Happy Thanksgiving

For those of you traveling, may your journey be safe and may all of you have a blessed holiday. I hope you all are "home", whatever "home" may mean to you at this point in your life. Peace.

Psst.....Don't you miss John Denver?

The Dog will not be Thankful When This all Starts to Come Back Up

I dried cornbread and bread slices overnight in order to make dressing this morning. That empty row in the front? Apparently, the dog, who has never swiped anything off the kitchen counter before, helped himself to a seven slice feast of white and wheat bread last night.

I have been forced to add a package of stale buns to the mix, and I'm not namin' any names but somebody around here could use some Gas-X.

Earning My Stripes

Holidays have a way of provoking memories of family for most of us. For some, those memories aren’t so good, but for many, like me, Thanksgiving and Christmas remind us of good times with loved ones who are present at the table only in spirit now.

I’m in the process of making dressing for the Thanksgiving meal we’ll have at mama’s tomorrow, and I can’t stop thinking about grandma. Grandma made the best dressing in the whole world. Not stuffing, dressing. Stuffing was a little frou frou for us. As a kid, I regularly perched myself on that wobbly kitchen stool and watched her mix up cornbread and bread with onion, celery, spices, broth and of all things, chicken noodle soup until she had it just the way she wanted it. Then I would wait eagerly for that savory smell to start drifting from the oven. Dressing has always been one of my favorite parts of the Thanksgiving meal.

There’s a hierarchy to the assignment of dishes for the Thanksgiving meal, with the cooking of the turkey and dressing left to the senior members of the family. When you’re a newlywed or a new in-law who has to prove her culinary worth, you’re usually assigned something foolproof like corn or rolls, and you work your way up the casserole ladder each year until you reach the pinnacle of the spread, which is the turkey. Dressing, however, is right up there under the turkey. Screw it up, and your one shot at captain’s bars in the Thanksgiving army is over. You’ll be busted down to green bean private faster than you can say French’s Fried Onions.

I graduated to dressing duty a couple of years ago, which was a little earlier than I expected, but I think mama was just overwhelmed enough that year to delegate that duty. And since no one else jumped at the chance, I said, “Me, me, me!” Now, I didn’t mess up the dressing that year, but my dressing was just okay. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t set the world on fire. Its popularity level was somewhere between Bristol Palin (thank heavens the viewers of DWTS did the right thing) and a TSA pat down. Since then, I have continued to tweak it in hopes of making it really good one day. I don’t have any hope of it ever being as good as Grandma’s, but I’ll try. And as I mix that cornbread and fixin’s tonight, I’ll be seeing Grandma in her apron standing in front of that stove with that banged up baking pan wishing she was here to teach me how to graduate to captain.

*That picture is of grandma holding mama in the early 1940's.

The Day Before Thanksgiving at the Grocery Store

Whereas the parking lot equals this:

And making it down the spice aisle without injury requires this:While doing a little of that:

And the bread aisle is all whuh:

And the frozen roll freezer is all nuh uh:

Oh, and never mind the tired clerk who's all :when you politely ask if there is any more sage in the back.

Which equals I'm a big fat loser for failing to get everything I need ahead of time so I don't have to visit the grocery on the day before Thanksgiving yet another year in a row.

Blessings to each and every one of you, my friends on this holiday.

*Images courtesy of: googleflags.com, baseballrampage.com, showmastersonline.com and mccullagh.org.

Turkey Time

I love Thanksgiving. Great food, good times with family and no pressure about gifts. Ah, my kind of holiday. This week my mind is full of memories about past Thanksgivings. For years we ate the big meal at Grandma B.’s. Then we added too many grandkids, ran out of room and had to move the feast across the street to her sister’s house. I loved eating there. Great Aunt Tottie never had kids, so she always had nice, modern furniture, dishes that weren’t chipped and matching glasses and silverware. None of that jelly jar, fruit jar, glass from the laundry detergent stemware we used at my house. No sir, she had those nice, colored metal tumblers with the matching pitcher. Everything had a place at her house and everything was in its place. I wasn’t used to that coming from a family of three kids, a swing shift working dad and a mom who thought deep cleaning was a disease.* Neither were my cousins. I’m sure we were like the troops landing at Normandy when we showed up at Tottie’s house in noisy rounds of three and four kids at a time. She was probably exhausted when we all went home at the end of the day, and I’m sure she felt like her home had been invaded by enemy forces. No wonder Uncle Red was nicely numbed by Falstaff by the time we all got there. Or was it PBR? I forget. Help me out SuperCop.

For us kids, it meant a day of poking ourselves full of food, avoiding turnips and sweet potatoes, roughhousing with each other and watching 90% of the adults smoke themselves into a blue haze while yakking about old times. Mama is the only one of her siblings who doesn’t smoke. The rest of them keep Brown and Williamson in business. Aunt Tottie was a Pall Mall gal, and Grandpa B. smoked so much his fingertips were yellow. Yes sir, there was some puffin’ going on during dessert and coffee. It was a nice compliment to Aunt Brenda’s chocolate and coconut cream pies. She makes the best meringue in the world. Activities for the kids after the meal included fighting over Uncle Red’s miniature slot machine he bought in Las Vegas and sneaking peeks at his Hustler magazines stashed in the bottom of the magazine holder in the bathroom. I think it’s funny no adult ever questioned why it took us kids so long to pee. If the weather was nice enough, we played outside. That meant staying far enough away from Uncle Red’s dog, Jack, to keep from losing the seat of your pants. God bless that dog. I would have been edgy too, if I’d been tormented by a dozen rowdy kids. We were all usually wearing some kind of sock cap crocheted by Aunt Tottie and given to us the previous Christmas. She was a sock cap, scarf, afghan crocheting fool. Hang on folks……Oooh, I had to pause for just a moment while I laughed out loud at the gold caps she made everyone one year. Sorry SuperCop. I was picturing you in yours and laughed so hard I almost wet my pants. Never mind that I was wearing one too.………

As I grew older I gravitated more to the adult conversations held after dinner, listening to their stories about growing up together and learning about their lives before marriage and kids. We lost Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Red. We all grew up and had children of our own. We quit having the big meal and started having gatherings with our own parents and siblings. I love the meal we have now with Baby Ruth, Zeke and my brothers, but I kind of miss that big, noisy gathering. And I miss Aunt Tottie. Her last Thanksgiving was spent just a few years ago with us. Weighing in at 89 pounds, she ate enough pie to choke a horse. A sliver of this and a sliver of that she called it. She was still smoking too, although she pretended she wasn’t because she was losing a battle with emphysema. As I prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow, I am grateful for my health and grateful for my family. Not just my parents, brothers, husband and child, but my cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great aunts, great uncles and all those folks who enriched my early years with a wonderful blend of goofiness, red neckedness, history and laughter. I am one lucky girl.

*Clarification-mama didn’t keep a dirty house. She just didn’t worry about dust and clutter.

Dressing for Success

No matter how old you are you still feel like the kid in the room when you're with older family members and they continue to perform certain roles within the family. Some jobs are left dangling in front of you with the admonition of "some day when you're old enough". Well, apparently, I'm finally old enough because mother called me last night to divide up the cooking for the Thanksgiving meal at her house, and I've been assigned...gulp...the dressing. "Would you mind", she asked? "Sure. Not a problem," I said smoothly, but the whole time my mind is screaming "Oh my God, I get to make the dressing!" Sniff. Sniff. Weep. Weep. I'd like to thank the Academy for this honor. I'd like to thank God and my family. My agent. You like me. You really, really like me.

Holy Cow. I can't believe it. This is one of those protected jobs usually performed by a mature female member of the clan, which in our family is my mother. Before her, it was my grandma. Grandma was the grand dame of dressing makers. She started two days early what seemed to my wee young mind, a complicated, top secret process. I remember watching her from my stool at the end of the kitchen table, amazed at the fact that she used chicken noodle soup in her recipe. When I asked her about her recipe she seemed a little evasive, giving me the old "a little bit of this and a little bit of that" dodge. I always vowed to worm that recipe out of her but she died before I was able to. That's one of my biggest regrets to date because her dressing was da bomb. No wait. Off the hook is the new phrase, right?

So, I'm feeling rather honored that I get to step into those big shoes (And they were big. Grandma had bunyons.) and carry the dressing torch. But here's the thing....I don't know what I'm doing. I've never made dressing in my life. I've watched others do it. I read yesterday how the Pioneer Woman makes hers, and I've read many a recipe, but I've never made it. And we all know how tricky dressing can be. It's easy to get it too sticky or too dry or too crusty or too bland or too sage-y. It's easy to screw it up. Sigh. The pressure is intense. I cannot fail. I have a standard to live up to. I have a torch to carry. A flame to ignite in my own Teen Angel, who is possibly the next generation of dressing makers. I'm hoping that somewhere up there Grandma is watching and between now and Thursday will whisper in my ear the trick to making a successful dressing. In the meantime, I'm going to savor this honor and the fact that I'm finally old enough to take on this important task. Or wait, does this just mean I'm getting old? Where's my manager?

Hold The Pumpkin, Please

We are fast approaching a time of year when I stand out like a sore thumb. Thanksgiving will be here before we know it, and I’ll have to start avoiding two of the most popular fall foods, pumpkin and sweet potatoes. I hate ‘em. While the rest of the world is lapping up candied sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie, I’m turning my head. I don’t like anything that tastes or smells like pumpkin. No pumpkin bread, no pumpkin pie. I don’t even eat pumpkin roll and that contains large quantities of cream cheese, one of my favorite food groups. It doesn’t matter how much you spice it up or cover it with sugar, I can’t eat pumpkin. It gags me. The same goes for sweet potatoes. I get rave reviews for my candied sweet potatoes, but I have to hold my nose when I cook them. All the marshmallow cream in the world can’t dress them up enough for my taste buds. Ooh, and don’t bring me any of that southern favorite, sweet potato pie. Blech! It’s one of the few (and I mean very few) desserts I won’t eat.

I don’t know why I’m this way. I like other foods that are considered quite nasty by other folks. You know, brussel sprouts, broccoli, cabbage. I love cabbage. I actually crave cabbage on a regular basis. That’s downright weird, I know. I even eat chick peas, and nobody likes chick peas. I have to admit I’m not a spinach eater, but that’s because I ate large quantities of it as a kid due to my Popeye addiction and heaved it up one night all over my long hair. Whoops. I should have given you a gross alert on that one. Anyway, I didn’t care too much for spinach after that. I’m not big on turnips either, but I think that’s because my mom scared me with turnips. I had a great aunt who was prone to freezing her leftovers for years and reheating them for big family gatherings. When we got to Aunt Tottie’s house, Mama would sniff out the stuff most likely to cause salmonella and whisper a warning in my ear. Inevitably, it was, “Don’t eat the turnips, tell your brothers”. I think she instilled a turnip phobia in me I can’t quite shake. They’re probably quite lovely.

Every year I try a little bit of pumpkin, just to see if I’ve outgrown my distaste for it, and every year I end up spitting it out in a napkin and wiping my tongue like Tom Hanks in “Big”. The hardest part is living with the comments from people who can’t believe I don’t like it. Around these parts, it’s almost like breaking the eleventh commandment if you don’t eat pumpkin pie. And then when I tell them I love cranberry relish, they really freak, because no one else likes the cranberry relish. “What? You’ll eat cranberry relish, but you won’t eat pumpkin pie? What’s wrong with you?” Well, nothing’s wrong with me. I just don’t understand why someone would look at a hard, round sphere and say let’s peel that sucker open and cook the stringy stuff in the middle. I’ll bet that’s some good eatin’. This year I’m asking for a truce. Don’t ask me to try the pumpkin pie, and I won’t do my turkey dance for you at the table.