Well - sometimes it seems like it. But actually this may have been the longest time since I last blogged.

OK - I am going to miss out on winning NaNoWriMo. I have done 16,000 words and I don't think I can manage 34,000 in 24 hours. But the girls are going to make it, so that's good. I will finish my novel in the next couple of months anyway. Then I can pretend that it's high quality is because of the extra time I had to finish. Or is that backwards?

Thanksgiving has come and gone. All those who deserve thanks please consider yourselves thanked. You know who you are.

On to the important part of Thanksgiving - dinner.

The night before we had hours fresh abalone pounded flat and thinly sliced, then pan sauteed in white wine, garlic, thyme and lemon zest. That was accompanied by angel hair pasta tossed with chunks of morels fried in garlic. That may have been better than the real thing.

Dinner was a free-range turkey stuffed with cranberry, chestnut, prune stuffing. We had more of the dressing and gravy and sauteed chard and beet tops and roasted winter vegetables (butternut squash, yams, beets, onion, leek) and cranberry-satsuma sauce. Dessert was pecan pie. Probably the simplest Thanksgiving meal I've done in years, but actually very good and NOT hugely wasteful like usual.

We stripped the carcass afterward for sandwiches and turkey pot pie and I boiled the bones and odd scrapings to make broth and blended in the winter vegetables later for a superb soup.

Somewhere in there we also had Jan's fabulous baked brie and cranberry appetizer.

I may or may not get to the recipes....