Thanksgiving gathering

Great Thanksgiving food, and wonderful family gatherings. This fruit dish my brother Eric set out captures the spirit of the food, laden with layers of flavor, calories and family history. My brothers and I spent the days before Thanksgiving e-mailing our last-minute recollections about the Thanksgiving foods from our childhood, and then dividing up who would make what. The fruit plate above was an accurate recreation of our grandmother Irene's Thanksgiving centerpiece (and we then remembered our mother saying, "Don't pick at the grapes, you'll make them look like a skeleton!").

Eric prepared the turkey masterfully, despite the usual struggle over getting the dark meat cooked without the white meat drying out. (I have since seen the suggestion described in this link.)

The Hochheimer clan gathered for a photograph before dinner. (None of us are named Hochheimer anymore; we are descendants and cousins and in-laws. I recently heard a musing about what constitutes life and death; one view proposed was that we have a form of life as long as someone still speaks your name. By this measure, my grandparents (Larry and Irene Hochheimer) are alive and well!)

I made sticky buns using the same recipe our mother used (from the now-closed Woodbine Cottage in Sunapee, New Hampshire. Thank you David for your late-night help!). I also made my cousin Lynn's cranberry-strawberry jello mold (came out great) and my first-ever pecan pie (filling was tasty, crust was tough).

There was a sweet moment when everyone swarmed around the kitchen island of Eric's renovated house, and we all hungrily spooned and speared, oohed and ahhed, and then made our way to seats with full plates. The rest of the night saw us going from table to kitchen, back to another seat to eat and chat with other relatives. It was great Thanksgiving in which the food was a medium with which we both looked back and created forward, remembered and made new memories. Certainly a gathering to be thankful for! (And perhaps next year I will write about the next day’s gathering with Amy’s family, and how a very smelly cheese has become a Thanksgiving staple …)

Fishes

What is it that so completely captures our attention when we see the fish in the aquarium? I love to stand and watch the fish swim; I feel an odd affinity with them. Not that I would like to be a fish in a tank ... but the patterns of their movement, their unconscious beauty and their muscular power somehow embody an aspect of my dreams. Watching them is like a meditation (or more properly, perhaps: watching the fish is a meditation).

Part of me wonders whether it matters -- to them? to me? -- that the fish are trapped in the artificial environment. But of course one aspect of existence is to live within an environment, within a context, and to learn how to live most fully within those limits. The fish don't have to wax philosophical about it; they just are where and how they are. All their energy goes into swimming.

The fish are beautiful and strange. They ignore each other, and yet every movement communicates clear knowledge of where the others are.

I move from tank to tank, watching. Crisscrossing in the airy building from one viewing spot to the next, mingling with crowds then standing alone, I watch. The fish don't care that I am there. But there is something meaningful to me about the fact that they are there.

Sweet Peppers

Sweet peppers (also called Bell peppers) have beautiful shapes. Their sensual curves contain sweet, crunchy flesh. Inside are not only the seeds of the next generation, but also (often) surprising lumps of smaller pepper bits (I haven't been able to find a proper term for these "babies").


Green, yellow, orange and red peppers are all fruit of the same plant - Capsicum annuum. The green are the least ripe; the red are the ripest; the yellow and orange peppers fall in between. As the pepper ripens, its nutritional content changes -- red peppers have much more Vitamin A, Vitamin C, and Beta Carotene than the green. (The yellow and orange, which taste the best to me, surprisingly have less Vitamin A and Beta Carotene than either the green or the red.)

The sweet peppers are related to all the various hot chili peppers -- but not to the plant that gives us peppercorns (white and black pepper, Piper nigrum). The fleshy peppers all originate in Central and South America, while the peppercorns come from India.

Botany not withstanding, sharp flavor seems connected to sharp flavor. When we look for heat in our food, where better to turn than a pepper? But give praise also to the sweet peppers, which put juicy flavor, beautiful shapes and vibrant color in our salads.

Pumpkin Birthday

Amy's birthday falls on Halloween (every year!). This year, in honor of her 50th, she wore the pumpkin costume her grandparents made for her when she was 8 years old. It was a perfect expression of Amy's incredible talent for bringing out the "inner child" in all of us.
We dressed up, although we didn't all look as cute as Charlotte with her cat ears and tail.

We played games. (Yes, that is a candy corn balanced on Maya's nose.)

We ate the beautifully decorated cake (marzipan skeleton courtesy of our niece Hannah, who told us that the umbrella was intended to keep the skeleton from getting sunburned).

The pinata, which of course was designed as a pumpkin, was attacked by costumed partyers of all ages
and, destroyed, deposited its contents of candy and toys on the ground, where they were equitably distributed to the youngest generation.

All in all, a very satisfying birthday for Amy and Halloween for us all !!