, not as an investment, but lets just say it is a good job that we don't need to sell it any time soon!  I"m thankful for that, too. And since I'm feeling sentimental, I'm also grateful for the vast beauty of the Sierra Nevada mountains. I was knocked down by the sheer scale of the scenery when I first moved to California, and never tire of the peaks, crags and views.

The house we bought was perfect for a couple and a dog. It had a small galley kitchen, a big living room for parties, and was heated by two wood burning stoves.

This meant that upon arrival, usually around midnight on Friday night the house was at the same temperature as the outside; usually below freezing. We would put on hats and double layers of clothing, light the two fires using cold logs hauled up from the basement, then knock back a couple of Scotches and retire to bed fully clothed under two down comforters. Usually the place would be warmish by morning, but on the coldest weekends the house would reach a habitable temperature by about Sunday, just in time for us to leave. This was no hardship for two hardy skiers. Central heat, who needs it, we crowed.

Once Geekygirl arrived I managed the frigid arrival routine by snuggling her with me in bed, but once her brother joined us it became impossible for me to keep them both warm while Geekydaddy struggled with the fires. On one impossible evening two winters ago I held two freezing howling children while Geekydaddy's frantic firemaking efforts caused the chimneys to billow black smoke back into the house, meaning we had to open all the windows to the blizzard outside, dissipating the meagre amount of heat we had generated. We decided that we had to get central heat put in.

Last year we remodelled the whole place, and spent our Holidays in South Africa instead.  Yes, we took an almost three year old and an almost one year old half way around the world on 27 hours worth of flights. I am very thankful not to be doing that again this year!

It was completed (well almost, but that is another story!) this summer, but this is the first winter weekend we have spent here since the revamp. The seasons change fast up here in the mountains, we were last up in October when it was a balmy 65oF, but now there is a foot or so of snow crunching underfoot and a distinct chill in the air. We arrived late on Wednesday night, pulled into our new garage (instead of having to dig our way to the door), left the kids sleeping warm in their car seats while we flipped the heating switch and waited for the house (ambient temperature about 0oC) to get warm. I ran the kids duvets through the dryer to make their beds snug-buggly, and by the time they were ready the house had already reached 5oC. They hardly stirred on transfer. We unpacked the groceries, knocked back a welcome beer, then put ourselves to bed and hour or so later, the house already quite pleasantly warm.

Central heat is an amazing thing. Thanks, propane!