Loading ...
A From-Scratch, Vegetarian Thanksgiving
So many people nowadays wish, “Happy Turkey Day,” instead of the more traditional. “Happy Thanksgiving.” I always think (but never say), “Not so happy for the turkeys, really.”
But in our house, it is always a Happy Turkey Day. You see, we have no turkey on Thanksgiving.
What do you have then, people always ask. Well, think of everything one has beyond the turkey on Thanksgiving Day, and that is what we have. The turkey is the only thing, of course, that is not vegetarian for the feast. (Additionally we have a sort of “fake” turkey, which my kids - two of whom now do eat meat - like as much or more than actual turkey).
We also have a vegetarian fennel “sausage” in a wild rice and cornbread stuffing, with shitake mushrooms and herbs. Mounds of mashed potatoes with mushroom gravy. Sweet potatoes, with and without pineapple and marshmallows. Spinach creamed with onions and sourcream. Walnut soup and breads. Occasionally, peas and pearl onions and/or green beans with almonds.
And then there’s dessert. I’d rather not have pie at all if it is not good pie. Store bought - unless from the finest bakery - is not a substitute for the real thing. So, as I write this on Wednesday, I have a spiced sweet crust pecan pie in the oven, my daughter has just rolled out pastry for a high, double-crusted apple pie, and I would make a pumpkin one myself if it wouldn’t leave my sister-in-law without something to bring to dinner. As topping, all of the pies require only whipped cream or vanilla ice cream (don’t even think the words, Cool Whip).
Now that I’ve written all of this, I’m glad that the feast is not until tomorrow. All the descriptions have me feeling full already! Agree with me or disagree on the necessities of a from-scratch Turkey Day (or on the necessity of a turkey at all), but whatever your feelings for this day, have a happy one!
Bohemian Thanksgiving
I’m writing this post on Tuesday because as you’re reading this entry Wednesday I’ll be in the kitchen, or more accurately, I’ll be in the grocery store, then in the kitchen.
I don’t know about your family, but in our family we usually have as many desserts as we do side dishes. I know. I know. It’s a very unbalanced meal but, hey, Thanksgiving only comes once a year.
We’ve always been an unconventional Thanksgiving family. We have no problem departing from the turkey, dressing, and pumpkin pie. However, we are a little more rigid about dessert. It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without pumpkin bread (with chocolate chips) and banana bread (ditto). You’re sensing a theme, here, right? Yes, we Rosetts love our breads—quick, yeast, and dessert varieties! And do I really need to mention that chocolate is an important dessert ingredient? I didn’t think so. You guys know me so well! Another dessert must-have: chocolate pie.
So, what is sacred—not counting the blessing, of course—at your Thanksgiving table? I’ll even give you a handy fill in the blank:
It just isn’t Thanksgiving unless we have ___________.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Pressing Questions
I’ve found myself pondering a few scintillating questions lately—questions for which there don’t seem to be any answers.
So I bring them to you, oh loyal GG readers and friends, in the hopes you can shine a little light on these curiosities.
1) Why is it that I can fall asleep within thirty minutes of putting a movie on, yet when I climb into bed—with the actual goal of sleeping—I find myself staring at the clock thinking of all the things I could be doing if I didn’t need to sleep???
2) Why, when I need to be pounding out this latest proposal, do I find my forward motion at an absolute standstill because “something doesn’t feel right?” Uh, hello…can’t we just come back to it?????
3) What is it about pizza that one never grows tired of???? (Yes, I realize I ended that sentence with a preposition—tough 
)
4) What is it about the words shenanigans, hooligans, and cahoots that makes me giggle? Every. Single. Time.
5) What is it about certain foods/candies that one can pass by week after week without so much as a second thought…until it’s time for a road trip??? Suddenly I have to have bulls-eyes, pretzels, and Yoo-Hoo. Have. To.
Okay. There they are. In all their glory.
So give ‘em your best shot and/or leave a few of your own.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!!!
Hugs,
~Laura
You Can Take It To The Bank
Okay, so maybe that’s not the best title these days…
But I’m going with it because you get the point. In a cliche-sorta way.
While Diana is slaving over her keyboard for the next 6 weeks, I figured I’d pop in briefly and pose a question for all of you.
So here goes–
What is the BEST piece of writing (or life in general) advice you’ve been given?
Here’s mine (first a writing, then a life):
**Write first. Every day.
And
**Never compromise who you are/what you believe for anyone.
Tag. You’re it…
Happy Monday,
~Laura posing as Diana
Among the Best of Us….
I’m absolutely delighted to introduce Gail Konop Baker today. When I tell you she’s among the best of us, I don’t say it lightly. She’s strong and passionate, generous and kind. And she’s handled the obstacles in her life with a grace that simply must inspire all those around her. So without further ado……Gail!
________________________
I am the Accidental Memoirist. I never planned to write a breast cancer memoir, never planned to get the cancer that would prompt that.
But in January 2006 after soon after completing my second novel about a woman who finds a lump in her breast and thinks she might have breast cancer and wonders if she’s lived a meaningful life and sent it off to my then-agent, I went in for my annual mammogram and was told it was “suspicious.” A week later I was having surgery and while I was waiting for my own results, I received an e-mail from my agent (who didn’t know about my health scare) that said something like, I don’t really like the breast cancer novel. I’m not sure I care whether that woman has breast cancer or not. Ouch!
But the writing disappointment was a minor blip compared to how the diagnosis flipped my world and my sense of self upside down. I was about the healthiest person I knew. I never got sick. No aches or pains. I ran. I practiced yoga. I ate mostly vegetarian, whole grain and organic. I was the person others consulted for health and anti-aging tips.
I felt like a fake, a fraud. Even after I was told it was non-invasive and they got it all out, I knew because I was relatively young, I was at high risk for recurrence and I felt panicked and paralyzed. I couldn’t write, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything other than Google health sites and obsess about recurrence rates and make homemade batches of organic facial creams. I even thought about starting an organic facial cream company for vain hypochondriacs like me. I asked my husband to bring home an electro magnetic field measurer (I’m still waiting for that… do those even exist?). I suggested we move to Utah and live off the land (even though I don’t know the first thing about gardening or farming).
Finally after weeks and weeks of this, my husband pressed a journal into my hands and said, “You have to write this down.” I shook my head. I was not a journal keeper, never had been and I did not want to write any of this down. But one day I picked up the journal and a pen and without even thinking, I started scribbling my deepest rawest craziest most intimate thoughts into this journal.
The first lines were: “I’m sitting topless in the oncologist’s office on Valentine’s Day. Cancer is a Bitch.” Once I started writing the words just flooded out. I shook and wept and fell asleep and woke up and wrote some more. The ironic thing is, as I poured these crazy thoughts out, I thought I would never EVER show those words to anyone. I thought this was a way I didn’t have to burden my friends and family with my crazy thoughts. (And now you can go buy them on Amazon right now!) Eventually I wrote those thoughts into an essay I called CANCER IS A BITCH and sent it to some trusted writer friends who said it was powerful and I should do something with it. But what was it? What would I do with it?
Soon after that I read that Literary Mama was looking for columnists and on a whim I pitched it and they said yes and I started writing the column Bare-breasted Mama. To be honest, it was painful to write and I felt naked, like I was exposing myself both physically and emotionally, the responses from readers were so soulful and many hadn’t even had cancer but they either knew someone who had or just responded to the midlife issues about motherhood and marriage and career that I wrote about. They thanked me for making them laugh (because believe it or not the book is funny!) and cry. Their words gave me the courage to keep writing and opening up and eventually leave my then agent and pitch the idea of a breast cancer memoir to a new agent.
Next thing I knew I had a new agent, a new book, a new lease on life.
So not only did I not realize I was a writing a memoir but I also didn’t realize I was writing my way out of my crazy funk. A while I know that the word cancer scares people and they wonder why they should read about it. I have learned from my readers that the funk I describe in my book and ultimately emerged from… could be a divorce, losing a job, a bad injury, anything that knocks you down and makes you wonder how and when you will get back up.
And I did…. eventually. Got back up stronger and more determined than ever. As a result, since my diagnosis two years and ten months ago, I have written a book, finally launched my career and my two daughters to college, run two half marathons, gone to yoga boot camp and Italy (for the first time!) and trained two yellow lab puppies. But more significantly, I discovered that the more I opened up, the more the world opened up to me.
So why not? I say most days now. Why not live more urgently, more openly, more curiously, more honestly, more lovingly? Why not be the person I always meant to be?
________________________
I’m confident there’s not a better way to live; life’s too short to do things differently.
I hope you’ll all pick up Gail’s amazing book:
Have a great weekend! I’ll be back next week with a full report on the wonderful Southern Writers Reading event and a preview of this year’s Birthday Madness….
xo
Tasha
Good Girls Can Be Bitchy, But Cancer is Bitchier
Tomorrow, I’ll be posting a review of four fave books over at the blog of Patti Abbott for a feature she calls Friday’s Forgotten Books. Stop by and check it out! But for today, read about one book you shouldn’t - and I sure won’t - forget:
Gail Konop Baker and I have a few things in common - we are both stunningly fine writers, we both went to a small liberal arts college that has the audacity to have a llama as mascot, we both had three children, we both breast-fed those children…
And that’s where it stops. Because I don’t know what it’s like to be diagnosed with breast cancer, and Gail does. And yet, thanks to Gail, I do feel like I kinda know what it’s like. At least, Gail had begun to take me there, with Bare-Breasted Mama - the funny, human, scary, and poignant pieces about her cancer that she wrote for Literary Mama. And now, she has put all of what she poured into those pieces into the newly-released memoir, Cancer is a Bitch: (Or, I’d Rather Be Having a Midlife Crisis).
The wife of a radiologist, Gail brings her experiences to life with grace and intelligence. As I commented a while back to her, “The most touching thing about this to me is your experience as a doctor’s wife, the wife of a “fixer” of sorts, who can’t “fix” this.”
But don’t listen just to me. Here’s what the Big Four reviewers had to say:
Kirkus Reviews
“You-are-there account of the author’s diagnosis, surgery and much more.”
Booklist
“Wrenchingly authentic…down-to-earth account.”
Library Journal
“Cutting, crafty, and clearly a woman on a mission, Baker takes us along as her life turns upside down in so many ways. No graphic treatment specifics here, but an honest (and very funny, for the most part) approach to breast cancer. For all patient health collections.”
Publishers Weekly
Baker, a former columnist for the online magazine Literary Mama living in Madison, Wis., is busy on her novel—with a protagonist she happens to have diagnosed with breast cancer—when real life intervenes. Shocked by a diagnosis of breast cancer herself, the 45-year-old mother of three begins a yearlong struggle to combat and comprehend the turn her life has taken. Baker and her radiologist husband trek to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Though her cancer has not metastasized and she’s spared chemotherapy and radiation, Baker nevertheless faces the fear that the disease may return. As Baker grapples with the demands of motherhood and marriage, she also begins a relentless search to find the cause of her disease and head off its recurrence in the future—turning to organic foods, whipping up batches of organic face creams in her kitchen and avoiding electromagnetic fields. In this heartfelt memoir, Baker proves to be both humorous (she compares waiting for her follow-up mammogram results to a call back for an acting audition) and compassionate, as when a friend is diagnosed with colon cancer. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
If you know anyone who is a survivor of or still struggling with breast cancer, please buy them this book. I myself will give you your money back if they don’t laugh at least once, cry at least once, and look up from the last page bearing a smile of thanks to you for buying it for them and to Gail for sharing. And, hey - read it yourself. You will understand them, their burden, and their joys all the better.
Chilly Softness
It snowed yesterday. Just a few flurries, but there was much celebration in the house at this sign of winter. True, there was no accumulation, but that didn’t seem to matter to my kids. It was snow.
I love the way it looks, but I have to confess that I don’t get quite as excited about snow as my kids.
For me, the first snow of the season usually means digging out all the boots and realizing they don’t fit anymore. Or, after much searching I discover that we don’t actually have any boots since they were too small and I gave them away in a flurry of spring cleaning months earlier. (I’m not a professional organizer, I just play one on TV write about one in my books.)
Then there are those things that seem so minor, but can play havoc with our routine, like ice scrapers. Where did we put those?
And the snow shovel. Do we even have a snow shovel anymore?
Once we figure out (or correct) these minor issues, we can get back to enjoying the weather, which usually involves sopping wet gloves followed shortly by hot chocolate, tiny marshmallows, and a blazing fire.
We’re a military family and have spent the last five out of the six years in places were gloves and hats were definitely not required. I think our snow/winter deprivation might possibly mean that we enjoy the season more than people who live in a place that gets snow every year without fail.
We don’t take it for granted and we don’t know how long it will be before we’re off to a spot that is mostly sunny and hot year-round—not that it’s a bad thing to be in Southern California in December. There are definite advantages like no snow tires and Christmas parades without the possiblity of frostbite. But for now, we’re here in the thick of the icy wind and swirling flurries and loving every minute.
So, what are your feelings about winter? Love it or hate it? Has it already snowed where you are?
Any suggestions for mysteries with piles and piles of snow?
To Be Touched by Thought
“It’s the thought that counts.”
I remember hearing that expression when I was a kid. Mostly when the gift I finger painted in school suddenly looked paltry compared to an older sibling’s store-bought gift. It was a statement I assumed was designed as a reassuring pat on one’s back when the whole world knew you couldn’t afford more.
And, I guess, it was.
But in the years since, I’ve also come to see that statement as something that has nothing to do with size or quantity from a comparative aspect and everything to do with, well, thought.
And compassion.
And friendship.
And romance.
And love.
It’s about listening, learning, caring, and reaching out to people around you with a little thought… Thought about who they are—inside and out—and letting them know they’re treasured.
I bring this up because I was the recipient of a “friendship” thought just this past Friday when Lynn (a very loyal GG reader) and I met up for lunch. It was our second such get-together in as many months after realizing we live in the same basic area.
During our first lunch back in October, we spent the hour talking about writing, books, work, and life in general. When she told me she was originally from Idaho I told her about the nearly-complete-license-plate-map that wasn’t… Compliments of her native state, of course.
You see, come Memorial Day each year, my daughters and I begin scouring the roads and parking lots in the hopes of finding each and every state before Labor Day. The first year we were short a handful of states: Hawaii, Idaho, and North Dakota. This past summer we did better. Much better. In fact, we had both Alaska and Hawaii colored onto our map before June was even over. During the next two months we filled the northeast, the southeast, the Midwest, and the west.
Each and every state.
Except one…
Idaho.
$%#^&#$^&*&^!!!!
So I mentioned this little tidbit to Lynn over that first lunch. It was said in fun and was an itty bitty portion of our time together. Yet she listened. And remembered.
Fast forward to this past Friday. We sit down at a table with our soup and sandwiches and she announces she has a present for me.
For moi?
Yup.
She reaches into her bag and pulls out this:
Once I got over my fit of giggles, I found my eyes getting a wee bit misty.
Why, you ask?
Because she listened when I didn’t even realize I was talking. And she remembered even after we parted ways and got entrenched in our normal day-to-day lives. And in doing so, she made me feel special.
I love that kind of stuff. Love, love, love that kind of stuff.
And sure enough, Lynn’s surprise got me thinking. About some of my most prized possessions. Things that were completely unexpected yet were given with compassion and love and thought.
Like my courage button which many of my readers know holds tremendous meaning for me.
And this sun catcher which was given to me by a woman who has welcomed me into her family and made me feel like I belong.
She gave me this one evening when we were having what felt a lot like mother/daughter time. And there’s not a day that’s gone by since that I haven’t looked at it and remembered that warm feeling.
So keep that in mind this holiday season. It’s not about the size of the package or the pricetag it sported. It’s not about the great deal you found or whether it’s easy to ship. It’s about the thought… Thought about who that person is and what fills them up. And, most importantly, it’s about finding a way to let them know they’re treasured. And loved.
Maybe that means finding or creating something that celebrates a shared past. Maybe it’s a trinket that holds special meaning. Maybe it’s a carefully planned (and executed) date. Maybe it’s a romantic dinner. Maybe it’s creating a moment in time to be locked away in one’s heart…
The sky’s the limit, really. It simply depends on the person to whom you’re giving and your own capacity for thinking from deep inside.
How about the rest of you? What’s a special thought-filled gift you’ve received and why did it mean so much?
Hugs,
~Laura
The Little Train that C–
Yes. My point exactly.
Unfortunately, despite the best will in the world, the wish to succeed, and a fine new wood burning engine…I just can’t seem to get this blog done. It is the proverbial straw, the bridge too far, the…well, it’s too much right now.
So I am going to gracefully admit defeat and retire from the lists. Well, not really. Just officially extend what is already turning into quite a blush-making leave of absence. My apologies to my fellow Good Girls who are doing a much better job of juggling cocktails and crime. Granted, I did get the lowest score on that 30s Wife test we all took (and I’ve been brooding ever since).
Anyway, I’m crawling back into my cave, taking a couple of aspirin tablets in advance, and I’ll be back with the New Year — wearing my top hat and playing the kazoo. You know, like always.
Til then…take your vitamin C, look both ways crossing the street, and respect the semi-colon. Talk to you soon!
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
So I’m currently being wholly corrupted by my brother, whom I’ve not seen in far, far too long. He’s plied me with excellent wine. We’ve had a spectacular dinner with our parents, and the sad truth is that I’m not prepared to write a blog full of insight and pith.
I can, however, give you some universal truths:
1. Love is best when it creeps up on you unaware
2. Wine is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy (Benjamin Franklin, via my wise brother)
3. A book you’ve read changes markedly from what it was when it was sitting on your shelf
4. You aren’t as tall as you look on TV (again, the wise brother, fortified with much pinot)
What truths can you share with us today?
xo
Tasha