24 hours of great smells

It started on Wednesday night, with the turkey stock I did. Yes, it was the "Thanksgiving" turkey, which may seem late, but since my sister-in-law was kind enough to have us down for a smashing dinner on the actual day, we did our turkey much later, and everything hung in there nicely without any adverse bacteria. So the odor that permeated the house Wednesday was awesome, thanks largely to the sachet that makes any stock really go. Of course, there's no real need to be slavish about following the recipe to the letter -- I found myself out of both dried tarragon and dried basil(!), so I just subbed in some herbes de Provence. No problem. (Can't do without the cracked peppercorns, though.)

The ultimate destination of the resulting stock was a turkey and sausage gumbo. This particular recipe gives you a choice on the roux...and of course the roux is everything for a gumbo, right? I take the decadent pick on this once-a-year occasion and do it with the recommended bacon fat. (The funeral is next Tuesday. Be assured that I died happy and well-fed before the heart attack.) Most of the gumbos I've done have oil as the roux base, which is far saner, but the difference is very real. I always feel with a oil roux like I'm shifting around quicksand by the end; there's nothing wrong with it, it does the job, but it's a little more....I don't know, manufactured. The bacon fat, on the other hand, just binds incredibly well with the flour. By the end of the stir, you could almost believe that you're folding a lovely brown chocolate for a fondue or something. And if you're going to stand there for the better part of an hour stirring without a break, let's face it, you'd like to feel good about the time and effort. I did.

There is one real drawback to choosing this method, I should note: You're stuck with all this bacon at the end. It's unbearable, I tell you.

So after the bacon rendering, but before the roux, it was time to get the Christmas tree. (When I got to my wife's office, both she and my son Danny, five minutes apart, immediately said, "You totally smell like bacon.") This year, we hit the Boy Scout stand in Kendrick Park in downtown Amherst, which is adjacent to Doreen's office. And this is where the nose-o-meter redlined. First off, it snowed here yesterday, and then a Canadian high blew in -- cold, windy, crisp air. Our first true winter day, so the conditions were just right.

The trees smelled amazing, of course. But the kicker is that they keep a woodstove going in the little shack, and the blend of fire smoke and cut pine was just incredible. It took me instantly back to when I did this myself as a Boy Scout; I was in a very active troop and we always had some funding scheme going to finance our regular, year-round camping forays. (Including snow camping in winter. We were really hardcore.) Door-to-door candy bar sales; newspaper recycling where you'd hit up everyone for their papers and do the car weigh-in/weigh-out; you name it, we did it to scrounge money. The tree sale was a perennial, and one that the Scouts still have available to them long after newspaper recycling has become a memory, I guess. And we'd have a barrel fire on colder days. Quite the flashback. On top of it all, I always drive the tree home in my '90 Honda, so now it smells wonderfully piney in the car.

I don't know how I'm going to top all of this tomorrow. Is anybody having a beachside lobster bake that I can hit? I can bring plenty of gumbo.....