November Kitchens and Foods

 Evelyn and Tom’s Kitchen, Fairfax, VA

m

Evelyn and Tom have all new doors and door handles, and a new white paint job in their kitchen.
I’m featuring their kitchen this month because it’s much more interesting than my own kitchen!

From Evelyn’s Kitchen

Seared tuna, bread, and salad.

Turkey breast, stuffing, and roast vegetables in Evelyn’s kitchen.

Also in Fairfax

Fantastic Mr. Fox lives in the back yard. (Tom’s photo, shared with Saturday Critters),

Also at Evelyn’s: we watched the semifinals of the Great British Baking Show.

Visiting W. Lafayette, IN

Earlier in November, we visited Elaine and Larry; she had baked some of her wonderful pies.

Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor Winter Dinner

This is Sherry, one of the original Historians, with her potluck contribution:
her grandmother’s sausage, apple, and squash casserole from the 1930s.

The theme of the dinner was APPLES. My Waldorf Salad is a classic American dish.
When first introduced at the Waldorf Hotel in New York in 1896, it had only apples, celery, and mayonnaise.
Now it has lots of other ingredients as well.

Dining at Home in Ann Arbor

Len made Conchas: Mexican sweet rolls with a crunchy topping

Our Ann Arbor kitchen wasn’t very busy this month, as we were preparing for our trips to Indiana and Virginia, and then we were traveling. So I had more to say about other kitchens and other food experiences this month. And now I’m home from Fairfax, and of course I found out who won the 2024 Great British Baking Show.

Sharing with In My Kitchen from Sherry’s Pickings and Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz

! © 2024 mae sander.

“James” by Percival Everett

 

Think about what it would mean to be enslaved — utterly enslaved — to a master/owner who detested you and everybody like you. Imagine the worst injustices, cruelties, and aggressions you would be subjected to by totally unrestrained bullys. Imagine how humiliated and angry and desperate you would be. Imagine also how you would feel if these outrages were perpetrated without restraint on your own family and those you loved. Imagine being aware that any response you made could not only result in more punishment and outrage against yourself, but also vast injustices against your family and fellow slaves, or even against enslaved people you didn’t know.

Have you tried to imagine all this? You haven’t come close to what Percival Everett’s brilliant and penetrating novel James can show you about how a slave owner (or any random white person) in pre-Civil-War America could demean a human being who was “owned” and destroy both body and spirit. The absolute power of whites over blacks, even free blacks, at that time is nearly unimaginable, but Everett forces the reader to visualize the horrors. 

James, of course, is a retelling of Mark Twain’s masterpiece Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain forced the reader to see slavery from the eyes of a naive boy with an innate sense of justice, despite his social background. James goes beyond the original for the modern reader because the author’s  eyes are twentieth-century eyes; further, the author gives the character James a dual perspective, both as an educated man (self-educated) and as a helpless victim. 

James is a totally different book, and totally different from most retold stories. Its power comes from the juxtaposition of two visions from two authors and two eras. Impressively, it also captures — and extends — Mark Twain’s humor. In both books, humor enriches and transforms the sadness embedded in the novel. At least that’s how I see it.

The book is a best-seller and award winner, so there are plenty of reviews that unlike this one actually summarize the plot and compare the two versions in detail.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Thanksgiving Dinner

  

 And Miriam baked this Apple Galette for dessert.

Photos © 2024 mae sander

Another Poem for Thanksgiving Prep

 

Yam

BY BRUCE GUERNSEY

The potato that ate all its carrots, 

can see in the dark like a mole,

its eyes the scars

from centuries of shovels, tines.

May spelled backwards

because it hates the light,

pawing its way, padding along, 

there in the catacombs.

From The Poetry Foundation

Thanksgiving Dinner Preparations

Chopping onions for stuffing.

Today along with Thanksgiving preparations and visiting with the family, I have been reading appropriate poetry from The Poetry Foundation website. I’ve read several poems about autumn, about the history and meaning of Thanksgiving, and to go with my first bit of work (chopping onions) I read a few poems about onions. Here are a few lines from the poem that fits with what I’m doing. If you are in the mood for a poem about the holiday, see this page: Thanksgiving Poems. I may post more later. Or not.

 Onions

BY WILLIAM MATTHEWS

How easily happiness begins by   

dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter   

slithers and swirls across the floor   

of the sauté pan, especially if its   

errant path crosses a tiny slick

of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.

This could mean soup or risotto   

or chutney (from the Sanskrit

chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions   

go limp and then nacreous

and then what cookbooks call clear,   

though if they were eyes you could see

 

……..

   

This is the best domestic perfume.   

You sit down to eat with a rumor

of onions still on your twice-washed   

hands and lift to your mouth a hint

of a story about loam and usual   

endurance. It’s there when you clean up   

and rinse the wine glasses and make   

a joke, and you leave the minutest   

whiff of it on the light switch,

later, when you climb the stairs.

Happy Thanksgiving

 

Pre-Thanksgiving Dinner Pictures

Salad, seared tuna, scallops, and white wine. Great job, Tom and Evelyn!

Thanksgiving Turkey Butter (tastes like butter)

Scallops — Tom’s recipe. Also his seared tuna.

Movie we watched: The Prestige (2006)

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Thanksgiving Prep: Key Lime Pie

Making Pie Crust

Filling the pre-baked crust.

Out of the oven.

Looking Forward to Tomorrow

Tomorrow: Evelyn will add whipped cream (photo from a past Thanksgiving)
Update: we actually ate the pie on Thanksgiving Eve.

Tomorrow’s dessert (photo from a past Thanksgiving).

Photos © 2014-2024 mae sander

Dragons

 

All ceramics by Evelyn Sander 2024

Blog post © 2024 mae sander