Another Thanksgiving

I'm doing it again. I was originally going down to see my partner, but everyone down there is still sick with flu, so I had to give up and just fake Thanksgiving here. Pretty much just like last year, when we were having snow. Frozen turkey dinner again this year, although I actually purchased both a can of yams and cranberry sauce for the occasion. I also decided last night while shopping in the Medium City (I can't seriously call it the Big City, but it's decent and only half an hour away) that I would go ahead and make a pumpkin mousse pie, which was fairly traditional when I was growing up. I decided to wait until I got home and looked up the recipe, so I could go to the local grocery store to get needed ingredients. I also thought I might already have most of the necessities for my green bean casserole at home.

Back at home I made my list, and discovered I did indeed have the green beans, french fried onions, and cream of mushroom soup, so one less set of stuff I needed. But I found last night that the local grocery was out of pumpkin pie spice (perhaps temporarily), and out of canned pumpkin (perhaps not so temporarily). Did you know there was apparently a pumpkin shortage this year? I hadn't heard anything about it, but I figured I'd make one more attempt this morning to see what I could find.

I stopped at the local grocery on the way out and found at least the spice was restocked, but no canned pumpkin. The store did have pre-made pies and pumpkin bread kits, but I didn't want those. So back to visit Wegmans in the Medium City again. Wegmans was out of most of their pumpkin, but did have plenty of cans of organic pumpkin from a brand I hadn't heard of, so I found what I needed and headed home.

I started setting up the casserole in the afternoon. Let's see, green beans, casserole dish, cream of mushroom soup... hmm, the soup is how old now? Oops, it seems to have a 2003 expiration date. Maybe it's OK? Hmm, no it looks kind of funny. Well, off to the local store one last time for soup. Thankfully they were still open for another hour. For not having done much in the way of cooking, my Thanksgiving turned out almost as hectic as a traditional meal would, complete with multiple grocery trips for missing and forgotten ingredients.

In any case, the meal turned out fine, and I've spent the rest of the day watching my recently arrived Netflix DVDs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed. So it was a fairly supernatural Thanksgiving, but that's what I like, so it was good in its own way. I just wish I could have gotten down to Kentucky, too.