I gave thanks this week for the wonderful dinner my neighbors shared with me, and for the leftovers I enjoyed creatively all week long. I baked a pie to share with them, Vaughn Vreeland’s coffee-maple chess pie, which looked a lot better than it tasted. Oh well. The laminated crust was great but it shrank so much in the parbake I had to use a smaller pie tin. I’ll try the crust again with a regular chess pie the old fashioned way.

The first leftover day I made a sandwich with avocado, mayo, blueberry jam, cheddar cheese, lettuce and turkey, which tasted a lot better than it looked. Then, knowing I could never finish all of everything and would have to freeze some of it, I threw some of everything (turkey, garlic mashed potatoes, chestnut stuffing, green beans, turkey, and a splash of cranberry sauce) into a pot with a pint of chicken stock, and simmered and stirred until I had a creamy, delicious, chowder-like soup. Which both looked and tasted delicious!

Then I made turkey salad, also including some stuffing and green beans, along with mayo, mustard, and Penzeys spicy salt, enjoying that one day on toast, and another day with the last of the warmed up potatoes and stuffing. I’m grateful for the generosity of my neighbor and for having fun with food.

I had been wanting to bake homemade English muffins for awhile and had the little metal rings in the pantry waiting, when the need to bake them finally arose. I tried them two ways: one instruction had me place the greased rings on a griddle and fill them with dough; the other had me put the rings on a cookie sheet and bake in the oven. In both cases, I filled the rings too full, but the breads turned out light and puffy anyway, and perfectly adequate. I’ll try the griddle method again with a different recipe.

Today’s lunch was ‘eggamuffin,’ a treat from my days in the swamp when my neighbors and I breakfasted together frequently at their trailer. Oh those days in the swamp! I lived in a retired military quonset hut split into a duplex, along with a ragtag assortment of other mostly single residents in other huts, trailers, and a cabin or two, surrounded by live oaks, at the edge of a sinkhole that had filled in with water and was a magnet for herons, frogs, and the occasional alligator. Such a different habitat from the sere mesa I wound up on, both so dear to me in their own ways.

Maybe the best turkey of all this week was the flock of wild turkeys who wandered through the yard this morning! In the thirty years I’ve lived here I’ve only heard them in the woods a few times, and seen a couple outside the fence one time. It was a startling thrill that pulled me away from washing dishes when I caught my first glimpse of one strutting past the south windows. By the time I got to the east window they just kept coming, ultimately more than a dozen of them, strutting and pecking as they went, moving steadily.

I watched, delighted, until they had all moved through the yard and jumped the fence. It crossed my mind to send Wren out there to catch one for us to eat, but she hurt her paw in the snow the other day and wanted to lie on the heating pad and lick it instead. Just as well.