Radioactive Crab

Most people in this country eat a big dinner that consists of turkey as the main dish. There are some people who eat less traditional things, and I'm not just talking about those crazy folks who serve turducken.

At dinner, we were talking about people who have other things for Thanksgiving dinner. Things like lasagna for the Italians, crab cakes for the local folks, beef and colcannon for the Irish.

My family eats turkey (Christmas dinner will be lasagna, we save the colcannon for St. Patrick's Day). We also had a grand mix of things as side dishes. A nice salad, broccoli cole slaw, green bean casserole, pineapple, and potato salad to go with the stuffing and the giblet gravy and the cranberries. We wash it all down with a White Zinfandel or sparkling apple cider. We're mostly traditional. Except we eat on paper plates because no one wants to get stuck doing the dishes. My grandmother does have a dishwasher, so I'm not quite sure how that happens anyway. But it happened every holiday before we started with the wasteful paper.

So, I'm sorry to report that our holiday get-togethers are not green affairs when they happen at my grandmother's house (and almost all of them do).

Somehow, we managed to have five pies for dessert. We didn't eat them all, of course, we only broke into three of them; pecan, pumpkin, and apple with a supplement of raspberry torte. Yes, I'm stuffed fuller than a piñata on Cinco de Mayo. I didn't have any of the apple pie. See, apple pie is only good with some extra-sharp cheddar to go on top of it.

I'm told that's a northern thing: cheese on apple pie. I have a coworker from Ohio who thinks it's a southern thing like grits. I think that means Ohio is neither here nor there. The thing about Maryland is that it's both north and south. We have the southern grits, the northern apple pie with cheese, and even our own thing: no one does crabs like Marylanders. Blue or not, the crabs from the Chesapeake are the best out there (we were talking about this on our drive home, you see). Maybe it's the sludge that was dumped into the Susquehanna River at Three Mile Island and washes into the Bay that makes the crabs so yummy. Here's to radioactive crabs!

And you thought I wasn't going anywhere with that crazy title, didn't you?

Mom and I had a nice thirty minute ride in the second day of 70º weather this morning. Then I spend the better part of the day playing The Sims so as to stay out of my mother's way while she claimed the kitchen as her own. Then it was off to grandma's for dinner with our family friend aunt, and mom's brother and sister in law. We were entertained with the last hour of Guys and Dolls between dinner and dessert. Oh, how I wish I didn't have to work tomorrow.

But I'm thankful for my job, as much as I complain about it. I need to have one, and I perform it well. I'm thankful for my home, messy as it is. It's still the safest place in the world. I'm thankful for two soft cats and two cute anoles. Their company cannot be duplicated. I'm thankful for my friends. If I forget to tell you, I'm sorry. And I'm thankful for my family. I've heard that relatives are simply an accident of DNA (thanks for that wisdom, Margo Howard). If that's true, then I've had the best accident there is.

Happy Thanksgiving.