Thanksgiving in Mill Valley

We have our first official, out-of-town visitors this week!
Elizabeth's father and sister, Cathy, flew in yesterday to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with us.

Yesterday was spent relaxing and preparing for today's dinner.


I'm not sure what they were doing here. Feel free to caption this one yourselves...


Elizabeth and Cathy then prepped the bird and baked the pies...



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This morning – Thanksgiving day – the women dressed the turkey and popped it in the oven. I wasn't familiar with the radical turkey technique of slathering the bird with mayonnaise, cramming it into a paper bag and shoving it in the oven...



While Elizabeth kept an eye on dinner Mr. Benson, Cathy and I went for a short hike around Muir Woods, a state park coastal redwood forest about 4 miles from here.





Fast forward to the meal's completion...
Evidently the mayonnaise/bag trick forms some sort of "self basting" arrangement. As strange as it sounds (to me, anyway) it results in a very moist, tender turkey. Add to that rosemary mashed potatoes, candied yams, spinach salad with blue cheese, candied pecans and cranberries and an amazing stuffing:


Excellent! An absolutely great Thanksgiving meal. Thank you Elizabeth... thank you Cathy. An awful lot of work went into the production of this dinner and it was all certainly very evident and very much appreciated!

Photo Essay – Windmills

I've got no news to report and Elizabeth has been hounding me to make a new post so I thought I'd just post some images from a recent photo outing. If you follow my flickr photostream you've likely seen these already. If so, go right ahead and skip this post – nothing new here.


These are from the Altamont Pass, near Livermore, CA. I've always found these tall, graceful sentinels interesting. Driving through the pass, the hundreds of windmills have an otherworldly appearance. They are silent from afar but rather noisy up close.


Two photographer friends and I drove out one evening last week to capture these. When we're mutually free we like to get together and explore an interesting local area to take shots, chat and exchange ideas.