A Reverie For a Gourmand

"If music be the food of love, play on."  William Shakespeare

With marriage comes the opportunity to start new traditions.  And although both my husband and I would love to be in Wisconsin with our parents and siblings for Thanksgiving, outrageous airfare prices control our holiday.  So here we are, in San Francisco, prepping for the feast of feasts.  This weekend we bought our first turkey.  The array of fowl at the store was intimidating, but we finally chose an eleven-pound, organic bird, thawed and ready to be roasted.  Now, we're trying to find recipes for side dishes like sweet potatoes, green beans and cranberries, as well as our pièce de résistance, the turkey.

My family recipe book

One of the best gifts my mom ever gave me was a family recipe book.  In it, she wrote all of my favorite recipes and every time I look at it, I not only see my mom's distinctive script, but I see my past.  I see myself in ballet shoes, prancing home from Nutcracker practice, just in time to hang our homemade pretzel ornaments on the tree.  I see my apron-clad mom letting me, for the first time, roll out potica (a Slovenian nut bread) dough on our kitchen table.  I see my Grandma Millie, pulling out a fresh loaf of chocolate chip banana bread, just for my sister and me.   Naturally, I've been scouring the book for recipes I can use this Thanksgiving and found a few that I will add to my repertoire.  Holiday mashed potatoes, sweet potato chips, cranberry sauce.  For the rest of the dishes, Ian and I will have to find our own recipes.

As our lives change, so do our traditions.  The key is remembering those loved ones who, present or not, you'd like to incorporate into your new traditions.  Mix new recipes with the old and, for a more global interpretation, build a future that's influenced by your past; this Thanksgiving will truly be a mix of my past, present and future, and I can't wait!

Recommendation: Pumpkin Spice Bars (courtesy of Williams-Sonoma)
1 package yellow cake mix; set aside 1 cup

One bar and only crumbs left!

1/2 cup butter, melted

3 eggs

1 jar of pumpkin butter

2 tbsp. milk

1 tbsp flour

1/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup butter, softened

1 tsp. cinnamon

Preheat over to 350 F.  Divide yellow cake mix, placing all but one cup in a mixing bowl.  Stir the melted butter and one egg into the cake mix.  Press the mixture into the bottom of a greased 9"x13" pan. (Although the pan I used was a bit smaller I think).  Mix the jar of pumpkin butter with two eggs and milk.  Pour over the cake mix.  Stir the reserved cup of cake mix with the flour, sugar, softened butter and cinnamon. (I used my hands for this). Mix together until crumbly.  Sprinkle over top of the pumpkin layer.  Bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until golden brown.  Cool.  Cut into 2" squares.  Serves 24.

Enjoy!

Euripides, Serendipity, and Divinity

It seems as though it's been a lifetime since the last time I wrote a post.  So much has happened to me in the past six months as life's tumultuous journey has led me to a place where I am so utterly happy I can hardly contain my delight!

In May, wedding bells rang loud as I married my best friend.  And although it's probably cliché to say that my wedding day was one of the best days of my life, it was.  My cheeks hurt so much from grinning ear-to-ear that the next morning I could barely open my mouth wide enough to enjoy the breakfast spread at the American Club in Kohler, WI.  But alas all self-control and humility was thrown out the window when I was presented with a mouth-watering buffet (the same reason my husband has officially banned me from OCB), and I miraculously managed to devour waffles through the pain.

Since then, things have changed drastically for me.  I moved to San Francisco and haven't looked back. Although if this were a perfect world, I'd have my Midwestern family out here with me, but c'est la vie.  The month after the move was difficult, however.  My husband had a job lined up and was working by mid-July. A different story for me, I was sending out what seemed like millions of resumes.  I was depressed, angry and feeling inadequate as the rejections continued to roll in.  Long story short, however, after a rather depressing first month in SF, I did find a job.  I had been so frustrated just sitting behind a computer that I put up a listing on craigslist for French tutoring.  A private junior high/high school contacted me and said they were hiring teachers and I should apply.  I did, and got an interview the next day.  Turns out, the director had gone to the same college as me and his son had been a student at the school I had been previously working at in Chicago.  It was all very serendipitous, but I can only interpret it as a deus ex machina.  When God helped me untangle a badly snarled plot of my unemployed life.  And the reason I know this term, deus ex machina, is thanks to a section on Greek tragedy that I'm now teaching.  Hooray for a job as an English (and French) teacher!  I now get paid to read!

So, put your faith into something, because good things will, and do, come.  But remember, you also need to put yourself out there, too.  It's easy to get into a slump, but life's too short to let it get you down because deep down, we all have the ability to evoke something comparable to the works of one of the great Greek tragedians.

Recommendation:  The works of Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides