(You all like my food logistics posts. We have tried to sanction off meals and just cook for ourselves but it never lasts because a table with less than twelve people at any given meal just feels too empty and everyone wants to be together.)
I need a farm, gosh, my talents are wasted here. I grew up feeding cows, goats and rabbits, leading the cows to the milking machines and sometimes unknowingly to slaughter, being too small (and too traumatized) to hoist the chickens off the ground to hang them up, scraping bees off honeycomb, counting queens and then being sent to the river (full of leeches) or to the sea (full of monsters) to cleanup from being sweaty and covered with pollen and honey and milk. The irony is that I grew up lactose-intolerant. The agony is that I don't let that stop me.
We went and did the big Christmas shop today. Because chocolate and cheese keep, the turkeys will remain frozen and because Bridget needed her brie and eggnog. We got some light fruitcake and shortbread cookies. We got extra veggies that can be frozen up until Christmas week too. I found halloumi (!!!) in the deli and we got enough stuff to do our faux 'pub-crawl' (house to house, with a course at each kitchen) appetizer night on Christmas eve. There is too much food on the point now and I don't have to grocery shop until after Christmas now.
Perfect.
I called the market back and asked them the size of the young farm turkeys they had and the biggest was twelve pounds and I didn't want to dicker around with trying to roast eight or nine turkeys that were lean or free-range or grass-fed, read to every night by the light of a full moon. I want Butterball stuffing-stuffed turkeys that are all jacked up and FAT and we found a fresh cache of them at the decadent grocery store way down on the other side of Caulfield and that's fine. It's a special event, a mega-righteous holiday and who doesn't need to buy one hundred pounds of turkey for Christmas?
I took three boys with me. We got five twenty-pound turkeys after asking if it was okay to take that many without calling ahead (narrator: It was). These boys will lick the bones clean and be looking for more within hours. There are sixteen to twenty people so that's enough for two full meals, I reckon and I already checked my privilege on the way home, thank you, if you are about to ask. I tied it to the back of the truck so it bumps and smashes along behind us, making one hell of a racket just so I don't forget.
We are blessed. And maybe it seems like I complain about the sheer mountain of effort required to feed and care for a commune of this size but I don't think I really do. I wouldn't change it, anyway and if it means only a few of us leave the point for provisions at any one time to protect the rest, then I will do it without complaint forever.