Blaze Orange

I love a feast. Most any excuse for a party. To raise a cup, to break bread. This year Thanksgiving is with the in-laws, at the in-laws, and with other family in attendance too. We’ve made broccoli salad, deviled eggs, crystallized ginger, dressing, and two pumpkin and two pecan pies to take.

The pecan pie always makes me think of mother. It was one of hers, and it was especially loved by my brother who I hardly ever see. It is simply not a holiday without making that pie. Although I’m thinking about seeing if it works with hickory nuts.

Pumpkin pie, for us, starts -- oh, about this time of year with some garden bed preparation. Or maybe it is in spring when we plant them for the first time. Or maybe it is early summer when we replant or whatever. Before the frost we bring them inside; pumpkins, acorn and butternut squash, cushaws. They will all make decent pies (except for field pumpkins, don’t try that). This year the cushaws, which almost always make, didn’t. But we did get some candy roaster pumpkins and that’s what I baked Tuesday in preparation for Wednesday’s pie making.

I don’t do so well actually feeding my family while I’m preparing for a major feast but I did make sure I made a couple loaves of bread just for us to eat on Tuesday. On the first one, there was lemon basil sitting on the counter in a bowl from where a daughter had processed it off the stems just the day before. So I put a couple of tablespoons of that in. Mmmm.

But the pièce de résistance was the second loaf. We’d stripped the meat out of the candy roaster, and I’d measured out what I’d need for pies and had a cup left over. I dumped it into the bread, along with some onion powder and rosemary and freshly grated ginger (because after all, we had the ginger to candy laying right there). If you don’t know, candy roasters are long things, and sort of pale on the outside. Not too pumpkin-like. But inside they positively glow blaze orange. And so did my bread. And so do my pies in their whole wheat crusts.

Although I make bread all the time, we rarely eat wheat bread hot out of the oven. This time we did and it was such a treat! Tonight supper was cornbread with jalapeños chopped up in it. I’ve got all the containers set out to take with us to bring leftovers home in.

Happy Thanksgiving ya’ll. It’s rifle season in these parts so don’t wander too far.