Thanksgiving Eve

Oh, how I love Thanksgiving! I learned about 4 years ago, when we started having Thanksgiving dinner in our own home instead of enduring the travails of visiting others, that I must take the Monday after Thanksgiving off. It's starts tonight - the eve of the big eating day. This year I began by making the ginger cranberry chutney and the maple pecan tart.

Tomorrow I will leap from my bed and start cooking. I will cook all day, and I will eat, and the kids will run around my feet and everyone will sit around chatting and drinking beer (Jeremiah's most recent homebrew is just now ready to be popped open). We'll start the day with just a sour cream coffee cake. I like to keep it down to something this simple because we need to pace ourselves. This year I decided we should eat dinner a little later, like 5, and I'm going to make a beef and barley soup for lunch. The soup bones are in the fridge waiting to lend their flavor to the stock. There will be the peeling and the chopping and the baking and the whole house will smell fantastic.

Then the rest of the weekend I'll feel compelled to be as active as possible to work off the day of senseless eating. And, just because I'm in the swing of it, I'll probably make more stuff. By Sunday evening I'll collapse into bed feeling destroyed. And because I was wise and gave it some thought, I will lounge in bed until the girls force me to get up on Monday. Perhaps I'll use my time off to plan Christmas dinner...

Happy Thanksgiving!