I am writing this newsletter quite late on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, largely because I pushed myself this week to finish the second draft of what was once a little novella about a sock gremlin who turns socks into lint and is now much, much longer. (I don’t know exactly how much longer; I will have some idea when I finish typing it in, but this means that I will probably be telling you much more about this in maybe a month or so).

 

If you read Friday’s notes behind the blend, she describes where the idea for the tea came from—a story about writers walking with bioluminescent jellyfish in the waters late at night, and how she translated that into a tea blend using her synesthesia, a neurological condition whereby her brain processes concepts as flavors.

 

This is an herbal tea that is absolutely delightful. It is now officially one of my favorite herbal teas. I am going to try to drink this tea forever. It has a deep sweetness and an enormously balanced flavor to it. 

 

Reading the notes on what Friday thinks of it was also delightful. It was neat to see someone describe osmanthus flower as “convex” — to me, I describe this taste as “round,” because if you think about where your tongue is tasting the flavor, it tastes the flavor all the way around the edge of the tongue. Words to describe tastes are always deeply suggestive. Often, it seems that flavors only show up in comparison—“oaky” or “like coffee”—but these things are of no use describing things where we have no prior comparisons.

 

I personally think of this blend as closer to sunshine than night luminescence, but I do agree with much of what is said in Friday’s notes. There’s a juiciness to it, like the very first bite you take from an overripe fig. There’s a roundness to it, the feeling with the first sip that you’re going to have to stop and process everywhere the flavor hits. And most of all, it’s the kind of tea that makes me want to hug myself and smile.

You can get Bioluminescence from Friday Afternoon Tea.

We are having friends over for Thanksgiving this year. It’s always a delicate balance: I love cooking, and cooking is definitely my love language. But also, I hate the feeling of getting up on Thanksgiving and doing nothing but cooking.

 

So I have been doing prep work for an hour or so every day this week so that it’s not going to end up a constant stream of work. One of the ways I keep this fun for myself is by taking the concept of Thanksgiving meals and turning it sideways.

 

I have come to be a little disenchanted with most of the trappings of Thanksgiving. 

 

As an example, the turkey. I spent years and years figuring out how to get a turkey deliciously moist, and I finally achieved it one year. (Note that this does not count the fact that in brining the turkey the prior year, I accidentally dropped the brine on the stove and it shorted and I couldn’t cook anything for six hours and the stove has never worked exactly right since, which is fine because I don’t need to use all five burners anyway.)

 

Huzzah! Turkey done right! Yay! Except… it was so much work. For a vaguely average meat whose main “benefit” is that you end up with about three more weeks of vaguely average meat stuffed in the freezer.

 

I have not made a turkey since.

 

Or, pumpkin pies. When I was growing up, my mom believed in not wasting food. Not any food. Not at all. Not ever. What this meant was that she would freeze our Hallowe’en pumpkins (there were seven kids plus two grownups who all made their own Jack O’Lantern) and then turn them into a vast quantity of pumpkin pie purée, all of which were turned into pies. Not the standard nine inch pies, either—she had twelve inch pie pans.

 

You can make so many pumpkin pies from a single Jack O’Lantern sized pumpkin. And you can make EVEN MORE from nine of them. One year I remember having seventy-two pumpkin pies—seventy-two twelve inch pies!—and even with seven kids in the family, it is just an enormous and unending deluge of pumpkin pie. We would be eating pumpkin pie through Easter. (My older sisters remember year in which there were more pies than seventy-two, but I don’t remember what they remember as the year with most pies, and so I’m going off my own memory here.)

 

Not coincidentally, I have not eaten pumpkin pie since I left my parents’ house.

 

So this year, I am slow-cooking pork loin and making turkey-shaped bread rolls. We will have a baked, stuffed a pumpkin with rice and mushrooms and a single, normal-sized pecan pie made with date paste instead of corn syrup, and I really hope that turns out because we do not have a second option for dessert lined up, because my entire body turns into a cavern of fear at the idea of too much dessert at Thanksgiving.

 

I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving with exactly as many pumpkin pies as you deserve.

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