That's What Jenni Said

Friday morning the crew (A and her hubby R, myself and hubby J) rolled out of the home of A's parents at 5am. You haven't seen attitude until you've seen Long Islanders in line at Best Buy at 5am for the biggest sale of the year. There was a lot of swearing, pushing, rushing, and at one point customers formed a human chain to stop new customers from entering the store ahead of those that had been in line since 2am. It was intense and a lot more physically aggressive than similar Black Friday sales events held in Virginia. After Best Buy we popped into Home Depot, ToysRus and Sears. A lot of great deals. The only thing that was disappointing was the sales tax. 8.6% for NY state and another 4 or 5 % on top of that for local taxes. Ouch! Some things I really don't miss about living in NY and sales tax is definitely one of them. By 9am we had completed 3/4 of our Christmas shopping for the year and we headed to a diner for breakfast. A quick breakfast and review of our pu...

  This years Thanksgiving feast was like no other I've experienced before. Early afternoon J and I helped A and her hubby R and the rest of A's family setup for the Thanksgiving party. Every year her parents host a celebration gathering for their friends and family in the NY Russian community. The party averages 25-50 guests and features Russian cuisine, live music (courtesy of A's father and brother) and lots of laughter and joy. Although I would miss the traditional American turkey and fixins I looked forward to broadening my culinary horizons. I did not have any experience with Russian food prior to this event. We setup the main table in the party room upstairs with the main entrees...   From left to right: (back row) seafood salad, cabbage turnovers, chicken dumplings, fried white fish, spiced chicken in crepes. (front row) pickled cabbage, onion/pea/carrot salad, beet salad, vinegar roasted pork,  2nd dish of chicken in crepes, 2nd dish of chicken dumplin...

Note: Buzz, Michael, and Wild-r-f – I cannot reply to your entries that you leave on the lj site since the feed doesn’t allow anonymous comments and I don’t always even see them unless I remember to visit my feed entries there since I don’t get email notification when you’ve left comments there. If you want me to be able to answer questions you ask me in your comments you’ve got to click-through to the actual blog (link is always under the title of the entry) and leave your comments on the actual blog instead of the lj feed. So the plan * was * for J to take my car to work this morning, dropping off the pups at the kennel for boarding over the holiday on the way to work. I was going to drive his car to work and then drop it off at the dealer on the way to A’s house because the “steering wheel lock malfunction” warning light keeps coming on and causing odd problems such as preventing you from turning the car off, or preventing you from turning it back on. Late last night the light cam...

Do you hold many happy memories from Thanksgivings past? This morning on the way to work I reviewed my Thanksgiving memories on my mental viewfinder. Out of 30 Thanksgiving holidays, only a handful stand out as memorable, and not typically for joyous reasons. There was my first Thanksgiving away from home. I was 14 and attending school on the East Coast. It was cost prohibitive to travel cross-country for the holiday so my parents cooked up a plan for my sister in Alabama to pick me up instead. We had not seen each other since I was 9 and she had come to visit us in the Southwest. There wasn't much to talk about during the 12 hours drive to her place in Huntsville. For the Thanksgiving meal we dropped in on her local friends. I looked to the food for comfort from my feelings of isolation and homesickness, but even that missed the mark. There were no mashed potatoes! None! How does one *do* Thanksgiving without mashed potatoes??? Tears rolled down my cheek as I tasted my first bite ...