Hope everyone out there had a good Thanksgiving! I did.

I had agreed to bring a "dessert with pumpkin in it" to the traditional family gathering. I'd been thinking that I would make pumpkin pie, but when I called my mother to get her recipe, she said suggested a pumpkin cake recipe instead.

Plus, it turned out that what I thought was my mom's super secret traditional family pumpkin pie recipe turns out to be the one from the back of the Libby's pumpkin can.

Anyway, I got halfway through making the cake batter, and then discovered that I had somehow forgotten to put the eggs I'd bought on Wednesday afternoon into the refridgerator, and they'd sat out on the counter overnight. (I've been braindead like that lately - I blame it on a stressful week at work. Fortunately, I've taken care of the most immediate source of stress.)

So, I ran to the supermarket for fresh eggs, and discovered that it was much less crowded than it had been the day before. Yay! I also picked up some white chocolate Hershey's Kisses with dulce de leche filling, as much because they fascinated me as a marketing item as anything else - they were clearly aimed at a Latino market, with the principal text being in Spanish with tinier English translations underneath. What really tickled me was that what was rendered as "dulce de leche" in the English text was "cajeta" in Spanish. A quick google reveals that while both terms refer to a sweet made by caramelizing milk, "cajeta" appears to be a distinctively Mexican term (and is apparently often made with goat's milk!), while "dulce de leche" seems to be Argentinian.

The Spanish language is a wonderful thing. The Hershey's kisses were pretty good too - I'd prefer them with milk chocolate instead of white chocolate. Caramel is good, though.

Um, anyway, back to the cake. I managed to finish the recipe without much further incident, except for the experience I have whenever I bake where I stick in the knife to test for doneness, and it comes out all gooey, and I think "Oh, no! I did something wrong! I've made a pudding!" And then it goes back in the oven for 5 more minutes and comes out beautifully.

I really need to bake more often. It's not inherently more difficult than many things I do in the kitchen all the time - in fact, it's probably technically a lot simpler than making a good stir fry or grilling chicken - but I do it infrequently enough that I don't have that confidence and instinctive abililty to correct for variations and errors that comes from experience.

So, I baked the cake, and Daniel and I went out and had coffee while it cooled, and then I came back and made a batch of cream cheese frosting. Which is magical. You put powdered sugar and butter and cream cheese and vanilla extract in a bowl. And you look at it, and think, "This is never gonna work." And then you take your hand mixer and go whizzy whizzy, and you have this beautiful bowl of icing. So simple.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Daniel's aunt and uncle, with the usual family crew including aunt, uncle, grandparents, a passel of cousins, Daniel's sister Diana and her husband, Oren. Daniel's cousin Kevin just got engaged to his girlfriend (Elisa? Alisa? I can never spell her name properly), which is cool, because even though I cannot spell her name I adore her.

We had a long pre-dinner conversation revolving around the process of taking graduate school qualifying exams, which made me conclude that we are all much too academic.

I was also struck by how weirdly grown up we all got. Understand, I've been coming to family gatherings with this crowd for at least a decade now. (Probably longer, actually, since Daniel and I just celebrated the 14th anniversary of our first date on Wednesday, but I don't entirely remember when it started to be routine for me to be invited to family gatherings.) The cousin who was in elementary school when we first met is now deciding on his college major. The ones who were in high school or the early years of college are now doing grown up things like getting married and buying houses and cars and stuff like that.

And yet we really haven't changed all that much. When I was 18, I couldn't really imagine being thirty. Now that I'm thirty, it feels a lot like being 18, except that I get to spend more time doing things that matter.

Oooh, here I go getting all philosophical. Dinner was yummy. We had the traditional stuff - turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans. And five kinds of dessert: apple pie, pecan pie, sweet potato pie, pumpkin cake, and chocolate brownies. I had some of the pumpkin cake (because who trusts a cook who won't eat their own cake) and some of the sweet potato pie. Both were good.

And there was coffee, and after dinner chatter, and then a bunch of us ended up watching CSI. I'm still working my way through season 2 on Netflix, so it was weird to see all the characters instantly age by 3 years or so.

Then we came home.

Today, I'm basically relaxing. I've been reading, Friday Night Lights, a book about high school football in Odessa, Texas. (Recently made into a movie.) It's an interesting book, because the author, in his introduction, basically makes it clear that on one level, he really wanted to write a heartwarming story about a small town brought together and uplifted by football. On the other hand, it's also clear that he's fascinated by the darker side of both the football program, and small-town Texas life in general. So, he can make even someone like me, who could care less about football and believes that most school sports programs are run in a way that damages the academic functions of the school, sympathize with these high school football players. But the book also has something of the grip of a well-written anthropological ethnography. You simply can't believe that people are this weird. And it's a much more effective critique of Odessa's high school football insanity than I suspect could have been written by somebody coming in with a hostile perspective.

Anyway, I think I'm going to go fix myself a snack and then read some more about football. Talk to you later!