This Place Reserved for Tuesday's Post

There will be a post today. This just isn't it. So grab a coffee, linger over the last of your leftovers, or, if you're feeling ambitious, get some work done. Have an adventure--maybe even two--then stop back on by after dinner this evening, if you're on the east coast, or for your late afternoon pick-me-up on the west. With any luck, all this silliness will be replaced by today's Actual Post.

Oh--and congratulations to Raoulysgirl, the randomly selected winner in the apple peeler/corer giveaway!

This message comes to you as a public service form Running With Letters. Statements contained therein may not be suitable for any purpose.

Celebrating Monday

4 lbs. of coffee
Indeterminate bags of flour
3 dozen eggs
14 dozen potato rolls
An entire tub of shortening
11 people for post-Thanksgiving pizza
9 smiling faces packed around my table for birthday lunch

The statistics are as endless as the excess they reflect. I have been reveling in food, family, and fun for a week, and am anything but ready for my Forced Re-entry into the Real World this morning.

So I spent a lot of time last night trying to come up with things I like about Ordinary Days. I resisted the fibers of my being bent on loudly insisting that there’s nothing notable in the normal; that Routine and Usual are just way stations enroute to Better Things.

I pressed myself in my search for reasons to celebrate the standard because I know that life, in all its richness and fullness, plays out on the stage of the everyday and the commonplace.

So I’m heading off to school this morning remembering that there’s life in the scraps and crayons that will roll across my classroom floor. It’s in the books that I want to read, the music I’ll listen to on my commute, the leftovers in my lunch. It’s in the average stories of common experiences we’ll share around the dinner table tonight. It’s in the miles I need to run, the rides I must give, the emails I will answer. And the messy rooms I call home? They are simply teeming with life.

Ordinary may be the heart and soul of the Real World, but it is also the backbone of everything we hold dear. So today I may be up at dawn, bereft of pie, and teaching class, but that doesn't mean I'm not celebrating.

In Other News:
I will post the giveaway winner this evening. With so many busy with things besides blogging, I wanted to give readers a final chance to leave a comment for a chance to win an apple corer/peelerin time for holiday baking!

The Review Trailer

In planning for our family’s annual week of Thanksgiving, I completely forgot about Wednesday.

Wednesday is, quite traditionally, the day that nothing goes as planned. It’s the day after the initial euphoria of the vacation mentality has passed, the day before all the elements of the year’s most anticipated meal fall into place, the day devoted to preparations we never fail to underestimate. Simply put, Thanksgiving Wednesday is rough, a fact everyone seems to forget until the clock tells us its late, our bodies say we’re tired, and our recipes indicate that key ingredients are forgotten, missing, or simply not doing their job. Worst of all, Wednesday is the day my sister and I confront our annual nemesis: the pie crust.

I would like to tell you that the “cooking show” my sister and I planned, documenting two-recipe pie crust showdown yielded the elusive supple crust we have always sought; that in the pursuit of same we became an overnight internet sensation as our special blend of humor, commentary, and cooking prowess played out in our planned series of near-real time posts right here in this forum.

I’d like to tell you that family criticism had nothing to do with the sudden cancellation of our cooking show debut, that we were able to sustain the spirit of frivolity that fueled our initial efforts at conquering our traditionally lackluster crust.

And I’d definitely like to tell you that the apple peeler/corer I was asked to try and review worked so flawlessly and saved so much time that all the other setbacks dissolved into irrelevance.

But the truth is that Real Life is a lot messier and more complicated than we want to believe. Real Life is uncertain, prone to mishap, and subject to ill-timed setbacks. In short, Real Life is a lot like Thanksgiving Wednesday. And you what? It’s a whole lot more interesting as a result.

One of the most important things I’ve ever learned about journalism is that the real story is in what Actually Happened. Any story approached from a pre-conceived angle by a reporter fishing for a certain kind of quote or contrived ending will result in a stilted read reflecting a Life Substitute with a chemically engineered Aftertaste. Not at all what we’re about here at Running With Letters.

What Actually Happened was that my sister and I struggled through the making of three pies in a mostly somber state after the sudden scratching of our live-blog cooking show. Our crusts were unmanageable, somewhat stiff, and left behind no scraps for us to slather in rolled layers of butter, sugar and cinnamon. Saddened by the sour reception to our show, we slogged through the assembly of said pies, sure we would be buoyed by the stellar performance of the corer/peeler/slicer.

The bottom line is that the peeler was fun to use and did save us some time. We tested it on no less than six varieties of apples (our pies are nothing if not a celebration of savory flavors and diverse textures) and found that it performed best with apples that leaned more toward the faultless than the flawed. Hard, round, perfectly proportioned apples zipped through the process, whereas the soft, the irregular, and the misproportioned tended to tangle and tear. We were anxious to see how it performed on potatoes, as the package made mention of spud use as a popular secondary application. We gave it a trial run on the potatoes my husband needed for his locally renowned rolls, but found that my niece needed to finish the job with a manual peeler—a fact that steered us away from emergency use of the gadget in a near-disaster on Thanksgiving when, as the turkey emerged from the oven, we realized that we hadn’t even started the mashed potatoes.

A merciful feature of Real Life is that the nitty gritty realities of preparation often have a soft and gracious flip side, in which we’ve been reveling ever since we flipped the calendar to Thursday. Today, we’re eschewing the realities of Black Friday and we’re carving pumpkins instead. Despite my absence from the shopping scene, I do have a deal available for one of my followers: There’s a second corer/peeler that’s waiting to have one of your names pasted on it and shipped to your house in time for Christmas baking. If you’d like to win, just let me know in your comment and I’ll post the winner on Sunday.

I’m off to jump back in to the potpourri of sweet and sour that blends to make that oh-so-savory flavor I call life.

From a Wing to a Prayer

When it comes to Thanksgiving turkey, everyone has a favorite part: for some it’s the drumstick, while others prefer a thigh or breast. But me? I’m all about the feathers.

Not the Real Feathers from the Actual Bird, mind you. That would definitely put a damper on my both my culinary and dining experiences. No, the feathers I’m anticipating this Thursday are of the cut-out construction paper variety.

After enjoying our Real Turkey, it is our tradition to push our dishes aside and turn our thoughts to the colorful cut outs mingling among the nuts and mints inside the pumpkin shaped placeholders at our respective spots at the table. With the late afternoon sun bouncing off our wine glasses as it streams down the length of our farmhouse table, we sit in blissful moments of peaceful silence, writing the things that make us thankful over every inch of feather-like real estate.


We linger over the writing for some time. Although we never fail to mention food and family, home and health, we take the time to think beyond the Big Four to recognize the underrated, the overlooked, and the mundane: the wealth of ordinary treasures that enrich our lives. The scratching of pencils and markers punctuated by occasional outbursts of stifled laughter fills the kitchen until every feather is placed into a common pile for a read aloud.

The twist? We guess who wrote the message on each feather. Some are easy. For instance, any feather mentioning underwear or featuring creative spelling will be attributed to my son, hands down. Any feather devoted to the overt praise of baking ingredients or kitchen gadgets will undoubtedly be the work of my daughter, The Baker. If a feather says something along the lines of: “controversy, conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, minto wheels, Stirling engines, perpetual motion and UFOs,” no time will be lost in debate over whether or not my husband wrote it. On the other hand, if one reads anything like, “the sun on my face, the smell of leaves, crunching leaves, nuts, and leaf colors,” it’s pretty much assumed to be my work.

Other times it’s not so easy to guess. Any one of the eight family members around my table could be thankful for a particular dish or any one of a dozen jokes or incidents that transpired in its preparation. And when one feather reads: “pumpkin muffins, pumpkin bars, pumpkin bread, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin spice, pumpkin nog,” and the next says ,“pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin pie, pumpkins, pumpkin seeds, pumpkin carving,” all anyone wonders is which feather was mine and which was my sister’s—a feat that could theoretically require handwriting analysis, if it really mattered.

In earlier years, we used to tape the feathers to a cut out turkey, but the plumage became so voluminous that now we just scatter them across the table in a sort of variegated prayer of appreciation for the simple pleasures and intricate treasures that define the life and love we have gathered to celebrate.

Pie Before a Pall

Five AM isn’t an hour with which I am well acquainted. The introductions I’ve had with the Crack of Dawn have been brief and often artificially inflated by the specter of travel or adventure. Under normal circumstances, anyone seeking me before, say, six on a go-to-work day, or the more reasonable seven thirty on a work-from-home day, should make a beeline to the master suite in the back of my house and not toward my kitchen at the hub.

If circumstances should find me in the kitchen at that unfamiliar hour, it would be far more likely to find me clinging to a steaming cup of joe like a drowning woman on a life preserver than at the helm of a mixer, as I was one particular holiday-time morning a few years back. On that occasion, I had both my parents and my grandmother under my roof and was scheduled to teach art all day and host a party for upwards of twenty teens and young adults all evening. Instead of taking a reasonable course of action like serving, say Purchased Goods (gasp), I decided on a Traditional Homemade Spread. Hand decorated gingerbread men. Festive Party Punch. And pumpkin pies with hand rolled crust. All of which, needless to say, had be fresh. Very, very fresh.

Which brings me to my 5 AM baking frenzy. Surrounded by spices and the wafting scent of baking crusts I was feeling so on top of my day—so satisfied, so do I dare say, smug? Because, really, if I’m being honest, I was royally Showing Off. I wanted my family to see me as a complete 21st century success: I can work! I can bake! I can decorate cute little gingerbread men with my kids! I can entertain!

Sure, I had to ‘keep moving,” make the most of my time, stay “organized”, and any of a dozen other mantras by which I keep pace. But that was OK, because later that evening I cut those pies into adorable little slivers and passed them around my beautifully decorated home and held my breath as a hush fell over the party and I waited to the satisfied “oohs” and contented “ahs” of my assembled guests.

At that moment, I basked in the glow of Accomplishment—the Gold Medal of the Keep Moving Guild. I had cranked out a day of which I could be proud. I had truly done the “all,” that folks over at the “Do What You Can” Club deemed impossible. Back then, I had no respect for the kind of living the Do-What-You-Canners were hocking. Who could possibly be interested in slow when fast got you so far?

Recent weeks have given me a glimpse into the Do What You Can, Proceed Slowly, “don’t sweat it” Society. During the hours I have spent with my husband over the past few weeks since his injury—which has been most of them—we have done nothing quickly. We’ve stuck to no kind of rigid schedule. We’ve done the things we can, when we can. And what I’ve found is that we have plenty of time—time to talk, to dream, to enjoy little things about each other that we too often miss. We’ve been able to play games, watch movies, and do absolutely nothing other than enjoy each other’s company. And the real shocker? Nothing has fallen apart. The house is still relatively clean. The kids are happy. The bills are paid. And I am more in love with my husband than I have ever been-- an accomplishment way more sweet than any pie I have ever served.

Dishing out my pumpkin pie that December evening, I had no inkling that I was missing out on anything. Intent as I was at “keeping things moving,” it didn’t occur to me that the hush that fell over the room was actually a pall. The fact that the one thing I missed that day was the sweet goodness on which everything hinged eluded me until I shoveled a big bit of pie into my own mouth and realized that in my haste to pop those pies into the oven, I had forgotten the sugar.

One Line Wednesday: The So Late It's Early Edition

The variegated wig was the most notable feature of the stiff form splayed on the roadside sofa.

It was the neutral sleeve with the subtle stripe that first flashed into my peripheral vision midway through my morning run. I had been noting, in a vague sort of way, the plethora of roadside bulk refuse that the city--no doubt hampered by an unusual volume of post-storm rubbish-- had neglected to pick up on Tuesday, our neighborhood's usual garbage day. The assortment of worn furniture, rusty lamps and typical basement fare was unremarkable--then the stiff sleeve caught my attention and I missed a step in my evenly-paced sprint.

The khaki-esque trousers registered next, heightening the level of my concern enough that I pulled to a complete stop and noted the pile of primary colors arranged atop the pate determined, to my great relief, that it was merely a well-dressed effigy about to meet its fate.

One Line Wednesday

The variegated wig was the most notable feature of the stiff form splayed on the roadside sofa.

New to One Line Wednesday? Get caught up and join the fun!

I'll be back tonight with the back story on today's line, and can't wait to read your lines in the meantime!