The U.S. celebrates Thanksgiving next week. NEXT. WEEK.
I am not ready, not even close. There will only be my immediate family, so four of us, for dinner. It shouldn’t be too difficult to plan, purchase and prepare. Still, I thought I had at least another week.
I need to bake homemade biscuits and a few pies; green beans, sweet potatoes, turkey and gravy. I might even have a pot of mulled cider stewing. The trick now will be to go shopping for all of this and not lose my mind, or temper, or both.
All that menu planning got me thinking… a dangerous thing on a good day, but when in ERMAHGERD what-am-I-going-to-do mode, it’s just plain weird.
A peek inside my mind…
Who thought of how to bake bread that first time? What led this progenitor-baker to mix together flour, oil, salt and yeast. Where did the idea of yeast come from? What about croissants (multiple layers of dough), bagels (dough is boiled prior to baking), pasta – “strings of raw dough, boiled in salt water, it’ll be a worldwide, epicurean phenomenon.”
Maple syrup is basically tree sap. Who licked the first tree and thought, “this tastes sweet, let’s invent pancakes.”
Did you know that you can’t eat raw olives, you could but they are far too bitter to be palatable. They must be pickled before you can eat them. What kind of guess-check-revise process had to be implemented before we have the olives we know and love today?
What about those odd and peculiar fruits and vegetables? Who were the first people to try artichokes, pineapples, coconuts, rhubarb, eggplant?
Cotton candy! Where did that come from? Aliens?
Mushrooms… who was the first person to think eating fungus was a good idea?
These are the sort of questions that keep me up at night.
What’s on your holiday menu?
“Americans have more food to eat than any other people and more diets to keep them from eating it.” Barbara Jordan
This week’s word is:
Eat
What to do:
Using “eat” for inspiration, write 100 Words – 100 exactly – no more, no less. You can either use the word – or any form of the word – as one of your 100, or it can be implied. Include a link in your post back here, and add your story to the Mister Linky list. If you don’t have a blog, you can leave your submission in the comment section, or as a Facebook status post. Remember to keep spreading the love with supportive comments for your fellow Wordsters.
Thin spiral notebook 