Our Thanksgiving blessings

Here's what our Thanksgiving was like.

Like most holiday cooks, the secret is to start the day before (Wednesday). This was the day the weather report promised high winds.

I decided to clean and refill our oil lamps, which were dusty and in need of topping off, in case of a power outage.

Before:

After:

My goal for Wednesday was to get both types of stuffing made, along with dinner rolls and pies. We started with the bread stuffing.

Into the wood cookstove oven. I figured since the cookstove was hot anyway, I might as well be efficient and use the oven.

Next, dinner rolls (Older Daughter's particular favorite). I tried a new recipe this year called "Half-time spoon rolls" by the incomparable Jackie Clay in her book Backwoods Home Cooking. Easy and delicious. Here's the unrisen dough:

For the second rising, the dough is spoon-dropped into cupcake tins. Here they've already risen and I'm putting them in the oven.

Hot out of the oven, they're brushed with a bit of melted butter. Yum.

While the rolls were rising, I made wild rice stuffing. No one else in my family likes it, so this is my once-a-year indulgence.

I'm draining some carrots I canned last year, and ready to chop up some of this year's onions.

Sautéing the carrots and onions. After adding the rices and boiling water, it cooks on the stove top.

While it cooked, I tackled the blueberry pies. I still haven't gotten around to canning this year's blueberries, so I started with frozen fruit.

In fact the berries were a little too frozen, so I let them defrost on the warming shelf while I made the pie crust.

Typical happy pre-Thanksgiving chaos.

By 2 pm, everything was done (except the blueberry pies weren't yet baked). I was pleased at how many ingredients came from our own efforts: Eggs, onions, garlic, carrots, potatoes, blueberries, bread, chicken stock. But many ingredients were purchased: flour, sugar, yeast, and of course the turkey.

Since it was early and the kitchen was tidy...

...Older Daughter and I decided to stretch our legs and take Mr. Darcy hiking on the same trail we hiked a few days ago.

It was very cold (about 30F) and windy, so we bundled up.

We expected to be blasted from the ridge top by high winds, but in fact we were protected by another ridge, so it wasn't so bad. Below us, the lake surface was choppy with whitecaps.

On the downhill side of the hike, we were thrilled to spy a distant moose across a draw.

Correction, make that two moose! I've lived in Idaho nearly 17 years and have not, in my opinion, seen nearly as many moose as I'd like.

We admired these beauties for a few minutes before continuing our descent.

We noticed some woodland graffiti on the trail.

We also noticed another hiker had dutifully bagged up his/her dog's poop, but left the bag by the side of the trail. Older Daughter thought perhaps they meant to fetch it on the way back and simply forgot. I was a little less magnanimous in my thoughts, but at any rate we picked up the bag and deposited it in the trash can left at the trail head.

The trail head has a bag dispenser for the convenience of hikers with dogs. Since I had extra bags at home, I brought some and stuffed them into the dispenser.

It was dusky by the time we left the park, and passed some roadside deer eating their own Thanksgiving dinner.

It also occurred to us, as we drove home, that on a day when so many people were tied up in massive traffic trying to be with their loved ones for Thanksgiving, we had just spent two hours hiking and had seen not a single soul.

Back home, I finished baking the pies and the last of the rolls.

"Voila," I said as I pulled the last pie from the oven. "All the pre-Thanksgiving cooking is done. And ALL of it was done in the wood cookstove." "Oh, you homesteading nerd," Older Daughter pronounced. (Guilty!)

Since most of the cooking was already done, Thanksgiving Day was a rather leisurely affair. I caught some photos of our barn cat, Simba, dreaming of his own Thanksgiving feast of fresh quail. Simba is quite a hunter, so those were some brave quail.

Here's the turkey, just out of the oven.

Don does the carving.

Setting the table. We had two neighbors joining us.

Older Daughter folded the dinner napkins in a particularly pretty way, with a slot for each utensil.

Last-minute things: making gravy and heating the dinner rolls and stuffing.

Because one of our guests works for the highway department and is currently on the night shift, we had dinner very early (2 pm). As it turns out, he had the day off after all, so everyone could linger over coffee and pie as long as we wished. Still, by 5:45 pm the guests had left and the dishes were done. I was able to sit down with a glass of wine and a book.

Then Younger Daughter called from her overseas duty station and we all chatted for about half an hour, so altogether it was a very wonderful day.

We finished by simmering the turkey carcass overnight...

...and canning up a nice batch of turkey stock.

I hope everyone had a similarly blessed Thanksgiving!

What do 5000+ books look like?

As some of you may have gathered, we love books. We collect books. We have books all over the house, in the oddest nooks and crannies, wherever we can squeeze them. I wrote an article (never published) called Raising a Reader: Confessions of an Obsessed Book Collector which, if I do say so, is a pretty darned accurate portrayal of our family's little, er, quirk.

And to answer the most frequently-asked question....no, we haven't read them all. We've read most of them, though - at least 75%.

So what do 5000+ books look like? I went around and photographed our bookshelves. We have about half of them roughly grouped into categories. The rest are a mishmash.

Here is our collection of history, politics, and finance:


A heavily-used shelf. Top shelf are interior design, some science series, and some photo collections by Life Magazine; next shelf are costuming (chiefly Renaissance and Medieval), arts, and crafts; next are the comic series (Foxtrot, Calvin & Hobbes, Baby Blues, The Far Side, etc.); next are our daily-use schoolbooks; and on the bottom, some oversized books involving art collections and mythology.


Mostly science books (largely geology, biology), including my cherished "In the Shadow of Man" autographed by Jane Goodall back in 1978; plus a few gardening books and miscellaneous mishmash.


A mishmash unit. Lots of novels (Bronte, Seton, M.M. Kaye, Austin) along with absolutely anything else, ranging from Plants of Idaho to a biography of Shirley Temple.


One of my favorite shelving units. This holds Childcraft books and This Fabulous Century books at the top; on the left are World Book Encyclopedias (picked up for $1/each when our old Oregon library upgraded to newer editions); left bottom are history books; and the two right-hand units hold my collection of farming, gardening, and homesteading books.


Oops, almost forgot our cookbooks:


A stray shelf built into the boot unit my husband made, next to our entry way. At the top are the cubbies where we tuck hats, gloves, etc. Bottom, obviously, are boots. This shelf holds a lot of our identification books (birds, flowers, insects, etc.) and some overflow mishmash.


The shelving unit next to the stairs. This is largely a mishmash of books we tend to reach for frequently - political books, Bill Bryson (love him!), some overflow children's books, and a lot of my collection of interior design and decorating books. (Which is pretty funny when you think about it, because I have absolutely no talent for interior decorating.)


The shelving unit next to the piano. This used to be a display unit for our tankards when we were doing craft shows. Now it holds a collection of classic literature - Bronte, Twain, Dickens, Aesop, Mitchell, that kind of stuff. A few shorter sets or series as we find them.


Oldest Daughter's bookshelf in her bedroom:


Our reference shelves, as well as oversized books (mostly art). This unit is at the base of our stairs, and the little radio ($5.99 at Goodwill) is constantly tuned to KAGU 88.7 FM, the classical station out of Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA so I can hear it in my office. Ah, bliss.


Shelves in the front room bathroom (that I now use as a canning closet). The lower shelf has books on religion and several spare Bibles; the middle shelf has books on psychology and human behavior; and the top shelf has books on simplicity and frugality.


Reference books on a high shelf in my husband's "office" (poor guy doesn't really have a proper place to call his own). These are wiring and plumbing manuals, woodworking reference books, appliance repair, that kind of thing.


A typical sight - recently finished (or recently referenced) books piled everywhere.


These shelves are on the stair landing right below my office. These are a mishmash - no particular order or theme.


These are my writing reference books in my office.


These are children's books that the girls have largely outgrown, but are too good to get rid of. We keep them upstairs near where the TV is. (For the record, we don't have TV reception and only use the TV for watching movies.)


One year Don asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I said I wanted a magazine shelf. We had magazines archived all over the house, and I wanted them shelved all in one place. Many of these are magazines Don or I write for - Countryside, Grit, Backwoods Home, Back Home, Crafts Report, etc. Others are magazines we get at thrift stores or free as library giveaways - Architectural Digest, National Geographic, etc. On the top shelf are two series of books (one on classic sailing ships - my husband used to be in the Navy; and the other an almost-complete Great Books of the Western World set) found at a library sale for - I'm not kidding - $3 for each series. For the whole series. (We thought we'd died and gone to heaven.) You can see something of the unfinished nature of our do-it-yourself house by the insulation above the books. On the other side of this wall is my office.


This is our "paperback bookshelf," squeezed into an odd nook outside our bedroom door. Don built these shelves out of 100+ year old barnwood we found in the attic of our old house in Oregon.


Some of our series volumes: my beloved Harvard Classics (incomplete - I'm working on acquiring the volumes as I find them) as well as some Great Classics I picked up for a buck apiece at a library sale. The rest is mishmash. The shelves were originally display units for our tankards back in the days when we did craft fairs. Now they're located in a spare bedroom.


So that's what 5000+ books look like. Any questions?

UPDATE: Now here's the Ultimate Library. I wish!