Turkey soup

Eastside Road, December 15, 2013—

THESE ARE THE DAYS of smaller delights at table, the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. At least that's often the way I think of them. It's almost as if we were consciously reining in, partly in the wake of whatever feasting Thanksgiving may have provided, but much more, I think, prospectively, as if our bodies were striking a defensive posture against Feasting Yet to Come.

We've been eating turkey soup. Not as much, cook tells me, as I think we have. And I'm not complaining: it's good soup. I think we're at the end of it: today I noticed the neck and gizzards sizzling away at the bottom of the soup pot.

We have other delights, of course. Lunch today involved Franco's guinea=hen terrine; you can't get a lot more delightful than that. We still have pears, and I picked a few more Pixie tangerines today, sneaking under the frost blanket.

The daily green salad is always a pleasure: the garlic's showing its will to grow, and I have to cut the sprout out at its core, always thinking of Dylan Thomas…

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age…

Turkey soup, and winter thoughts. In a week we'll be elsewhere, and in the intervening week we seem to have three dinners already planned, two of them out…

Cheap Barbera d'Asti