Thanksgiving playlist

 

It’s my great fortune to have spent half my life with men who care deeply about music.  My boyfriend in college introduced me to the pleasures of live music, and to musical promiscuity.  He listened to Sinead O’Connor, George Strait, and Anita Baker (we saw the latter two in concert on two nights in a row).   Sister called him my iconic ex-boyfriend.  We dated for two-and-half-years, which isn’t really that long, and I dated before and I dated after, but he’s my real Ex.  He had an outsized influence on me, in some terrible ways and some good ones.  I broke up with him in a transatlantic phone call 19 years and 11 months ago, and by now the good ways are more present in my memory than the bad ones.

Daniel… oh Daniel and music.  Daniel still buys CDs in abundance.  Daniel listens to everything.  He had the new Rhianna record the day it came out.  He knows every Rossini song — not just the operas.  Music matters to him more than to anyone I’ve ever known.  When we lived together in his apartment, we would come home from work and put on music immediately.  There are a few discs from the mid-1990s that bring me right back there — Gipsy Kings, Cyrus Chestnut, Van Morrison, some Faure.

Tomorrow I’ll be cooking most of the day, and I’ll be listening to selections from the stack above.  I stopped keeping up with new music about the time Milo was born, and that’s okay with me.  I like stuff I can sing along to already.  (Not shown: The Best of Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler; Dire Straits, Making Movies (to die! “Romeo & Juliet,” “Expresso Love,” “Hand in Hand” — each one a masterpiece, and all three on the same disc);  Recurring Dream, The Very Best of Crowded House; Unsung, Slaid Cleaves (“Roberta” — I always listen to that song 3 times or more in a row.)

In case you were wondering, the raw, vegan pumpkin pie recipe seems to be a great success.  The made-up rice recipe would have been good if I’d used wild rice, but I bought Japonica rice, which is black rice and very sticky, so the dish is not a success.  It’s good enough to serve, but not good enough to make again.  Sticky rice just isn’t right for Thanksgiving.  And I forgot to buy walnuts for the bread sauce for the green bean dish, so it’s more of a cashew sauce.  It’s good, but not what I intended.

The eve’s eve

Just yesterday I was jotting down notes for a valedictory post.  It turns out that more writing leads to more writing, until it doesn’t.  And my book is taking up all my writing energy.  That’s a good thing, I think.  I really like what I’m writing.  I feel really good when I do it.  It’s going very, very slowly, but it’s good stuff.  It’s definitely what I should be doing now.  But, as always happens with me (the links too numerous to track down), as soon as I tell myself or others that I’m going to stop blogging, I start thinking about things I want to blog about.  Thus, this post.

I live in a city that takes holidays very seriously.  Over the last several years, I’ve noticed a Thanksgiving creep: not just the day after Thanksgiving but also the day before has become part of the holiday.  For my part, I’m working from home tomorrow.  But tonight has a delicious eve-of-holiday-eve feeling.  Tomorrow, and tomorrow night especially, will be a frenzy of cooking and preparing, but tonight is cozy and calm.  Work isn’t done, by any means, but it feels done with.  We aren’t rushing around the house getting ready to launch the next day.  We’re taking a night off in some way — and we never take a night off.

Most observant Jews I know love Thanksgiving.  It’s a holiday that we can participate in just like everybody else.  It’s also not ballasted (is that a word? I want something less pejorative than “encrusted” or “weighted down” or “burdened” — definitely not burdened) with so many obligations.  I love my holidays, especially Sukkot, but these holidays entail hours in synagogue, long walks to and from synagogue.  There’s no going to a pre-meal yoga class, no goofing off on the internet, no dash out to buy cinnamon or lemons or scallions that I forgot that will make the recipe perfect.  There is a rigor built in — there’s a lot of advance planning and very little indolence.

But Thanksgiving?  Wheee!!!!!  A holiday with no rules — who could imagine something so delicious and indulgent?   We love, love, love Thanksgiving.

Tomorrow, after working, I’ll start cooking.  I’m already soaking the cashews for a vegan pumpkin pie.  (I won’t tell anyone it’s vegan.  It has to be non-dairy since it follows meat.  I find very few non-dairy desserts worth eating, but I think that vegans have figured this out fairly well.  I love raw chocolate not-cheesecake, and hope this will be good as well.  I probably screwed up by getting an overly sweet prepared pie crust, but I think I can live with that).  Then on Thursday I’ll make green beans with bread sauce (Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe), quinoa with carmelized onions (Mark Bittman), sauteed asparagus (Cooking Light), garlic mashed potatoes with crazy amounts of olive oil, rice with cranberries and pistachios (I’m making up the recipe), and cranberry sauce (step 1, open the can.  There is no step 2).  The pre-cooked, kosher, grass-fed, organic, free-range, Montessori-educated, turkey is defrosting nicely in the fridge.  That’s how a vegetarian does Thanksgiving.

Have a beautiful holiday, or simply a lovely week.