Happy birthday, Dick Van Dyke!

The venerable Dick Van Dyke turns 100 years old today!

Love him or hate him, you have to admit the guy had talent as a singer, dancer, and comedian. Here's a dance scene from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang":

Or how about this hilarious clip from "The Carol Burnett Show":

Happy birthday, Mr. Van Dyke.

Thanksgiving, two weeks after the fact

I never got around to posting pictures of our modest Thanksgiving. Here it is, two weeks after the fact, and a reader was asking about it, so here goes.

The menu this year was simple: Turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, scalloped potatoes, green beans, wild rice stuffing, bread stuffing, biscuits, and dinner rolls.

Naturally much of this spread is made the day before. Here I'm working on "half-time spoon rolls." Letting the dough rise:

Second rising:

Baked and brushed with melted butter:

Bread stuffing starts with a loaf of fresh bread. Other ingredients: Homegrown sage, homemade turkey stock, homegrown onion, homemade butter. I'm sensing a theme here, aren't you?

The bread stuffing is for Don and Older Daughter. Oddly it's while making bread stuffing each year when I piercingly miss Younger Daughter the most. She used to love snitching uncooked bread stuffing.

Older Daughter doesn't like onions, but Don does, so I always divide the pan.

My particular indulgence (which no one else likes) is wild rice stuffing. It's my once-a-year treat.

Since I had so much homemade butter, I slathered it on the turkey before baking.

Thanksgiving wouldn't be complete without a dog that just "happens" to park itself in the middle of the kitchen floor. Y'know, in case something falls.

After the turkey went into the oven, we had a chance to talk with Younger Daughter at her European duty station. It was late in the evening for her, and she had already had a "Friendsgiving" celebration earlier in the day.

Turkey, finished.

Older Daughter likes to make fancy folds in the napkins while setting the table.

At last we all sat down for our feast.

A few days after Thanksgiving, I finally got around to canning turkey stock. I had frozen random chicken and turkey carcasses for the last two or three years, so I pulled them all out of the freezer and chucked them in my biggest stock pot. I let them simmer all night long.

I added a splash of apple cider vinegar to help draw the nutrients out of the bones. By morning, it was a rick broth indeed.

I started straining the broth by putting everything through a colander over another stock pot.

Lots of meat bits left on the bone, so I separated some for Mr. Darcy.

Believe me, I went through those scraps with a fine-tooth comb. I didn't want him swallowing any bone shards.

I wasn't sure how many jars I'd need, so I washed a lot. My canner holds 18 pints at a time, so I washed not quite double that.

I started filling canning jars with hot turkey stock...

...but then realized there was just a bit too much fat in the stock. Instead, I put the stock outside to chill overnight to let the fat rise to the surface. The next morning, I skimmed it off.

Filling the jars.

First batch out of the canner. I always pressure-can my turkey stock for 75 minutes (pints), the same as I would for meat. That's because, even though the stock is liquid, there are lots of tiny meat bits in it. I don't want to take chances.

Second batch.

Beautiful golden stock, enough to last us a couple of years at least.

I hope everyone's Thanksgiving was equally blessed.

Tomato disasters and successes

If you recall, we harvested two beds – upwards of 130 pounds – of a type of meaty paste tomato called Federle.

Because the vast majority of these tomatoes were green when we harvested them just ahead of the first frost, I layered them in boxes with a banana on each layer to provide ethylene gas. This would allow them to ripen. We set these boxes on a layer of plastic (to protect the carpet) and wrapped them in mosquito netting (to keep the fruit flies out).

However I got busy during the interim while they were ripening. Among much else, I took that fast trip south to see my parents and Younger Daughter. By the time I got around to cracking open the boxes, well ... let's just say many of the tomatoes had progressed beyond ripe into rotten. Grrrr.

The top layers were in great shape.

But the farther down I went, the worse it got.

I was so mad at myself for wasting so many tomatoes. In the end, the best I could do was pluck out the tomatoes that were still usable, and put them in a tub.

As for the rest ... well, we had to use towels and tubs and other emergency procedures to get those soaked and falling-apart boxes out of the house and into the yard. I was VERY glad I had put down plastic beneath the boxes to protect the carpet, which emerged unscathed.

I spent days beating myself up for this debacle. So many tomatoes, wasted!

The rotten tomatoes went into the waste pile.

I turned my attention back to the usable tomatoes. Because so many of them had been covered in mushy tomato slime, I actually washed them all.

After washing them, I re-packed the tomatoes back into the tub, but lined it with towels to absorb moisture.

Then I had to fetch down my food strainer from where it had been stored in the barn. I haven't used the strainer in a long time – certainly not since we moved – so it was predictably filthy. I gave it a good washing.

Also – knowing I would need it – I washed a large bucket.

Then I set up the food strainer.

Part of this set-up included putting a towel on the floor beneath. I learned from experience this is critical.

Straining tomatoes is messy work.

But there's no finer way to make a beautiful purée. Here the tomatoes are in the hopper...

...and here is the resulting purée.

Periodically I dumped the container of purée into the large bucket.

By the time all the tomatoes were processed, the kitchen was a mess. Such is life.

The next step was to bag up and freeze the purée.

I filled five gallon bags with purée, though the actual volume was probably more like four gallons.

I laid the bags of purée flat in the chest freezer until they froze, and then I stacked them more neatly.

After all was said and done, my apron was a disaster. I am brutally hard on aprons.

I laid the apron flat and sprayed it thoroughly with stain remover, then washed it, which helped a lot.

The next step in the tomato journey will be to make tomato sauce out of the purée, something I usually do in January or February. This consists of putting the purée in a large pot nested double-boiler-style into a larger pot, and cooking it down into sauce (the process usually takes about three days per batch). After it's thick enough for my satisfaction, I'll can it up.

So that's a summary of my tomato disasters and successes. Let's hope I'm a little more attentive to our unripe tomatoes next year.

A little slice of strange

No photos for the following snippet, sorry, so you'll have to use your imagination.

Last Saturday was a windy, blustery day. Don and I were taking advantage of the break in the rain to get some outside chores done. I was cleaning the barn and dressed like it (picture muddy boots, ratty sweatpants, old jacket, etc.). Don wasn't working in mud, but he was dressed in his usual daily work clothes and occupied with a small project in the back yard and on our deck.

Below our property is a road leading further into our isolated little valley. There are other homes further on, snaking into the hills.

While we know most of the people in the homes further down the road, we don't know everyone – especially since a couple of properties have only recently sold. (It's worth noting that one of the recently sold properties is a higher-end home with acreage.)

Anyway, it was while he was working on the deck that Don heard voices. He looked down at the road and saw two people, a man and a woman. They looked to be in their 50s and wore high-end casual country clothing. He said the woman had a short and stylish Karen-esque haircut, and the man had distinguished gray temples.

Having strangers in the neighborhood is odd enough. But it goes further. Apparently they were riding identical lemon-yellow e-bikes up the steepish slope, pedaling gently. He overheard a snippet of conversation about the bicycle gears in which the man said, "I'm on two, sometimes three." The woman replied, "I'm on one. It's very hard to keep us even."

Following behind the e-bikes were two matching (as in, bookends matching) pure-white Corgi-esque lap dogs, very furry, just running along behind and presumably having the time of their lives.

Don watched this extraordinary sight until the people turned a corner and disappeared from view. Meanwhile, since I was out working behind the barn, I missed the whole thing.

In describing the scene to me after I got back to the house, he compared it to the exact opposite of what the locals must have thought when the Clampetts rolled into Beverly Hills. What on earth were these sophisticated people doing here? Were they staying in a local B&B? Were they new neighbors, possible living in the luxury home that recently sold?

"They looked like an advertisement for a high-end retirement village," Don said. "Both looked fit and attractive and very put-together. The e-bikes were matching. Those weren't rentals; they owned them."

We concluded that if these people were new neighbors, we wouldn't look down upon them just because they were fit, attractive, and clearly wealthy. We all have our crosses to bear. Theirs just had an electric assist.

But we also agreed it was just a little slice of strange.