Thanks giving started with my first thoughts yesterday morning.

1. I made it.

2. I’m waking up next to Kimberly.

There were many more after that, but those were plenty big enough.

The celebration day itself, while a far cry from my more typical full-bore feast day, was still quite wonderful and satisfying. My father drove up from Oregon, arriving on Tuesday, and I picked Kimberly’s parents up at the airport on Wednesday, so we had family to share the day with us. The weather was gray and wet, which made sitting inside by the fire all the better, and working in a warm kitchen quite cozy.

My menu consisted of turkey broth, winter squash and apple soup, and apple cider for dessert. I’d made the turkey broth myself, and did a fine job, if I do say so myself. It was quite tasty, and required no adjusting of the seasoning. Kimberly oversaw the preparation of the squash soup, including her first chance to drive our new wand blender. She approves.

The solid food eaters had the squash soup, turkey, cranberries, sweet potato, sauteed greens, gravy and other stuff I didn’t pay attention to. They seemed to like it.

Since I normally work really hard on Thanksgiving, I was somewhat looking forward to taking it easy this year. The compensation for not being able to eat all that food was that I wouldn’t have to cook it, either. This expectation led to me being quite bewildered when I found myself hard at work in the kitchen. Apparently, that same odd brain lesion that keeps Kimberly from being able to learn how to use the espresso maker also impairs her ability to prepare turkey for roasting. The human brain is fascinating, isn’t it? Since the plan was to use a “cooking bag”, a technology that only I have experience with, I altruistically stepped in.

I still got something of a break, since instead of a full bird we were only doing a turkey breast. That made cleaning, handling and prepping much easier. It also gave me the chance to use my favorite Thanksgiving toy, the dual-readout digital electronic probe thermometer, which shows both oven and meat temperatures and adheres magnetically to the outside of the oven. (I did just see a picture in a catalog of a similar device with a wireless display, so you can sit in the living room and check the bird’s temp, which is a near-perfect hybrid of kitchen-gadget lust with nerd-gadget lust. If only it connected with my computer via 802.11g, so I could graph the rise in temperature, and perfectly predict when it would be done. Maybe next year.)

I also somehow ended up making the gravy. I guess this is what comes of being in charge of these things for so long. I had a taste or two of it while cooking, to check the flavor, but didn’t end up trying to have any at the meal. I decided that the very thing gravy is designed to do, be somewhat thick and sticky, would be just the thing that would make it hard for me to swallow. I ended up thinning the squash soup with more broth for that reason, after having had trouble with it at first.

I flatter myself by believing the claims from the solid-food eaters that both the turkey and gravy came out well.

After the meal, and a bit of clean-up, we were all sitting around the living room quite happy, watching the fire and talking. I brought out the finally element of the Davis Thanksgiving tradition, the wafer-thin After Eight mints. I’m happy to report that the chocolate and mint filling dissolve quite well in the mouth, so that I can, with care, swallow them. And they are so high in calories that it was actually worth keeping track of how many I ate for my daily calorie total! My family was enthusiastic in supporting me, consuming their own mints so that I wouldn’t feel alone in my struggle.

Perhaps it was not surprising that no one hurried to get up and go take a walk, despite the break in the rain. In fact, it was a pretty early night for everyone. One of the more pleasant features of the day, although it may seem odd to some of my readers, was that the TV was off until mid-evening, leaving plenty of room for sociability, conversation, and warm, good-food-inspired silences. My dad and I did have a “nightcap” consisting of a good British mystery in the Inspector Lynley series on PBS. No football at all; no wonder I feel out of the American mainstream.

This morning has featured some of the typical day-after chores that are so much a part of the whole process that doing them is actually sort of soothing. Cleaning the last of few pans and dishes that had to sit overnight. Running the assorted dishtowels and so forth through the laundry. Restoring the various appliances and ingredients misplaced in the heat of battle to their proper positions. My dad clambered back into his truck for the drive back to Oregon, and drove off, carrying with him one of the Alexander McCall Smith books we’d been talking about over mints. The tentative schedule for today features taking the two architects in the family to shop for a replacement for the defunct light fixture in our front hall, a pleasantly modest bit of home-maintenance and tool-using, and, of course, left-overs.

Yum.