feeling better ... and one more thanksgiving story

Thanks, everyone!

I'm feeling much, much better today, thanks to generous amounts of drugs. Antibiotics, the generic forms of Allegra and Sudafed (decongestants), Aleve, Advil Cold & Sinus, Orajel for the tooth pain ... I guess I have to say goodbye to my Olympic dreams — I'm way too doped up to pass any kind of drug screening.

So I'm all set for Thanksgiving here. My plan is lunch at a friend's place around 2:30 p.m. ... the office feast at 5 p.m. ... then Ri's family's big dinner around 7:30 p.m. I will be taking plastic containers to all feasts in order to stash extra food for the rest of the week and into the weekend! LOL

Thanks to everyone who suggested remedies — especially Aroused Girl, who alerted me to the fact that I like had sinusitis! yer a lifesaver, darlin' ... and you are now linked from the Diatribe! :)

And my thanks and appreciation to all of you who stopped by to wish me well and to say get better soon. I *heart* all you sappy fuckers!

DZER's Thanksgivings of yore

When I was a young kid and my dad was stationed on Guam, Thanksgivings were the best.

Guam fiestas are gigantic food orgies. I don't care how big of a party with how much variety of food you've been to/had, but nothing compares to a old-school Chamorro fiesta — NOTHING!! Especially for the kinds and varieties of food available.

So picture that, PLUS all the fixings of Thanksgiving, at you'll get what went on the tables at a George family Chamorro Thanksgiving. We generally went to a beach — the old NCS beach was a favorite; now it's called Tanguisson and its waters are generally polluted ... it's gone to shit since the military turned it over to the local government.

So we'd get there first thing in the morning. Some of the foods were cooked the day before, or early in the a.m. the day of, all of the barbecue and stuff was cooked that day.

Here's a general sampling of the food that was available: Red rice (Calrose rice cooked with achoté for flavoring and color); dinner rolls, corn and flour titiya (tortillas), local yams and/or taro, potato salad (my aunties made awesome Chamorro potato salad!), chicken kelaguen, beef kelaguen, shrimp kelaguen — kelaguen is meat that is cooked mostly with lemon juice; beef is raw meat with black pepper, onions and hot boonie peppers cooked entirely by the lemon juice; chicken has same ingredients, plus shredded raw coconut, cooked about halfway to three-fourths through and finished with lemon juice; the shrimp is raw and cooked completely with lemon juice ... sounds nasty, tastes fucking sublime!!

Damn I'm fucking hungry.

Then you have other kinds of salads: sometimes macaroni, one with cucumbers and daigo with kimchee base, kimchee (regular cabbage kind), seafood salad with the fake crab, sometimes even regular vegetable salad.

Meat: Chamorro-style barbecue chicken and ribs — soaked in a soy sauce/vinegar marinade before grilling — plus a variety of grilled fishes, depending on what was fresh/caught — barracuda, parrot fish, tilapia, other reef fishes. Little tiny fish (mañahac) mixed with vinegar, hot peppers, onions. Then there's usually fried chicken also, and dried beef (another Chamorro specialty). Sometimes there's a dish where we take the entrails of the pig and slowly smoke them over a hot fire for hours and hours.

We also always had at least one pig slowly roasted for hours and hours over a fire, slowly and constantly turned by a succession of uncles and older cousins trusted enough to turn the spit. Sometimes there was a steamboat. And my uncle cooked up this deep-fried roast beef that was to die for — crispy and super well-done on the outside, medium rare on the inside. Sometimes fried fish as well. Pancit — a noodle dish. Fried lumpia — our version of an egg roll, basically. Eel soup — a greenish soup. Spinach cooked Chamorro style.

That's most of the main food dishes that I can remember.

Of course, that doesn't include the roasted turkey(s), baked ham(s), sweet potatoes, mashed POTATOES (happy, gigi? LOL), giblet gravy, corn on the cob, homemade bread — white and wheat — as well as stuffing and dressing.

And I'm fucking starving.

Dessert was pumpkin pie, apple pie — both homemade by my mom, who rocks the pies like you wouldn't believe — with vanilla ice cream and/or cool whip for topping. Red velvet cake so moist and delicious it would make YOU moist! (not you, Mike. well, maybe). Custard pie. Latiya — a Chamorro dessert that is totally killer. Potu — sweet rice cakes, basically. Cheesecake — cherry and blueberry topping. Fruit salad. O. MY. GOD ... the fruit salad was some of the best in history.

I seriously need to eat.

So basically all of us kids would play in the sand, in the ocean, in the jungle. Swimming, horsing around, catching hermit crabs and racing them. Some cousins would free dive spear fish with a Hawaiian sling — we gots water skills like that — to either add fish or octopus to the table. After we got all worn out, it was time to gorge.

There's a certain trick to stacking a fiesta plate. You need to work with a solid base and then stack your way upward. You have to plan your attack — what you're going to eat, what you want — or you will run out of room. Not to mention you might end up wasting valuable and very tasty food. You stuff yourself. Wait an hour, because that's what they told you to do back in the day, then you hit the water again. Then you came back for more food.

Pack up in the late afternoon when it starts to get dark, clean up the trash, then head home.

How do you beat that?

Random Guam Fact Of The Day:
• Every village on the island has at least one annual fiesta to celebrate its patron saint; some have two. Walk through any of these villages on the day of its fiesta and you will get invited to come and eat, even if you know no one at the place. This is especially true in the south. Many villages also have sister village relationships with military units/squadrons. It's always fun to watch some 19-year-old who's never been out of his home state before come to Guam and then get roped into a fiesta. They're always surprised with how friendly villagers are, how good the food is, and how they're "forced" to take home food. If you don't leave a Chamorro fiesta with a food plate, you snuck out. LOL