Potlucks have a bit of a patina around them of awkward church socials, and I generally avoided them until I went to a wedding with a potluck reception that was fantastic, and a weekly party thrown in Austin that’s a rather amazing potluck.

Potlucks are great for several reasons. First, you can host them regularly and you don’t need to worry too much about how much food to have on hand- if many more people show up than you were expecting, then they typically bring extra food, which balances things out in the end. There are some really cheap foods that are a little rare and unusual that are great to cook for a potluck, that will cost less than what many people spend to feed themselves right now- for instance, a truly amazing lentil soup (I typically start with this recipe and make variations with whatever I have on hand) can cost as little at $2.00 for an entire stock pot, and a genuine french onion soup (slice onions, caramalize them in butter in the bottom of the pot, fill pot with water and cook on low all day, use beef broth if you really want to) is also dead simple and cheap, as well as being delicious. Make a large batch of well seasoned beans and rice, and you won’t put a dent in your food budget to serve dozens of people.

You get to try foods that you normally wouldn’t eat, or cook for yourself. There’s usually someone with more money than time who will bring some sort of store-bought goodie if you’re feeling a craving for one (I’ve found that bachelor friends are more than happy to pick something up at the store in order to get lots of home cooking). It’s a nice way to get to know coworkers or interesting acquaintances better, and it’s also a good way to have dinner with friends with serious eating restrictions due to diet or allergies.

If you start your soup or other dish in a crock pot in the morning, you can come home from work, tidy the house, put on some good soft music and have a few friends over. Some people advise asking for certain types of dishes, to make sure you’re not run over with desserts, but I generally find that requires too much organization on my part. I simply have a list of people, I try to give 3-5 days notice, send a reminder message the day of the potluck, and whoever shows up, I enjoy their company.

The turkey dinner was a success.

Hubs warned me when I bought the turkey that he did not like turkey. At all. I just laughed- I mean, who does not like turkey? Really?! Is that even possible? It turns out that my husband is not simply a funny man, he really meant what he said. He’d never had turkey that he liked, and he hates turkey.

The turkey just out of the oven. Isn't it pretty?

Well, at least we had people coming over so I wouldn’t be forced to eat a 20 pound turkey all by myself, I thought.

Boy, was I wrong.
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I love turkeys. One of the many reasons I adore turkey is that every so often, it goes not only on sale, but on ridiculous sale. It tastes amazing, and there’s so many creative things you can do to them that people rarely try. And they are cheap!

I try not to buy any meat that’s over $1.00/lb. This means that Hubs will occasionally complain because he’s tired of chicken, and he will gaze longingly at pork and beef. We haven’t had any since we moved to the new place because the specials at the local grocery store just don’t go that low. However, they did have turkey on sale for .77/lb, so I got a nice, sexy 20 pound bird. I made an herbed butter that I slid under the skin (sage, five spice powder, basil, garlic, and parsley, I think), and to combat the dryness in turkey, I went ahead and did an experiment. I separated the skin gently from the meat and slid 4 slices of bacon under there. I’m hoping that the bacon fat, as it warms up, will run into the breast and thigh meat of the turkey, because I’m not going to be able to baste it. Any way you look at it, though, I added bacon. It’s got to be good, right? I was thinking of wrapping the wing tips and legs in bacon instead of foil, but changed my mind at the last second.

So far it looks amazing, if slightly deformed.

I also whipped up a quick stuffing, some rolls, and some truly fantastic mashed potatoes to go with dinner tonight, and invited a bunch of friends who I haven’t seen in far too long. I’m spending my time tidying and cleaning the apartment to get ready for guests, and studying for my insurance exam (which is tomorrow! YAY! I might be able to become a Financial Adviser sooner rather than later!) and generally trying to do my best Wonder Wife impression.

The bathroom is clean, but I should probably take out the trash and mop the floor. The kitchen was clean, but then I cooked in it and it’s slightly exploded. Nothing in the house is dirty, it’s just a little messy and will require a bit of time to get everything set up for people. I only sent out an invitation last night, so I don’t know how many people will be able to make it on short notice. Sonya and her family, Brian, Ed, and Lynne will all show up, and each have offered to bring a side dish.

I love being able to feed people. It just makes me oh-so-happy. I’ll include my version of recipes (I’m a cook who does not believe in measuring) and pictures later! I got a few pictures of the turkey before I put it in the oven, but the camera battery died and the charger is still MIA after the move.

Wish me luck! This is the first time I’ll have done any entertaining at this new apartment, so here’s hoping it goes well!

I read an article about two months ago (that I just spent an hour trying to dig up in Google- if you think you found it, please leave a link in the comments!) that talked about the difference between the start of the Slow Food movement in America, and in Italy. In Italy, apparently, it’s fairly common to think that the right thing to do is the pleasurable thing to do. I know that with my working class Irish and Scottish roots, pleasure was seen as suspect, dangerous, and probably immoral.

That lead me to meditate on the nature of pleasure and morality. I am starting to think that genuine pleasure is, in fact, a moral compass pointing to that which is good, right, and wholesome- this is a remarkable change from some internalized messages about suffering being good for you, and work being something you did with honor, and the harder you worked (and the less you got paid) the more pure the work was. I remember getting the distinct impression that working all day as a ditch digger was more right than working all day in an air conditioned office, and that the misery of the toil was proportionate to how much you got paid. If you were in an office, it was better to work for a boss you hated at a job you loathed than some place that made you happy. The more you suffered the more you proved… what? That you could put up with crap to feed your family? That you were willing to martyr yourself on the altar of the Almighty Dollar?

Being that I don’t particularly enjoy being miserable and I’m not interested in martyrdom, I developed a deep suspicion of work in general and jobs in particular, with a fairly low fuck-this-I’m-out-of-here threshold. If I worked for myself, I could at least prevent myself from being ground into nothing for pennies. I have no interest in being one of the faceless workers in a Diego Rivera mural.

Upon further reflection, though, I don’t think that view of work is correct. It makes tolerating the absence of pleasure a virtue, because pleasure itself is suspect. However, if pleasure points us in the direction of virtue, why is there this deep distrust of pleasure in our culture?

I think that true pleasure has been co-opted or makes by lots of other things in our culture. Fast food is not pleasurable, but it is convenient, and when I look around me I see convenience has taken the place of pleasure in many lives. I know there are other things that have probably taken over healthy pleasure (gluttony is not pleasure, as someone who’s recovering from an eating disorder where there was a lot of overeating involved I can tell you that it’s a pretty miserable sensation, physically), or tried to take over pleasure.

I am thinking of pleasure that leads to a deep satisfaction, and yet even in my head I have a hard time teasing that out from the instantaneous associations with sex. What I am talking about it not sex, although that seems to be the only pleasure or satisfaction that is ever talked about. I’m talking about something more, something grander- the joy of being alive, of being a healthy animal. The enjoyment of a friends company, a good beer on a warm day, a peach at the peak of ripeness, sweet and warm with the sun’s touch, fresh off the tree, and making the kiddo laugh are all things that are fantastically pleasurable to me, and they bring me a lot of joy. There’s a lot of pleasure in things that I normally don’t think of as pleasurable, too. I do really enjoy some kinds of cleaning, because the results are so wonderful to live with. If you don’t believe me, think about the lovely sensation of slipping between cool, freshly laundered sheets that smell faintly of good lavender. Doing work with a defined end, that creates order and a place of calm in my otherwise chaotic and disordered life, is tremendously satisfying.

There’s also an element of untangling fun from happiness. I know you can buy distraction and fun, but fun is short lived. Happiness, for me, was always something deeper. I think the short, shallow, satisfactionles pleasure and fun drive a lot of consumer dollars.

And yet, for me, the very concept of pleasure that leads to joy has such tight bonds with sex and negative, dark things that I just know I’m going to have to spend a lot of time untangling that little bit of programming that I somehow managed to internalize. I want pleasure to be about things that bring me a genuine lightness in my heart, things that delight the senses and make me feel glad to be alive. I want that to surround as many moments of my life as I can manage.

I think I’ve been taught to short change joy. When I look around, I think it’s cultural, and I wonder who started it, and if it’s just me.

I think I need to reclaim pleasure as a worthy moral compass.