thanksgiving wrap up//welcome christmas!

well, admittedly i dropped off the face of the blog planet for the past couple of days, so i missed quite few daily photo updates.  i do have some to share today, though!

but not of thanksgiving.

don't worry, thanksgiving happened!  it happened and it was quite lovely - i was just too busy eating every hour or so to think to take any photos of the wonderful foods i was eating.  in fact, this is the only picture i thought to take and it's of nothing but a mostly empty wine glass!

the tail end of thanksgiving.

don't let this sad, unpoetic, "i'm a lonely wine glass on an empty table" photo fool you - this was probably one of the only times the table didn't have food on it.  there was so much! we somehow got ourselves on an eating schedule reminiscent of that of a baby bird - we ate small bits very often.  in the days following thanksgiving garret and i have more than once looked at each other and said "um... are you... hungry?" despite the fact that we just ate.  your stomach can get used to eating a ton of food pretty easily, i guess.  we're waning ourselves off of the large appetites that thanksgiving left us with.

we're still [happily] knee-deep in leftovers.  it seems that no matter how many times we take out the containers that hold all of the wonderful leftovers, we can't even put a dent in the food.  anyone have any creative turkey recipes to share?  if not we'll gleefully continue to eat plate after plate of the thanksgiving classics - turkey and gravy, green bean casserole, and garret's new favorite food, stuffing.

our company left on saturday morning, which left us with two days before the work week started again to continue holiday-ing.  yesterday we did my favorite thing of the year and went and got a christmas tree!  in brooklyn this usually meant going to a street corner and finding the smallest possible tree.  literally tiny - here's our tree from brooklyn last year:

our tiny little charlie brown tree in brooklyn,
christmas 2010.

we also apparently have a love for underdogs and bought the most deformed tree possible last year?  why are it's branches facing upwards instead of down?

anyway, this year when we went to get our tree, we realized that we actually didn't need to get the smallest tree available.  we have pretty high ceilings, here, and the space for a giant tree if we wanted one, too.  old habits die hard though, and i found myself sizing each tree up by its comparison in size to me (read: how small it was).  we picked one only slightly taller than us, and though we could have gone bigger, i think we found the perfect one.

i love christmas trees.  literally, i love them.  when i was a kid, i would wish i could sleep beneath the christmas tree.  when we lived in brooklyn and i would have to leave to go to work in the morning, i would actually feel sad that i couldn't spend more time with my christmas tree.  it's ridiculous, but in the scene in home alone 2 when buzz is putting candlesticks behind kevin's ears and embarrassing him, i'm hardly even paying attention to the narrative because i agree with the song they're singing so much.  so while it's great that as a writer, i get to work from home now and be with garret and murgy all day.... currently, i'm just really really excited that this year, i can sit by my christmas tree and do work all day every day.

we got our tree from the river valley market in wilmington, a small country style grocery store/deli down the street from us.

river valley market in wilmington, vt

the trees at river valley market

they had plenty of trees to choose from but we chose this little guy.

garret with our tree

murgy, like last year, was suspicious of our decision to bring a tree indoors.  some dogs just don't understand.  here she is investigating:

once the tree had passed murgy's inspection, we put it up and got to decorating.  here it is decorated: 

christmas in vermont,  2011.

i now only sit in the seat right next to the tree - hah!

all decorated for the holidays, we sat down and enjoyed a glass of champagne to celebrate our first christmas in vermont.

cheers! happy holidays!

here's to a happy and healthy holiday season!

p.s. if you happened to click the hyperlink to the clip of home alone 2 above within the text, you're welcome for finding a version where the dialogue is dubbed.

cranberry sauce and other thanksgiving preparations

as i may or may not have mentioned to everyone i know, this year garret and i are hosting thanksgiving - it's our first thanksgiving with family visiting our home!  garret's parents, his aunt laura, his grandma, and his aunt rusty are visiting us.  and vermont couldn't be a prettier backdrop to such a holiday! i know this is something we'll remember forever.  i'm just hoping we remember "oh, the great thanksgiving we had in vermont our first year" instead of "the time we ruined thanksgiving" aka "the disaster of the century" aka "thanksgiving 2011: a comedy of errors".  here's hoping we pull it off!

in my newfound quest towards preparedness i've been baking/cooking a lot today - two days early!  being prepared and cooking in advance is literally something that would have been a foreign thought to me as recently as six months ago.  i didn't do much by way of preparing anything in advance in my tiny brooklyn kitchen (where would the prepared stuff have gone? also, when would i have done that - on the subway?) and by "didn't do much by way of preparing" i pretty much mean that i never prepared anything in advance.  as in... there was one time when we had friends coming over for dinner and i was walking down the street with groceries for that dinner no more than 30 minutes before their arrival.  yikes!  

i don't know what changed, but at some point i realized - if you want to serve quiche for breakfast, make it a day early and you won't have to get up at 6am to make a mess and cook that day.  novel idea, me.  so, today i made two loaves of bread (banana and cranberry, for breakfast on friday) and homemade cranberry sauce.  now, i'm usually a big fan of the canned stuff (seriously - it's delicious and the shape is charming) but i felt like "real" cranberry sauce seemed more appropriate (read: grown up?) so i went for it.  it was really quite easy and the result is delicious.  it's chilling in my refrigerator waiting to be consumed two days from now as i write.

in case you want to try it out, here's the recipe:

1 12 oz bag of cranberries

1/3 cup of white sugar

2/3 cup of brown sugar

3/4 cup of orange juice

the zest of one orange

the juice of one orange

directions: put everything in a pot on medium high.  let it go!  as the liquid starts to cook off, you may want to turn it down more - maybe to medium low or so.  the cranberries will burst from time to time - the skins will crack open as the sauce forms.  the total cooking time is around 25 minutes.

i was amazed at how quickly it became something resembling cranberry sauce!! here's a (rather unpoetic) picture of the finished product... though i swear that in real life it's citrusy delicious cranberry stuff and not zombie guts, which is what it looks like here.