Gobble Gobble

THANKFUL: We at MPA hope everyone had a happy and healthy Thanksgiving. 

We had a cooperative holiday - we divvied up the cooking to do list between our place, Kennedy, and my parents. We each made our own turkey, but we were in charge of cranberries, Chex mix and wild rice stuffing. Kennedy was the beans and potatoes guy, and my parents made cookies, pies, rolls and more. 

Thursday morning the kids and I met Kennedy by the freeway, dropped off our bag for him and picked up his bag for my parents. We proceeded to Mukilteo and picked up baked goods for us, dropped off our food and Ken's food for them, and then headed south. We met Ken just off the freeway again and gave him the grandparents' baked goods and he gave us our food from him. The masked and socially distanced choreography worked well. It was a nice way to share a little bit of the holiday together, and get lots of great food with not too much effort!

Meanwhile, back at MPA, Christian was working a little magic. He fired up our vintage GE Partio Cart to roast the Thanksgiving turkey.

Isn't she lovely?

Since we haven't baked in it before, Christian smartly used a thermometer to monitor the oven's temperature. It runs pretty hot, so it's a good thing he was watching it.

I can't help but wonder, how many people do you suppose cooked their Thanksgiving turkey in a Partio Cart in 2020? Is it 2,000 or 200? Or maybe 20 or 2? I don't think GE sold a ton of them. They were $600 back in the day (1956, when they came out). That translates to about $7,600 today, adjusted for inflation. Way too rich for our blood! Glad we accidentally bought it for a couple hundred bucks a few years back.

A BIGGER FEAST: What do you do on the day after Thanksgiving? Well, you get up and peel 30 pounds of potatoes, if you're us. That's because Teen Feed was the following day, and we had lots of stuff to do to prepare.

Once the potatoes were cooked, they were mashed, with lots of butter, garlic, sour cream, salt, white pepper and whole milk added in. (We try to pack in the calories and protein when making Teen Feed food.)

We also made about 28 pounds of bacony green beans, and a couple dozen vegan cornbread muffins. (We always make sure we have vegan and gluten free options for our diners.) I was super happy with how the muffins looked - they puffed up so nicely. (I didn't eat one, though, so I'm not sure about the taste.)

Saturday afternoon, we swung by a Safeway on Queen Anne hill to pick up 160 pieces of chicken (two for each of our 80 diners). They gave us their Monday "Cheap Chicken" price on Saturday, which we really appreciated. We'd never outsourced our main dish before, but thought we'd try it this month. We wanted to do a Thanksgiving like meal, but not serve turkey, as we'd heard the kids aren't wild about turkey. So, our group of volunteers made traditional Thanksgiving side dishes and dessert, and served the fried chicken, which the diners loved, so yay for that. 

POKER FACE: The other night we were doing our 'camping at the convenience store' COVID era entertainment. It's a picnic table outside of a store in West Seattle where Christian and I can grab a beer and the kids can have a soda and we can sit by ourselves, play a game and pretend things are kind of normal.

We were playing a game called Loot Letter the other night. It's important not to tip your hand in that game. Poor CJ, he just doesn't have much of a poker face. Below was his work-around.