11/25/2020

This morning has been a whirl of wind in preparation for Thanksgiving.

Picked up these adorable floral arrangements at the local farm store, potted in pumpkins. They used decorative cabbage, roses, alstroemeria, in these lovely purples, yellows, oranges. It is a fresh feeling I get when flower watching, I could just get lost in them. They clear my mind, until I am fresh and new again.

Listening to a new record, I just heard “drinking Coca Cola and red wine”. I wonder if this is an adaptation like rosè and Sprite, or if this is my mind playing tricks on me again. Sometimes I like to live in a world as if there were no google. It’s similar to how I felt as a kid I think, where I could with impunity believe things and just explore the world. I can remember times when I’d take closed containers of spices, a wooden spoon, and a bowl and pretend to mix the ingredients. I have a vivid memory of climbing into kitchen cabinets and holding my breath as long as I could. I must have watched an episode of Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers that talked about it. But I felt so free in that moment, I knew I could hold my breath just as long as those oyster divers would.

Waiting on a batch of three pumpkin pies to cook, I set up green bean casserole. Earlier this week, I looked online for the original green bean casserole, the one they used to put on either the can of mushroom soup or the can of Durkee fried crispy onions. This version was transcribed by a family member long ago and it now belongs to my sister. I recall looking at it a time or two as an adult, the neat handwriting on the index card. Yesterday, as I browsed YouTube, I could not find the original recipe. Many of the new renditions have sliced mushrooms, bacon, fresh sliced onion, even cheese. The only one I have ever eaten has soy sauce, I know that for sure.

I dumped them all into a pyrex dish:

1 can Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup

1 16 oz frozen French cut green beans,

1/2 Cup heavy cream

1 tsp soy sauce

handful of French’s crispy fried onions

Stir it all together

Bake 350 degrees F for 25 minutes

Add the rest of the fried onion toppings on top

Bake 10 minutes

Let cool 30 minutes, then serve

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Christmas dinner lunch

 

 

Clockwise from top: Roasted cauliflower with toasted quinoa, Vegetarian summer rolls, Vegetarian Thai Curry with quinoa, Bacon-wrapped scallops

I feel like the holidays should come with some kind of overarching theme, like caveat emptor, a Latin law term meaning buyer beware.  I consider it for a moment as an expanding world view of mine in the face of holiday stress that comes with the glee that results in over gifting, cooking too much, sleeping too little, and maybe thinking too much into the spirit of Christmas to realize that my candle is burning too low. The wick disappears on its own, dissolving into liquid wax. Wicks to wax, dust to dust, as they say, or perhaps that’s not a thing at all, but I still feel comfortable with caveat emptor.

They were mentioning the phrase today on NPR while discussing how to bottle and mass produce resveratrol, a chemical found on the skin of grapes and also in wine. Diane Rehm was exasperated, baffled, perhaps, at why as humans we cannot consume so much of seemingly life-saving panaceas in food, and if not, where one would be able to buy such a thing. Although I cannot quite put my finger on it, I feel like I can relate with the interviewer’s sentiment.

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http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-06-29/anti-aging-research