Things have been absolutely CRAZY around here the past couple of months. Hannah just moved to Israel a couple of days ago, after living here for the past 6 months. She took up a lot of my time and energy- if she wanted to talk, I wanted to spend that time with her while I still could, even though it often meant staying up later than I would have liked to. This made me tired and less focused. I had several ideas for blog posts that never got written.
I was going to blog about my less-than-perfect food choices at Thanksgiving, when I went to extended family for the meal. That left me brain-fogged for a few days, and it was hard to focus on writing.
Then I was going to write a post about what I did with the 17 pound turkey I got from the supermarket’s Thanksgiving promotion. I still have some left (I froze half of it the night I cooked it).
I also had planned to blog about making latkes on Hanukkah, only to discover that my food processor broke during the move!
But now Thanksgiving and Hanukkah are long over, and my biggest challenge is re-learning how to cook for one less person in the house. I also need to use up some of the foods I’d purchased for Hannah. I have two slightly over-ripe bananas that she could have used in smoothies, but didn’t. I plan to make some sort of dessert with them tomorrow.
I also have quite a few sweet potatoes in the house. Partly this is because I’d planned on making a lot of sweet potato latkes, but only made one batch over the entire holiday. Partly it’s because Hannah likes them more than I do.
When I’d first made the turkey, I did the full Thanksgiving meal, even though it was a week or two later. I made brown rice stuffing, homemade cranberry sauce, green beans, white potatoes, and a pumpkin kugel. That’s basically a crustless pumpkin pie, but it felt more like a side dish, and less like a dessert, to call it a kugel instead of a pie.
I’d initially frozen half the turkey, and what’s left is currently in the fridge. It’s enough meat for Friday night dinner for 3. I made turkey broth in the crock pot today, and I made some of it into gravy. I already poured that over the turkey, and it will be easy to heat up tomorrow. I intend to make freshly roasted white potatoes and heat up some frozen green beans with olive oil and salt. I’ll make some plain white rice but skip the stuffing. I do plan to make another batch of cranberry sauce, in large part because I have a large package of pineapple juice that I might not otherwise finish before it spoils. Hannah likes to drink it by the glass, but I only use 1-2 ounces a day in green tea. I usually buy the 4-packs of 8 ounce cans so there’s less waste. The cranberry sauce recipe uses 3 cups of juice. If there’s not quite enough pineapple juice I’ll use some grape too.
I’m sure that I’ll soon get into new routines for meal planning and food preparation. Things still feel awkward right now.
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