Sow There!

Auntie Jeanne’s get-together is like the Thanksgiving dinners you see in the movies, with candles burning, soothing music on the CD player and bowls full of expensive delicacies.
My Thanksgiving started out Friday night with me frantically calling around asking friends for turkey cooking tips. I already knew (through previous trial and error) that one must remember to remove the neck and the gizzards from the bird before cooking.
Also, because we did not intend to put stuffing in the turkey, I learned from my mother to put an apple in the orifice of the bird to keep in the juices.
We also decided to cook with an oven bag. This was a delightful misadventure. After thoroughly massaging the bird with room-temperature butter, Tommy held the oven bag while I hoisted the bird into the plastic.
Not accustomed to lifting a slippery, 14-pound mound of meat, the bird slipped, tore through the oven bag and landed with a big thud on the kitchen linoleum.
Luckily, we had a good laugh about it.
We pulled the white plastic patio table from my best friend’s backyard and crammed six mismatched chairs into the living room.
Six clean cloth napkins were found in the back of a kitchen drawer but we had to settle for six unmatched wine glasses for the table.
The turkey turned out OK. However, I didn’t realize that it would cook faster in the oven bag. The meat literally slipped off the bone, which meant Tommy did not need to practice the turkey-carving techniques he had learned from page 137 of my cookbook.
Funny how preparing a big meal isn’t as stressful when you know ahead of time that it won’t be perfect.
However, some things with Thanksgiving are always the same. At crunch time — when everything is theoretically ready to serve at the same time — we had six people in the kitchen trying to carry things to the white plastic table.
As is the custom, the kitchen felt as accommodating as the galley in a commercial airplane.

Backyard art
In the afternoon we all made stepping stones in the backyard.
Tommy is in the process of making a new garden bed by carving into a spot in the lawn. We’re pretty excited about it and envision a new home for an herb garden near the ailing birch tree.
One requirement is that I have some stepping stones to be able to access the bed for weeding and harvesting.
Mom and I went to a big-box home supply shop and bought two 50-pound bags of quick-dry cement ($7.50 each). I also went to the dollar store and bought a bag of glass balls people use at the bottom of a fish bowl, and Mom brought some colored aquarium rocks.
Tommy dug circular holes in the dirt near the compost pile about three inches deep.
Next, Tommy and Leif mixed the cement in a 10-gallon bucket, quickly learning that the bucket had a crack in the side.
After the cement was mixed, we poured the soupy mess into the holes and started decorating.
Leif made an imprint of his 10-year-old hand and decorated it with the glass baubles. Mom used a stick to carve “peace” in the wet cement and outline the letter with aquarium rocks.
I wouldn’t say creativity was flowing, but we did the best with what we had to work with.
My best friend found a box of neon-colored refrigerator magnet letters left over from when Leif was a toddler.
We sorted them out on the couch and found enough letters to spell things out in the quickly drying cement.
We could have been more high-tech about the project. Several Web sites on stepping stones suggest using molds made from pie tins that have been sprayed with cooking oil or petroleum jelly. Other decorations could include broken pottery, marbles, coins, broken costume jewelry, or other strange items found in the garage.