It's been a busy time chez Levy this past week, what with niece Jacqueline's belated college graduation party last Saturday (good for her!), hosting the family Thanksgiving right here in the finally-suitable-for-cooking & entertaining (more or less) Levy household and then a follow-up, two-year-old birthday party Saturday night for most-recent-family-addition Ben Schroeder. Suffice to say I'm wearing my belt a little looser as a result. But it's was nice to have some kids around again. They sure add a sense of fun, purpose, curiosity and continuity (if not serenity) to family gatherings. Carol is particularly blessed and adept when it comes to dealing with/communicating with more recently minted editions of the human species, and I chalk a lot of that up to her good heart and phenomenal patience as well as her long career as a teacher and administrator in that line of work as well as her stint with Chicago's famous Second City--yes, that one--where she did a lot of shows and parts in their children's theater. As for me, I just do my best to be pleasant, pass the ice cream or cake when necessary, bat the ball/stuffed toy/party balloon back when it strays my way and try my damnedest not to be perceived as the muttering/doddering old uncle who used to do something-or-other with cars...

Or maybe it was books?

Hey, youth will be served. In fact, I recall my trying-to-be-wild high-school years when we spent a lot of time looking for joints where we could get served.

We found 'em, too.

But I digress.

In any case, Thanksgiving was a really big deal here on the home front, as for years--maybe even decades?--it was "our" holiday as far as family gatherings were concerned. And I was moreover, thanks to both desire and lack of competition, the designated Turkey Meister (not to mention stuffing, gravy and assorted fixins) and I enjoyed both the task and the honor. Only then the dreaded Pandemic intervened and after that Carol and I (well, mostly Carol) embarked on a few little home-makeover tweaks and projects--including our kitchen--that ran a little long-ish to get done. And don't even get me started on the so-called budget. But Carol loves that stuff and has a great eye and feel for it, whereas (as she is always quick to point out): "You could live in a damn cardboard refrigerator box under a bridge." I am quick to respond that if you don't put that refrigerator box under a bridge, the rain and snow will land on it during periods of inclement weather and your roof will get soggier and soggier until your soggy cardboard ceiling falls into your bowl of soup.

Now I enjoy sports on TV (racing and football, mostly), great old black-and-white movies, occasional new series and not nearly as many current events, news shows and documentaries as I pretend. But Carol loves to watch those infernal "home-improvement" shows that feature pleasant, eager, upbeat and discerning young couples aided by handsome/beautiful/fearfully photogenic and tremendously personable designers, tradesmen and "rehab experts" working with budgets that would suffice for many moderately sized municipalities or mid-size college sports programs...

I tend to term it "Property Porn," and I see it as a feral, viral and infernal addiction. But of course there's nothing wrong with me getting up at 3:30am to watch pollution-spewing Formula One machines racing their noisy little hearts out in a faraway country with a repressive, autocratic regime, no real motorsports history to speak of plus a well-deserved reputation for human-rights abuses and occasional, politically motivated assassinations and/or dismemberments...

But I digress. Again.

The point here is that we were unable to host Thanksgiving for a fat handful of years, and this past Thursday amounted to something of a coming-out party for Carol and me and our finally-finished abode. Although the last of that "finishing" actually took place as the guests were climbing into their cars to come over here...

It was good to be back in the saddle (or skillet?) again. Even if the list of "things we need to clean/get ready/put in order" was long following our extended hiatus from hosting.

But we did get it together and the party came off as we hoped. And I was once again able to don my apron and square off mano-a-mano (or should that be hand-to-foot or wattle-to-wattle?) against the iconic, Centerpiece Bird of the entire Thanksgiving experience. In our time-honored E-blast spirit of giving you useful information far too late for it to be of any use at all, I'll share my turkey-prep strategies and secrets at the very end of this e-epistle (below even the trivia). But first, let's take a little stroll through my own culinary background:

My family always loved to cook--especially my mom, who was a real whiz in the kitchen--and I well remember many of her specialties. I also recall the Sunday-morning brunches with my dad at the helm that featured enough fruit, eggs, breakfast meats, pancakes, French toast or waffles (with plenty of syrup and butter, of course) and sweet rolls to clog every artery in your chest. At least if taken in regular weekend doses over an extended period of time.

Many years later (and much to my folks' horror), I dropped out of college to pursue some sort of free-form, westward-bound, semi-hippie odyssey in search of--well, to be honest, I'm not sure to this day what I was in search of--but it seemed vitally important at the time. Mind you, I always worked and only called my folks for help once to get bailed out of jail (but that's another story for another time) and once to borrow about fifty bucks for a new tire when the LR one on my self-wrenched Volvo self-destructed in truly cataclysmic fashion on the way up The Coast Highway from Berkeley, CA to Seattle when I was working for/with that Communal Hippie Leather Clothing Factory in Oakland. But, again, that's another story for another time.

Between those two adventures, I found myself "on the Ave" and without visible means of support in Boulder, Colorado. I'd worked as a mason tender (the guys who mix mortar and bring it to the fellows laying block basements) a few years before during a collegiate summer. The crew was run by two wonderful and colorful hillbilly brothers from Tennessee (who had previously run a pool hall in Paducah, KY), and I gained a lot of insight from them. Plus an awareness and eventual appreciation/admiration of country music from them. But I looked a bit suspect and transient (guilty on both counts), and I wasn't able to land any kind of construction job. Which is how, thanks to the grizzled and gnarly old daytime drunk who hung out at "The Sink" bar on Telegraph Avenue damn near from the time it opened every day, that there was an opening for a daytime dishwasher at The Catacombs restaurant in the basement of the gracious old Boulderado Hotel on Pine Street, and if I hustled right over there, I might just be able to find employment...

Fortunately, I had been a member of the Dishwashers Union in Junior High School (I got free lunches plus lessons in union organizing, bylaws and making management miserable) so I actually knew how to work the various trays, conveyor belt and levers. So I got the job. Wound up living in the place, too, up in a tiny room on the decaying top floor with the one john at the end of the hall that always smelled funny.

But GOOD funny.

In any case, I was barely two days into my new dishwashing gig when the hotel manager--a recently retired, spit-and-polish, America-first Air Force colonel from Georgia--got into a bit of a heated political argument with the second-string, lunch-rush cook (who leaned so far left that he listed to one side) and it escalated until they were nose-to-nose like a pair of mirror-image steam engines, bubbling and sputtering and boiling at one another with their pressure gauges well into the red zone. Finally, the second-string cook wadded up his apron, threw it down on the manager's wingtips and marched out the door. With the manager yelling after him, in a beautiful Georgia twang: "AND DON'T COME BACK!"

Moments later, dear reader, the lead cook--a skinny, sawed-off cowboy-type with rolled-up sleeves and pants cuffs, tooled leather boots, big thyroid eyes and a wary but earnest and honest face--ventured back into my dishwashing area, tapped me unexpectedly on the shoulder (why did I think it was a drug bust?) and said: "Hey, you...you're a cook now."

And that's how I became a cook. And worked at it and learned a little about it and actually enjoyed it very much for the next several months. Met lots of interesting characters and tried but failed miserably at writing my first book, Hey, I was too busy experiencing things to write about them. But I didn't know that yet...

Tune in for more aimless, run-on stories and memories next time.

ANOTHER SHAMELESS PLUG: