Things Change

Six months ago, if you had told me that I'd be serving Thanksgiving dinner from boxes, cans, and bags, I would have laughed at you. I would have told you that I make my Thanksgiving dinner almost entirely from scratch, roasting a locally-grown organic pumpkin for the pie, baking my own vegan cornbread for the dressing, and going to great lengths to make my homemade vegetarian gravy taste like it was made with turkey stock. Creating the perfect meal was a multi-day cooking affair and was well worth it.

Six months ago, though, I had just bought a house that I thought would be the last one I'd ever live in. I had visions of the gardens we'd plant and the outdoor kitchen of my dreams. (I did not dream of a fancy outdoor kitchen such as you'd find in the glossy magazines. No, what I wanted was an outdoor bread oven and rocket stove - built from salvaged bricks or cob, an outdoor wash station for produce right out of the garden, and a permanent place for my solar ovens.) I would have told you that I might even have my own chickens by Thanksgiving and use a few of their eggs in my mom's cornbread dressing recipe, even though we usually don't eat eggs.

It's six months later, though, and things have changed. The house of my dreams no longer has a porch with convenient outdoor cooking space by the outside outlet. There are no gardens other than a few pots filled with plants that are already wilting from the nighttime temperatures falling below freezing. There is no outdoor kitchen and certainly no chickens, not when the local government is prosecuting people for simple coops built without permits in the floodplain.

Six months later and I'm exhausted from dealing with code issues and zoning problems, the annihilation of our dream, my mother-in-law's broken hip and other health problems, four months of physical therapy, financial challenges resulting from all of the above, and other commitments taking more time than I anticipated.

As of last night, my schedule finally cleared up and I have no pending commitments for the next month other than taking care of myself. My calendar only shows appointments for physical therapy, my TMJ dentist, and the regular dentist. Of course, there is also a mountain of paperwork I need to catch up on, some of it very soon, but you still cannot imagine the relief I feel to have nothing on the calendar for a bit. Is my planned yard sale niggling at the back of your memory? It has been postponed until Spring due to exhaustion and lack of time to pull it together. I'm not even going to attempt to consolidate the two storage units before the end of this month either.

Sadly, this wrapping up of various commitments did not happen in time for me to plan my usual Thanksgiving dinner. I thought about it a few weeks ago and realized I just couldn't pull it off this year. Other than the year when we traveled on Thanksgiving day and I put together a quickie meal in a hotel room microwave, this will be the first year in at least a decade that I have not made it from scratch. And it is the year I fully expected - months ago - to do it locally and organically.

Nope. Things change. I do occasionally prepare a turkey on Thanksgiving, especially when sharing the meal with my mother-in-law. This year, I considered ordering one of the locally grown, organic ones but changed my mind when I calculated the cost of even a small turkey at over four dollars a pound. I also had no interest in spending hours cooking it. A couple of small - not local and not organic - Cornish game hens are on the menu instead.

The dressing will come from a box: add water and margarine; call it done five minutes later. If I feel energetic, I might slice some celery to add to it, but don't bank on it. The cranberry sauce, as usual, will come from a can. I can't stand homemade cranberry relish; I only like the jellied stuff even with its questionable ingredients. There will be no sweet potato dish this year, even though I got sweet potatoes in my final CSA share this week.

There will be no delicious homemade mashed potatoes with local, organic spuds. Nope, I'm boiling dehydrated potatoes in water for 10 minutes instead. The complicated gravy recipe? Ha! Try this instead: open aseptic package of organic chicken stock, mix with flour and soymilk, heat until thickened. Hey, it's organic! The green beans will be organic as well, but they will come from a bag in the freezer; a bag that came from Trader Joe's not from green beans I froze myself.

It took me years to cobble recipes together to make a really good, tofu-free, vegan pumpkin pie (and crust) entirely from scratch but this year, Marie Callendar did all the work. We originally called Sara Lee but found Marie made a better, albeit pricier, pie. Yes, this means we've already eaten two pumpkin pies to figure this out. And we'll be eating another one today. Surely I shelled out five bucks for a small can of soy-based "whip" cream, right? Yeah, right - to put on a non-vegan, commercially produced pie. Nope. Cool Whip to the rescue.

Appalled? Yeah, so I am to some extent. Do I feel guilty that I am abandoning everything you thought I held dear for this holiday meal? Nope. Not one bit. Okay, maybe a tiny bit, but I need to take care of me for a while and taking care of me right now means not getting stressed out over this stuff. Next year, I hope to be back to my usual homemade Thanksgiving plans but this year, I am going to enjoy having the entire meal ready to go on the table in under an hour from start to finish. I'm just thankful that my family is willing to forgo the usual delicious meal in order to give me a bit of a rest.

(And yes, I wrote this in the wee hours of the morning. Hopefully bad dreams and insomnia will disappear this next month with a more relaxed schedule!)