We, three

Dunyazade lilies on the terrace

We are having a small Thanksgiving dinner tonight: a man, a woman, and a cat. Life in this part of the world has been strange for the last few weeks, and stranger still, coming up, with our truncated, one week trip to South Africa, which feels all wrong, somehow. But so it has to be. We just don't feel like party central.

We will be eating goose for weeks. We love roast chicken and turkey is really a giant chicken, so not much different, and a goose seemed like a good idea. There are perks: goose fat to keep in the freezer for all those potatoes to come, goose stock to reduce for later use in sauces and soups, and goose meat to be shredded and layered in Bevan Christie's incredibly sinful cake-thing of paper thin crepes. I must dig out his recipe.

The goose. I think, too, that I have changed my mind about how to cook it. We're going Asian. Some soy, some scallions, some sake, some citrus. So I lied about that stuffing. Perhaps I'll tweak it  - I can see quinces and wild rice working with ginger...A cranberry chutney, thanks to my Edible editor Gabrielle, who gave me the idea.

Thing is, I need to go out. Now. We need bubbly for our traditional (at least for us) Thanksgiving cocktails - and Vince is...working - albeit from home. In exchange for more time off when we really need it. And we don't eat our Thanksgiving dinner at 4pm. We can't. We never learned how. So it really is dinner, at the usual time, and going out around lunch time on this day feels furtive, somehow. As though one is doing something wrong. Because EVERYONE is inside cooking, or eating.

Maybe I'll wear a balaclava. No one will know it is me, Doing the Wrong Thing.

Just how recognizable are my hips, anyway?