Finale or Finally

 

Thanksgiving went well. I managed to get all the items needed for a good and traditional dinner. We always have creamed onions with all the other traditional stuff and I was able to get them because there were some at the food bank. We also had most welcome additions brought by those attending.  Among the additions to the meal were pies. Everyone went home with a pie, not necessarily theirs. A good time was had by all.

We had crab on Wednesday. A good friend of ours caught some fresh crab and gave us two and a half crabs already cooked. We ate them. If we hadn’t had the crab we would have had chicken in some form or other. I still have 5 pounds of chicken left in the freezer. My thanks to the crab fishermen, the crabs were most welcome.

We have been eating leftovers both Friday and Saturday, and we managed to send some Turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes home with all of the families.

So here we are at the end of the month and I have learned a lot:

1)  This is a hard job. It takes time and an enormous amount of energy. There is an huge amount of planning that has to be  done. When you don’t know what will be available on any given day is is hard to plan healthy meals. Most canned soups, stews and vegetables contain too much salt.

2)  I am grateful that neither of us has a food allergy. Speciality food is very expensive. I understand a little about that since my husband uses soy milk on cereal. He can eat yogurt and cottage cheese though. Soy milk costs about $3.50 a half gallon and milk is under $3.00.

3) The first thing that goes is fish. It is just too expensive. The only time we had fish this month was hen the food bank had some that I could buy with fish bucks. The second thing that goes is meat. Usually have a couple of vegetarian meals a month.We were eating vegetarian a couple of times a week. I started to consider meal as a condiment.

4)  I was surprised at the emotions I felt when someone gave us food. We got jelly from a neighbor and some more when I posted her gift on Facebook. The crab was also most welcome; and the scones, and the pumpkin bread. All of it was most appreciated.

5) I was also surprised at how connected I felt with: my grandmother, mother, assorted aunts and great aunts, they taught me how to cook and how to use everything. I used several of the recipes I got from them and remembered little tricks about extending food and recovering from disasters.

I am sure I will think of more that I have learned in the future. I think that if we were doing this full time we would have a bigger garden and we would have chickens.

Thanks to everyone who read about this foolishness and to the patrons of Fishline, You are my heroes.