Thankful

We've always resisted decorating the exterior of our house, reasoning that, being 1/4 mile off a very lightly traveled road and hidden by woods, no one would see it. This year, Bill got a wild hair and threw a couple of strings of lights up in the pines in the backyard, and then he got another and wound some blue lights around some birch trunks and hung some multicolored lights in the mulberry. I'm sitting in the dark kitchen looking out at them glowing softly against the snow, and I'm thankful.

No one but we five will see them, and that's enough.

Although we went kind of coo-coo over the kids as usual, Bill and I decided to put our Christmas into replacing our 1978 vintage kitchen stove. It was a Caloric, and I still loved it and would have been willing to put up with its quirks indefinitely until Bill pulled the trigger. It was down a burner, which couldn't  be replaced because the stove had long since been declared obsolete. The three burners that remained were a bit too hot to trot and having adjustment issues that did not seem to be resolving. To wit: You'd put some chili on to cook slowly on the lowest burner setting, and you'd walk away,  as you do when cooking chili, and you'd come back to find the flame merrily blazing away on Medium High and your chili adhered firmly and blackly to the bottom of the pot. We developed an elaborate system of cast iron frying pans overturned and stacked to run interference between the overzealous burners and our food. It was time.

photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson

It's a dead heat who's more thrilled about the stove: us or Phoebe. This is her inaugural batch of chocochipcookies. For those who wonder, it's a Frigidaire Gallery with on-demand convection and no drawer broiler, because those things spook me. We were looking at the model one notch above this one and about to settle on it when I noticed that it had printed on the touch panel the words

PIZZA             CHICKEN NUGGETS

Now, if we put pizza in our oven it's the homemade kind that Bill constructs from the risen dough up. And I have not had a chicken nugget in the house since 2008 when I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. I took the backlog of frozen Tyson nuggets, formerly a favorite of Liam's, out to the meadow and dumped them out for the vultures, along with a bunch of other stuff that had aged out in the freezer. The vultures, coyotes, opossums, crows and foxes ate everything but the nuggets. You read right. The nuggets just lay there, barely changing in form through snow and rain, until they rotted away.

Would somebody get this frikkin' chicken nugget off my freezer-burned pot roast?

Photo by MeatCam

Needless to say, we were not about to drop an extra $200 to get a high-end range that had printed presets for frozen pizza and chicken nuggets on its touch panel. I was not going to look at the words

PIZZA     CHICKEN NUGGETS

every day until they put me in the elderhopper.

 That was a deal breaker. I said as much to our spectacularly unhelpful salesman at Lowe's, who had touted the presets for heat-and-eat foodoid items as a big plus, and he responded, "Ah. Food Nazi, huh?" Oh, that's how you endear yourself to a potential customer. Note to NumbNuts: There are still some people out here who know how to cook, who load the grocery belt with fresh produce and raw meats instead of pre-formed derivatives of corn. We are vanishing, but we do still exist. Tell you what. You go ahead and ingest your fast fake

PIZZA    CHICKEN NUGGETS

and we'll construct and eat our snooty real slow food. Sieg Heil!

Hm. I seem to have digressed. I am thankful for our new stove, and each time we bake we marvel anew at its perfection. Phoebe and I made a Danish Puff a couple of nights ago that was the highest, most fabulously evenly golden Danish Puff we'd ever seen. The stove runs off our free gas. Thankful.

Thankful for our blossoming cartoonist, who's working on a series about a superhero onion named Produce Man. He's done two issues and is working on the third, The Adventures of Produce Man and the Awfully Alarming Apples.

Here he's explaining it all to Wendy, a lead vocalist and keyboard player for our new band The Rain Crows. We're playing January 7 at The Adelphia Music Hall in Marietta, Ohio. It has a built-in sound system and a soundman. So we won't be lugging a couple of tons of equipment. Thankful again. And very excited.    

The Raincrows: Jeff Eller, Wendy Eller, Bill Thompson II, Craig Gibbs, JZ and Chet Baker, Mascot 

Photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson

We wish you a peaceful Christmas, full of music, real food, and love. Just let me wrap all day, then sit and stare at  the Christmas tree with a kid on my lap. That's all I want.