Holy Tofu, Catman!

I arrived back in Washington at 10:00 last night after a long drive and a stop in the historic town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, for a delightful dinner at La Petite Auberge with a dear friend. I need to leave the hotel in an hour to get to National Airport, so this will be short and amended later.

Thanksgiving dinner with vegans is nothing like a real Thanksgiving dinner. There was no turkey, obviously. The mushroom gravy for the "roast" was, well, interesting. The butter for the homemade bread was not butter, but some odd concoction called "Millie's Miracle" or something like that. The pumpkin pie was made without eggs — can you even imagine what
that was like? It's like thick soup held in place by the whole wheat crust. The only caffeine I had for 36 hours came from the Excedrin I took for tension headaches.

For breakfast on Friday morning before I set out for my long drive, my mother fixed scrambled tofu and grits. Thank God for the grits. The tofu was inedible to me — I did open the curtains of my mind and take one bite, but that was all I could handle. She had homemade whole wheat toast, but when I asked for jelly to get the taste of the tofu out of my mouth, she offered guava jelly. When I declined that (I really do like "baba" jelly, as my daddy used to call it, but just wanted plain and ordinary strawberry or grape), she offered orange marmalade. Finally she dug around enough to find some raspberry jam. Then as I was pulling my bags together, she asked if I wanted a can of mango juice to take along in the car. I politely declined.

To all the vegans in the world, I mean no disrespect. But Good Lord, give me some options for normalcy. Please.

The Gardener has promised that my serving of turkey is waiting in his fridge for me. You can bet that on my drive back in from Sky Harbor this afternoon I'll be stopping in Continental Ranch to see what hugs and food I can forage from the kids and then heading to the Foothills to grab some of the Gardener's rotisserie turkey. Then I'll go into AJ's or Trader Joe's to get some real pumpkin pie, made with, By God, eggs.