December 1, 2014
Thanksgiving Day
has passed, but not without a snafu or two.
My sister, Sis, had asked about six members of the family (including
Charming and me) to her house for Thanksgiving dinner at 2:00 p.m. I
volunteered to make chocolate cheesecake, a strawberry/rhubarb slab pie, and spinach
squares. My brother, Jeff, was bringing
corn pudding. Sis was making the turkey,
gravy, dressing, honest-to-goodness mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and
cranberry sauce. Capital YUM!!!
Since I’m a bit
of a control freak, I made the cheesecake the day before and got up at 6:00 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day to make the slab pie
and spinach squares. Everything was
going fine until I got a phone call from Sis saying that her electricity had
gone off. She phoned the electric
company, but only got a recorded message asking her to leave a message if her
call was in regards to a power outage. It
was strange that her electricity went off when I live just two houses down from
her and our electricity was still working fine.
Oh well, no problem…just bring the turkey and fixin’s to my house and we’d
cook it here. So she loaded the uncooked
food into her car and brought it to my house.
I put the turkey
into the oven and life was good…for about fifteen minutes…UH OH!!! I quickly phoned the electric company and got
the same recording that Sis had gotten previously, except they had added a
sentence that said, “We are aware of power outages in your area.” Hmmmmm…what
to do?
I phoned Sis and
we brainstormed for a few minutes. I hung
up from Sis and made several attempts to call the local Chinese restaurant…no
answer. (Wow…that solution worked so
well for the folks in “A Christmas Story”.)
I phoned the pricey restaurant that sits up on “the hill” and got cut
off after having already been transferred to two different people. I took that as a sign that a ritzy
Thanksgiving dinner on “the hill” wasn’t in the cards for us.
I phoned Sis back
to give her the bad news. We were down
to two choices: going to the local grocery store and buying bologna and bread
or partaking of the free meal that was being given by the American Legion. We hung up so that we could mull over those
choices, while praying that the electricity would magically come back on.
Now you know I can
hardly let a post go by without mentioning my wonderful husband, Charming. After he discovered that our electricity had
gone off, he casually mentioned that he was going out to our garage/shed. Then he came back in a few minutes and said, “Using
the generator, I think I can get you lights and one burner on the stove, if
that’ll help.” I know it sounds corny,
but after ten years of marriage, he’s still my Prince Charming riding in on a
white horse to save the day!
Then a light bulb
went off in my head. I had canned pork
tenderloin back in the spring! You may
not know it, but canned tenderloin has traditionally been the equivalent of
steak to the “mountain folk” in our area of the Blue Ridge . As
a child, I remember Momma opening up a couple of quarts of tenderloin when we
got unexpected company. She would heat
up the tenderloin on the kitchen woodstove and use the broth to make the most
mouthwatering gravy you could ever imagine.
Making a meal from canned tenderloin can be done, literally, in a matter
of minutes.
Since it was
getting awfully close to the appointed time for dinner, I phoned Sis one last
time and offered the tenderloin option as a final solution. She agreed.
As it turned out we had a good meal of tenderloin, gravy, instant mashed
potatoes, corn pudding, and spinach squares with cheesecake and pie for dessert.
Each person at
the table took a turn to say what they were thankful for on this Thanksgiving
Day. Not surprisingly, there seemed to
be a common theme…we were all thankful for family, friends, food…and generators!
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| Unfortunately, this is the only picture I had time to take of our memorable 2014 Thanksgiving Dinner. This was part of my brother, Jeff's "doggie bag" to take home with him. At the top of the picture is the chocolate cheese cake. The rest is the strawberry/rhubarb slab pie. |
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