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Dear friends,

I know what you're thinking:  What, no Thanksgiving postmortem?  No minute-by-minute analysis of the 500-degree turkey roast?  Did you even *make* a turkey dinner, or is it all just elaborate subterfuge?

Dear friends, I apologize for dropping the ball.  The best part of Thanksgiving is always the recap, both in the eating of leftovers for breakfast and in the getting on the phone with your friends and relatives to gossip about your other friends and relatives.  I'm sure there is a Thanksgiving recap in me somewhere, but I will save it until I come back from the Outside World with the spoils of Birthday Gift Card Shopping.

I will say this, though:  I don't know who invented the idea of pie for breakfast -- English peasants?  New England settlers?  Carolina rice farmers?  the Amish? -- but whoever did invent it has conferred a mitzvah upon humanity.  I used to think that the apex of civilization was the eating of a plate of cold stuffing and cranberry sauce the day after Thanksgiving.  Then Lloyd said "can we have pie for breakfast?" and I remembered that our pumpkin pie, the one I so ignominiously sloshed on its journey to the oven floor, turned into the best pumpkin pie I have ever made in my life, and probably will ever make again.  He brought me a slice on a saucer, and with the first bite I cursed my childhood bad attitude all over again, the one that wouldn't touch a pumpkin pie until I was in high school.  If I had thought things through, I would have realized that pumpkin pie is, essentially, a custard pie, pumpkin flavored with eggs and milk and cream and sugar.  It's pudding, and how much pudding did I put away as an enthusiastic youngster?  But no, I was too fixated on the horror of eating squash for dessert, and thus did I find myself eating slice after slice of halfhearted storebought apple pie.  Now I am grown, and I have no such qualms now, and I wonder what this pie would taste like with the huge, amazing, multihued squashes available at the market.  What would happen if I tried Delicata squash, the long yellow-with-green-striations squash that changed my mind about squash as a young adult?  Turban squashes, kabochas, those enormous Blue Hubbards the size of a small dog:  I look at them all and see new possibilities.  I'm also flirting with the idea of sweet potato pie, but I'm more shy about this one, as one of my co-workers, a LuthorCorp mailroom lifer, makes a sweet potato pie that is easily the best pie I've ever eaten.  I have never made a pie as good as that one.  If I'm lucky, one day I'll make one that is *almost* as good.

As I continue squashing that smooth gorgeous pumpkin custard against my palate, I turn to my well-perused copy of Pascale Le Draoulec's American Pie and reread the chapter where Pascale and her traveling buddy Kris meet some New Order Mennonites in south-central Pennsylvania; these sweet and friendly young women tell them about the mighty shoofly pie, so well-loved here that some people eat it with every meal.  While I did not grow up in Amish country (I lived in a far more northeasterly county), I did grow up amidst dairy farmers, and most of my friends and classmates were farm kids.  I remember thinking that I'd dodged a bullet, not being born into a farm family.  The worst I ever had to deal with was weeding the garden, pulling the big rocks out of the garden before my stepdad started tilling, mowing the lawn, getting the windfall apples off the ground while they were still good to use, feeding the chickens and getting the eggs.  I didn't have to get up at 4:30 so I could start milking the cows by 5, I didn't have to come directly home after school so I could be there for the afternoon milking, I didn't have to win the trust of evil-tempered goats, and most of all, I didn't have to spend the hottest days of August cutting and baling hay.  I would look out in the distance at our closest neighbors, all four kids covered in sweat and dust, each carrying bales of hay that weighed as much as they did, two at a time.  At the time, I thought I was lucky, but now I think I was a dope.  These are the kind of families who could, and did, eat pie at every meal.  If I could have pie at every meal, I would wake up at 4, I would go to bed at midnight, and I would cut hay nonstop in the meantime.  I would let myself be stung by angry bees.  Alas, I spend most of my time in a cubicle, or in library study carrels, and I get, at best, five hours of exercise a week, not nearly enough to justify pie at every meal.

Breakfast, though, breakfast I can handle.  I have to tread carefully, though, because if I don't, Lloyd will want shoofly for breakfast every day.  And I'll probably oblige.

Shoofly recipe will be forthcoming when I get home.  Pumpkin recipe could also be made available, if you're not burned out on pumpkin pie by now.