282 animal, vegetable, miracleBlue handily to pieces (ten minutes flat—revenge is sweet) to cook down
for pumpkin pies. Lily helped roll out the dough. Both girls have always
helped with Thanksgiving dinner, since they were tall enough to stand on
a chair and mix the stuffing with their hands like a splendid mud pie. One
year earlier, at ages eight and seventeen, they had taken responsibility for
an entire holiday meal when I was sidelined with a broken leg. With some
heavy-lifting help from Steven they pulled it off beautifully: turkey, pies
and all. Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting
from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
On Thursday morning we baked the pies. In the afternoon we roasted
sweet potatoes, braised winter squash, sautéed green beans with chest-
nuts, boiled and mashed the potatoes, all while keeping a faithful eye on
Mr. T. By herself, Lily cracked half a dozen eggs into a bowl (subtract
$1.25 from the I.O. Mama column) and made the corn pudding, using
corn we’d cut from the cob and frozen in summer. Our garden provided
everything, with one exception. Cranberries mostly grow farther north.
I’d planted a small experimental cranberry patch but had nothing yet to
show for my efforts. We discussed a cranberryless Thanksgiving, and
agreed that would be like kissing through a screen door. Who needs it?
Did we need it—was it essential that this feast be 100 percent pure
Hoppsolver- grown? Personal quests do have a way of taking on lives of
their own, even when nobody else knows or cares: recreational runners
push themselves another mile, Scrabblers keep making bigger words. Our
locavore project nudged us constantly toward new personal bests. But it
always remained fascination, not fanaticism. We still ate out at restau-
rants with friends sometimes, and happily accepted invitations to dine at
their homes. People who knew about our project would get fl ustered
sometimes about inviting us, or when seeing us in a restaurant would
behave as if they’d caught the cat eating the canary. We always explained,
“We’re converts in progress, not preachers. No stone tablets.” Our
Thanksgiving dinner would include a little California olive oil, a pinch of
African nutmeg, and some Virginia flour that likely contained wheat from
Pennsylvania and points north. Heeding the imperatives of tradition, we
also bought a bag of lipstick- colored organic cranberries from Wisconsin.
As the fi rst store- bought fruit or vegetable to enter our house in many