‘Tis the Season to Make

This Thanksgiving was the first in several years that my wife and I have not hosted. My mother-in-law decided her hips hurt too badly to climb our front steps, so we made ours a moveable feast. For the past three years or so, my daughter has been an able and eager sous chef, to the point where my only real responsibility is to roast the turkey and keep us organized. She even made a delicious pie crust for the pumpkin pie. Katie and I made many of the dishes the night before, leaving only the turkey, stuffing, and Katie’s mashed potatoes to cook at Grandma’s house.

While I rely heavily on Cook’s Illustrated for recipes, I do have a few family recipes that come out this time of year: my great-grandmother’s pumpkin pie, my grandmother’s egg noodles. We aim for a large turkey so that we have plenty of leftovers for turkey noodle soup over the weekend.

We have one more tradition for Thanksgiving weekend: we head up to the small town of Weston, Missouri on Black Friday. It started several years ago when Bonny began working retail. Of course she had to work, so the kids and I would have an adventure with my mom. These days, Bonny joins in the fun. We enjoy the unique shops, and measure the health of the local economy by the number of empty storefronts. This year looked promising, with several new and flourishing small businesses.

Father Christmas is a fixture in Downtown Weston, and we were pleased to catch him out and about this year.

Bonny and I both grew up in small business families. Her mother sold rare books for many years; my mother owned a salon, and continues to work as a hairstylist (she has a knack for fixing bad hair color experiments). I’m excited to see Bonny’s work as a fiber artist take off, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the new year brings for her.

I did manage to spend some time in my own studio this weekend, making good progress on my dining room table and catching up on some much-needed jigs: a circular saw guide for cutting down plywood accurately, and a miter shooting board (which will work nicely with the Bedrock No. 605 that Bonny bought me in Weston last year).

Testing my Bedrock No. 605 with the miter shooting board.