Monday, October 04, 2010

Our Pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving

10/04/2010

The past Saturday The Nancy and I had my brothers and sister, their spouses, a few of their kids and my girls and some little guys visit with us on The Farm.  The occasion, see the title, for that is exactly what is was.  We had twenty for dinner on Saturday, and if I must say so, and if allowed to do so, we carried it off flawlessly from the beginning of the weekend Friday evening and the arrival of my eldest daughter and her significant other, to the departure of the last of the group Sunday evening about 4pm after the Ravens luckily pulled off a win over the Steelers.  The weekend was too cool, way cool, it rocked.

The Nancy and I have this entertaining down pat these days.  We have done the Thanksgiving thing so many times now, it is truly a second nature thing.  The menu varies little from year to year, and that makes it pretty easy to plan for, prepare and serve no matter how many guests we have.

I do the cooking, and I love to do it.  The Nancy would rather stick a pencil in her eye than spend time cooking.  Her philosophy is that if it cannot be nuked it is too much trouble to prepare.  She prefers to clean up, and I gladly opt out of that phase of the meal.  I’d do anything to make her happy.

Saturday morning I was up at O-Zero Thirty to begin my prepping.  It makes it easy to finish the dishes if some prep is done prior to cooking.  I got the turkey done on Friday – cooked and carved.  I had the carrots peeled and sliced before eight, and the potatoes peeled and cubed by nine.  We were on our way to a successful day.

Michelle and Patrick joined me about 8:30, and we talked as I worked.  I was talking to them as I minced some candied ginger to add to my carrots.  All was going as it should when it happened…the knife I was using broke bad on me and took off a piece of the right index finger including about a quarter of the nail.  As I grabbed my right hand with my left the blood began to flow…and flow…and flow.  I do an aspirin therapy to thin my blood and I could tell it is working just fine.  Fortunately, the chunk of nail and skin attached to it fell on the counter top and not on the cutting board (no pun intended).  Funny how closely it looked like candied ginger.  I would have hated to have heard once of our guests say, “Hey! What’s this?”

Our company included a former EMT, an RN, and a PA, so I wasn’t worried about getting expert medical assistance.  I will have to say the bandage around my finger did hamper me a tad, but with the assistance of my Bride-in-Chief and the enlistment of some family members, the meal hit the table exactly as it was timed to do.  Our Pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving was a complete success, and it only cost me a finger tip, but it did instill in me the need to get remedial training to develop my knife skills, and though it looks pretty bad, please know it doesn’t hurt to point.

And that is all I have to say about that…