Happy Black Friday!

It's still Thanksgiving here in the great northern wasteland, but for y'all it's Black Friday.

And Alaska is not a great northern wasteland. It's beautiful, but has more than it's fair share of crazies. Most of our politicians, for a start...

But this is not about that.

I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, whomever you are reading this, or maybe I am just shooting this out into space, hoping everyone had a wicked good Thursday. Some replacement karma for all those people whose driving makes me question their intelligence and brain capacities.

We had a quiet one. I got a 7.5 pound turkey breast. Mixed a couple of tablespoons of olive oil with dry mustard, fresh basil and green onion tops, salt, pepper, and THREE cloves of garlic (is clove the right word? It doesn't seem right, but it does. huh.) Added some chicken broth to the bottom of the pan. Which is an awesome rectangular roaster with a rack, nice and big, that I got for $10 at Fred Meyer's last year. Seemed like a good deal, and I really like the rack for roasting a turkey. Breast, at least. I think it would be great for a roast plus veggies too. I am going to have to remember that for when Mark gets home.

AND HE IS GOING TO BE BACK IN THE US VERY VERY SOON!!!!1!!!!!!!1!!!!

Sorry, just a tad excited about that bit.

Weird thing is, when I was carving the bird, the meat was so juicy I thought it was undercooked. No, silly. It's just when you roast the whole turkey, the breast meat gets a bit dried out.

It was garlicky and very good. We also had two kinds of stuffing -- one with herbed stuffing, sausage and corn, and one with herbed stuffing, sausage, apple, and apple cider.

The apply stuffing was a little too sweet, the ratio of cider to bread was off. But when mixed with the other stuffing, it was really good. Next time I wanna add some dried cranberry to the apple stuffing.

Cranberry Orange relish. Dump a bag of cranberries in a food processor or blender. Cut up an orange and drop that in there too, peel and all. Add 1 -2 cups of sugar to taste. Start skimpy with the sugar, it's better tart. I think I usually end up with somewhere north of a cup and a quarter, I think. Whirl it all together and that's it. It's better if it sits a while, it mellows a little. I generally don't get around to making it on Thanksgiving, in fact a few Thanksgivings ago Mark and I went to Fry's -- a fabulous grocery store in our Tucson neighborhood -- to buy a food processor, because I accidentally dumped a cup of orange juice into the guts of our blender and for some reason no one in my family was willing to plug it in and test it.

This cranberry is so much more fabulous than any cooked cranberry I have ever had. It's fresh and tart and delicious.

For dessert we had pumpkin pie. And a key lime pie from the grocer's freezer. Because I was just not in a pumpkin mood this year, and a light and fluffy pie instead of a heavy custard pie was a nice end to a big meal.

And then I talked on the phone for hours, since only a tiny fraction of my family is here.

Marilyn, my favorite sister, clued me into a really terrific Masterpiece Mysteries series. It's Sherlock Holmes, set in 21st century London. It's funny and entertaining and really terrific. Thor and Tess and I watched one of the three episodes on the internet...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/sherlock/series1.html

They are available until Dec 7.

It's available on DVD and I do believe that it will be on our Christmas list.

Oh, yeah. It snowed all day. We went from almost no snow, but plenty of ice, to four or five inches of snow. So tomorrow I can work off that turkey and stuffing by shoveling again. Yeah. Still not excited about the idea, but eh. Gotta be done.

I would post a picture here, of how lovely the neighborhood looks with a fresh layer of snow, but both the batteries in the camera are dead. oops.