Starch, anyone?

Nutritionists say starchy foods should make up about a third of a healthy human diet that should include carbohydrates (aka starch), protein, fat, vitamins, minerals, fiber and water.

I'm pretty sure my family, several generation back, stopped listening after carbohydrates. They definitely heard the "fat" portion and took it to mean fat wa essential to make all the other stuff palatable.

Evidence? A plate from Thanksgiving past ➨
Here you have your basics of a decent holiday meal:

• Noodles on a base of mashed potatoes
• Macaroni and cheese
• Corn
• Not pictures but surely within reach is one of Donna's home-made, buttery rolls (soft butter if Jason Bradbury is in the house.)

You really only need two color schemes to have a fabulous Bickel holiday meal: white and yellow.

There will be other colors available, but they're not the stuff people dream of and fight over:

• Orange for the sweet potatoes with or without marshmallows depending on who's hosting but surely with butter
• Green for the green beans bathed in either cream of something soup or swimming in a bacon-grease shimmer and featuring great hunks of iron-skillet fried bacon from a pig that may have spent the better part of a year with you.
• Pink because that pig had more to give and you must have both ham AND turkey available
• Brown for the turkey, which could be roasted, grilled or deep-fried.
• Beige for the gravy that goes with the turkey but not the white potatoes because they get the full-fat chicken-stock broth that makes another kind of gravy.
• Camouflage which is the only color I can ascribe to the dressing, which may or may not include oysters but started out with bread, butter and a bunch of herbs.

We got to host Thanksgiving this year and all of the above mentioned items were there. Our Jasheway friends brought a mac-and-cheese that was every bit a Bickel production. My guess is there were two pounds of cheese for every box of pasta and probably the same portion of butter. Kirstin attended a family wedding with me once, so I think she must have gotten infected then.

Alison's friend Jason Hickman (not to be confused with my nephew, Jason, Donna's cossetted baby boy for whom she ensures there's softened butter for the rolls. Jaime, Donna's eldest daughter and her daughters claim they get cold, hard butter if Jason isn't around...) made the pies. Including home-made crust.

One pecan and two pumpkin. We had a bit of an issue with the pecan pie but it did get consumed first. Ali's chocolate-chip pumpkin cookies were also a big hit.

Jeff deep fried four turkey breasts after brining two of them. Jim Bradbury kept watch over the flames from the chimenea and made sure Jeff didn't burn anything down with the fryer.

My main job, per usual, was sous cheffing and clean up. It's just safer for everyone. I peeled 30 carrots, six sweet potatoes, 10 pounds of white potatoes and halved about a million brussel sprouts. Two pounds of bacon went into the weekend, but Ali and Jason ate half of that. The rest was for green beans and a shrimp appetizer.

It all seemed to go fairly well. We moved the couches and added tables so everyone could be together, and that provided ample room for euchre with  dessert.

In my least hospitable act, Jim and I handily beat our guests, Joyce Jasheway and Jason. To make up for it, I gave Joyce a recipe and fed and housed Jason and then promptly abused him by having him help with Thanksgiving prep soon to be followed with Christmas decorating.

It was a really great day despite Rachael (IU Hoosier freshman) making the most of the bitter in-state rivalry with Alison (Purdue Boilermaker freshman) and the usual claims of cheating at euchre. 

Like pie tops off a great meal, our holiday finished with a visit from Eric, Tracy and Elizabeth.

Next up is Christmas. Ali got up early and is visiting some high school friends. But Jason is now awake, and he made the mistake of saying that at home in California, his day-after-Thanksgiving job is to decorate outside. So, he and I can get to work while we wait on Ali to come back and tackle the tree. I really thought he'd still be asleep, so this is like an extra bonus.

Jason is my new best friend. He and I will be in the shed soon figuring out the inventory and where lights should go. He's tall! I love him. I would totally soften the butter for him.

Jeff started out the day at 4:15 a.m. at a beer share/Bourbon County beer shopping so I expect he'll be down for the count and out of my decorating way any time now. Because I'm an excellent wife, I tried to get him to nap in our bedroom. (It's more comfortable there. Plus, he won't hear what I'm planning next and try to interfere...) From the looks of thing to my left, I've lost that battle.

It's not going to last for him, poor thing. Because part of the tradition of decorating the tree involves cracking out the House of Merle Christmas CDs. I know Auntie Jen will be doing the same, so we'll decorate together even though we're apart.

And later, I'll review the starch inventory. We sent a lot away with hungry college students, but there's plenty of white and yellow food to heat up. We'll be fully starched before our traditional Friendsgiving with Team Jackson tonight.

It truly is the best time of the year.

A voice for phone sex, a throat for Vick's.

The Captain's voice had never been more sexy, so I knew I was in for it.

The "it" in this scenario wasn't the good kind. The sore throat he'd been complaining about had morphed into his first cold of the season. 

I quickly took evasive action.

I slept on the couch. (The guest room is clean and ready for a healthy guest, and I was too lazy to event contemplate the decontamination efforts that would be required if I stayed there.) 

I avoided being too close to his air space when he emerged from his sick bed. 

I took Tracy Wiseman's advice and started pounding Vitamin D3. 

I got my 10K steps but otherwise rested. 

I had soup.

As a result of my proactive stance, my voice should take on a deeper, throatier sound (ala the Captain) today. Or so I suspect. I'm hoping not as I have a lot of work to do next week.

I may not get my 10K steps today. 

This is what marriage gets you. Someone should have warned me.

Jeff is feeling better, so I figure I'll survive. And Ali called to check in yesterday, so it's not all bad.

Goodbye, old friends. You've been a real and lasting pain, but I'll miss you.

My Pentecostal grandmother kept a hamper of fancy shoes and dresses that my cousins and I would dive into every once in a while when we were little girls.

Mind you, she was Pentecostal. They weren't high heels, but they were fancier than anything she wore during the day. This grandmother made all of her own clothes, wrapped her long hair in a bun and her only nod to makeup was a paper box of loose powder that I think she used for church. Oh! And she wore a broach or some kind of a pin on her church dresses.

But we still loved dress-up from that little hamper. My favorite item was a pair of shoes that had to be fake snakeskin or crocodile low, chunky heels with a buckle.  They might have been worn out and hideous even when new, but I must have loved them because I remember the hamper and I remember those shoes.

I've been thinking about those shoes as I consider bidding farewell to some shoes that my grandmother would never have worn.

I started wearing serious heels when I started working as a news reporter. I was 18 when I started getting paid to report. I had reached my full height by then, so I was not just young, I was short and the heels were a power boost. I had heels in every color, height and fabric. I had real snakeskin shoes that I remember wearing to Mesker Park Zoo. Not that I'd go into a snake exhibit, but I did want to show them what I was capable of should they ever escape and slither after me.

Years of wearing heels coupled with a gene pool that runs deep into bunions and bad knees have taken an obvious toll. This weekend, I decided I could wear these beautiful, red suede bootie heels to a fancy event. I've had them a couple years but never worn them out. They live with the other heels in my collection, on the high shelf in my closet.

The spikiest heels I own were debuted in New York City when I staffed a media event and thought I needed to fit in. The black and white ones went to an Oscar party. In those days, I wasn't smart enough to sneak a pair of flats along.

I made it about 30 minutes at the fancy weekend event before I limped upstairs and put my boots back on. I knew I wouldn't make it all night. I DID think I'd make it longer than I did.

Table 37 at Taste 2019.

I would toss the shoes and some fancy dresses into a hamper, but the chance that I'll have a pack of grandkids wanting to play dress-up is as thin as those Stuart Weitzman heels.

I'd give them to Ali but they're size 8s and she's an 11.

I've considered donating to Dress for Success, but they're not really

Here's just the girls. I would have been as tall as Karin
 had I kept my red shoes on.

business-y.

Jeff claims they still have plenty of life left in them and that they won't hurt at all if I just relegate them to horizontal use. Because he's helpful like that.

My guess is that next time I host Book Club, I'm going to see if the young bloods in my posse can wear them. Maybe we'll skip the books and just play dress-up.


In other news, Jeff and I visited Ali for Parent's Weekend recently. She's still doing amazingly well in West Lafayette and should receive part of our leftover Halloween candy in her latest care package. It was a monsoon when we drove up and so we skipped out to shop and have gourmet grilled cheese before coming back to a really competitive -- and looonnng -- volleyball game.

Ali was going to Rocky Horror Picture Show with some friends and shockingly, didn't invite us to go a long. We had super fun, though, and I'm kind of glad the rain chased us off campus so we could just hang out together. Jeff scored a new Purdue sweatshirt for his birthday, and Ali and I conspired to also smuggle home a Purdue bumper sticker for him.

Jeff's always represented Ali's school via bumper sticker. I'd get a tattoo before I'd put a bumper sticker on my Mustang. It doesn't mean I don't love or support her. I just wear it in my soul rather than on my car.

Here's us at the volley ball game. We had trekked about six miles through the Tippecanoe County Mall before criss-crossing campus to get to the game, so we were a little damp. And I was super glad I was wearing flat boots.