Though the past few days have been rainy and very windy (I mean really windy), the skies cleared and it was a beautiful Thanksgiving day. Colin and Marissa came over about 10:00am as I informed them that there would be a mandatory period of watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV. But that was all just background for a wonderful time for just the three of us to chat as a family. It couldn't have been any better for me.
Marissa got hungry, so we broke out the chips around noon, and then there was a vote that there would be no football game - even as background. I have a rule that I only watch football Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, and The Super Bowl. But they weren't hearing any of that. Marissa had brought over a copy of WALL-E knowing how much I love that movie - purposefully, I'm sure - to distract me. So, we watched about an hour of that until I had to get up and start fixing dinner.
I had decided to fix Rock Cornish Game Hens for Thanksgiving dinner. I knew they would be overpowered with turkey other places over the next few days, and they both love hens the way I cook them. I use a process James Haller, the famous chef from Portsmouth's Blue Strawberry. Though now long closed, during the 1970s and 1980s it drew people from far away for his innovative cooking. James taught me how to not only cook, but to actually enjoy it.
As I cooked, WALL-E kept us all smiling. Colin and Marissa wandered between the living room and kitchen as the smells of the hens filled the condo - at least this year I didn't set off the smoke alarm. The hens have to cook uncovered for 30 minutes in a 475 degree oven, and so sometimes - actually almost every time - the wonderful clouds of smoke just fill the place and set the alarm off.
I set them just a touch lower in the oven this time and not quite at 475, and though the smell of them cooking away filled the downstairs, there were no clouds of smoke. And that's a good thing so as not to throw the neighbors into a frenzy with smoke alarms going off.
Dinner still had awhile to cook, and so after WALL-E finished the kids picked Top Gun to put on. That's one of my all time favorite movies, and it was all I could do to keep focused in the kitchen as the soundtrack blared away as the jets flashed across the screen in the other room. Torture!
But even Top Gun gets put on hold for Thanksgiving dinner. We had such a good time just chatting away. Too good, maybe, because we got to talking about traveling. Marissa has been on me something wicked about taking her to Ireland for her graduation, though Colin has little interest in that. He want's to go to Florida...
But then we got talking about where I'd still like to go: DisneyWorld, Hell's Backbone Grill (for the reason for this entry to vist one of the most remote towns in the United States, read the section 07/15/06: Saturday Night and It's All Right!), San Francisco, Florence, DisneyWorld (again), maybe a few other places.
But then I mentioned Bermuda, and both of them really perked up and Marissa said how much she'd like to go there and just 'chill out on the beach'. Even Colin thought it would be fun. Marissa even said she might consider letting me off the hook about Ireland to do that.
So, I'm going to do some research and see as it would be so much fun to share that with them in celebration of my 60th. But as a backup, I'm not discounting fixing hens again with Top Gun as the movie of the night.
With other stops on their agenda, Colin and Marissa headed out around 4:00pm. I had assured them that they would be cut loose by no later than 3:00pm, but that, of course, was prior to someone bringing WALL-E over to throw the chef's timing off...
I had been stying pretty much ahead of the cleanup, so just some dishes to do. By 5:15pm I was parked on the sofa and relaxing as I had been on my feet pretty much the whole day.
