Tradition!

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and, like last year, I will be spending the day feasting on delicious food at my significant other's parents' house in Long Island.

This year I have a hankering to bring a little LaSota to the table. I won't be celebrating any part of the Thanksgiving weekend with my own blood relatives (a rarity, considering it's my mom's favorite holiday), so I'm going to bring a little of my own tradition to the dinner table tomorrow, gonna represent LaSota style.

And so...I just made my first Spinach Casserole (yes, it deserves to be capitalized). A staple at LaSota holiday dinners, the Spinach Casserole was, I believe, devised as a way to get kids to eat vegetables. The Spinach Casserole, you see, does not taste like vegetables. This is due to a careful (over-)cooking process whereby all nutritional value is squeezed out of several packages of frozen chopped spinach, which is then blended harmoniously with sour cream and dry onion soup mix, then topped off with plenty of butter and bread crumbs and parmesan cheese.

Yum.

Gourmet it ain't, but tradition it is. Yummy tradition.

It's Halloween, y'all...

It's the first Halloween in a long, long time that absolutely nothing Halloween-y has appeared on the radar. My friends and I all seem to be in the same boat: no parties, no costumes...no real acknowledgement of the holiday at all, really.

Is it because Halloween falls on a Wednesday this year? Is it because we're all getting older, and we just don't care as much as we used to? Perhaps.

I went about my business as usual today, and as day wore on into evening, I saw increasing signs of city Halloween life (it's hard to ignore Halloween completely in New York, after all). Kids and grown-ups in costumes (though, with the grown-ups, it's sometimes difficult to tell whether the clothing is a costume or just the everyday attire of an eccentric personality), candy being given away to Trick-or-Treaters at neighborhood stores, more interesting outfits than usual on the folks waiting on subway platforms...
(I did have a favorite costume - someone had stuck a fake oversized hot dog bun on his dog, adding a strip of fake ketchup on top for good measure).

I didn't really care about celebrating the holiday myself this year, but there was something comforting about seeing those yearly signs of Halloween life. More than most holidays, Halloween just blends so seamlessly into the fabric of my beloved New York City. Something would just be wrong if Halloween disappeared completely - so thank you to everyone who made an effort this year. Maybe next year I'll be back in the game...