Scattered Thoughts . . .

S heila and I are in the process of changing our plans for our upcoming Christmas in Manhattan trip yet again.   Lukey broke his foot a few weeks ago and we were hoping he would be able to bear some weight on his foot by the time we hopped on the train to New York.  Unfortunately, is foot is broken a bit more seriously than we had expected so he'll be on crutches for another month which means he'll be hobbling around Manhattan on crutches.  Which also means we'll need to adapt some of our plans. We typically try to walk about 15-20 miles each day in Manhattan in order to see as many sites as possible.  We definitely won't be able to do that with Lukey hobbling around on crutches.  This means our previously scheduled itinerary is not even close to being accurate.  We needed to possibly cut some things while also stretching out the timetable to allow enough time to get from one place to another.  Additionally, this has caused us to need to add some flexibility to our itin

This morning was a Thanksgiving prep morning.   I made some fresh cranberry sauce.  Sheila and I like this freshly made cranberry sauce so much that we can't eat canned cranberry sauce anymore!  It has maple syrup in it... allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon...  freshly squeezed orange juice...  lemon zest...  and a little more maple syrup.  Usually, I add some fresh blackberries or some other fresh fruit to it but we skipped that this time around.  That would have required a trip to the supermarket and we are not exposing ourselves to the supermarket while the pandemic is still in full swing.   Once the cranberry sauce was cooked, I immediately spooned it into some Ball jars.  I let the jars sit out to cool a bit before putting them in the fridge.  While the fresh cranberry sauce was cooling, I got started on making a fresh white cheese sauce.  This sauce will be used for a green bean dish...  fry up some bacon...  then saute some onion and garlic in the bacon grease...  then add the green