We had a super, low key holiday weekend at our house complete with many traditions, including the canned cranberry sauce one I wrote about last week.
One tradition that did not happen this year was the teen girl making the pumpkin pie. She has a really bad cough, and I envisioned her hacking into the ingredients as she mixed them with love. I don’t think I have ever actually made a pumpkin pie, but how hard could it be, right? So, as the husband smoked our beautiful turkey on the Big Green Egg, I whipped up the sides and baked the pumpkin pie. After dinner, the family members who still had room for more food (i.e., everyone but me) lined up to get a slice of pumpkin pie with the standard Cool Whip topping. No one ate more than one bite.
I am not sure that in all the chaos of making multiple dishes, I substituted salt for sugar or some other mix up, but my pie was not edible. In an effort to save Thanksgiving, I promised to take the teen girl to the grocery store first thing Friday morning so she could make a replacement pie (while wearing a mask to keep her cough germs from getting in the pie).
Since we lost trash and recycling pick up from the house (more about that topic here), I am very thoughtful about what actually goes into the trash. I compost a lot, but for things that can’t be composted, like the turkey carcass, I leave on a tree stump in the front woods for our wildlife friends. The composter was full, and after cooking all day, I was not in the mood to dump it out and start a fresh section, so I decided that my pie failure would go to the wildlife on Wild Azalea Lane. Y’all, that pie is still out there 4 days later! Not even starving wildlife would touch my pie. Now, that my friends, is sad.
Other traditions were more successful, like putting up the Christmas tree after Thanksgiving. When my mom was well, she would make sure our tree was up and decorated no later than Friday afternoon after Thanksgiving. I miss her homemade cornbread the most at Thanksgiving. She would cook it in her cast iron pan that she brought from home, because it had to be made in that pan.
And because I am the greatest wife and mom that has ever lived, I agreed to colored lights only on the tree and outside of the house. I posted about this big sacrifice on Facebook and realized that lots of other families are a house divided on this issue. Who knew? So, go me for being flexible and thinking differently about something that I have felt strongly about my entire life.
Did anyone else have a cooking fail over the holiday weekend? Surely I am not the only one out there. Chime in my friends! Make me feel better about my pumpkin pie fail.