8:44am: I should not need a degree in agricultural science to order sweet potatoes from FreshDirect. I ordered sweet potatoes, because I was like yams? the hell?
Yeah, turns out? That’s what I should have ordered: the yams. Because ordering sweet potatoes got me some kinda crazy ass yellow things that ain’t going in my sweet potato pie.
Hopefully, I will get to the grocery store early enough that it won’t be mobbed enough to make me weep.
8:59am: Okay, okay, I know I should be getting ready to go, but Hall & Oates is on the Today show and… the crowd is filled with middle-aged women just rockin’ the hell out. They are INTO it, man. You can almost hear the MySpace pages filling up with OMFG my mom is sooooo embarasing!!!11 Also, Oates no longer has his big ole pornoman mustache and that’s just weird.
10:02am: It’s a Thanksgiving miracle! I found $9.40 in my coat.
11:16am: Seeing as I just bought $12 of groceries, my Thanksgiving miracle is somewhat dampened, but still nine bucks is nine bucks. Anyway, I picked up a butternut squash to make a traditional New England squash pie instead of sweet potato. Walking back from the grocery store, I also realized, uh… I was going to go to the Greenmarket Monday and pick up another vegetable, wasn’t I? Yeah. Oops.
Noon: Procrastination sets in. I spent the last 45 minutes reading Give Us Back New York and figuring out how to put their banner on my site. I have not had much success. I guess I’ll go make a pie now or something.
12:17pm: I broke my whole site with that banner. Emergency repairs commence.
1:36pm: Well, that totally sucked. Now, I roast some squash.
3:22pm: Squash is roasted and scooped out of its skin. In retrospect, I’m actually quite glad I got squash instead of sweet potatoes. It wasn’t until I licked a bit of squash off my hand that something in me went oh, yeah… it’s Thanksgiving!
4:08pm: Pie’s a-bakin’. Man, did that make a lot of filling. I used this recipe, because everyone seemed to have good things to say about it and I liked that the egg whites were whipped and then folded in. I think it’ll end up a little lighter than the usual pie. I hope. Anyway, I still had three little ramekins of filling left over, which I just stuck in the freezer. I assume I’ll still be able to bake them at some point later.
5:54pm: Whoo. It’s taking a LOT of willpower not to bust out a slice of that pie right now. It looks great and it smells even better. Now, I make the traditional $MaidenName Family Pre-Thanksgiving snack: celery with cream cheese. Or, in my case, celery with goat cheese because I totally forgot to get cream cheese.
Epilogue: My husband comes home and goes, “So… what do you want to have for dinner tonight?” In all my preparation, I had completely flaked out on the fact that we might want to, you know, eat sometime before tomorrow’s Thanksgiving dinner. The. End.
I couldn’t resist recording the last installment of a VH1 special on “The 100 Greatest 80s Songs,” and Hall & Oates were on it talking about his moustache and current lack thereof.
Well, squash is a vegetable!
You won’t get yams no matter what you order-they are all really sweet potatoes. I quote:
Several decades ago, when orange-fleshed sweet potatoes were introduced in the southern United States, producers and shippers desired to distinguish them from the more traditional, white-fleshed types. The African word nyami, referring to the starchy, edible root of the Dioscorea genus of plants, was adopted in its English form, yam. Yams in the U.S. are actually sweetpotatoes with relatively moist texture and orange flesh. Although the terms are generally used interchangeably, the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires that the label “yam” always be accompanied by “sweetpotato.”