|
Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details.
Warning! Do not approach this man during Thanksgiving dinner by J. G. Fabiano
It is that time of year again when the whole family gets together to enjoy a feast of love, celebration and good food that destroys an entire year of diet and exercise - and am I ready for it! I especially love Thanksgiving because it is the one holiday I don't have to go out and buy anything for anybody. All I have to do is show up and eat. I like Thanksgiving dinner so much that in the weeks leading up to it I find myself day-dreaming about favorite foods from Thanksgiving Days past. I belong to a large extended family and one of the benefits is the multitude of different specialty dishes we get to enjoy only once a year. Some of them are so good I spend much of the rest of the year thinking about them. Hell! I remember them every time I look down and can't see my feet past the bulk of my stomach. The first dish that comes to mind is a green bean concoction made by one of my sisters-in-law that she only cooks for Thanksgiving and never makes it past the first serving. It would be impossible to know that it is made of green beans without trying it because it is smothered in a thick mushroom sauce with what looks like chunks of breadcrust floating in it. The great thing about this dish is that isn't too appetizing to look at, which gives the home field advantage to those of us who know it, over those new boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands and wives who are newcomers to the family table. The taste is out-of-this-world sensational. So sensational that I have been known to fight with a not-so-loved brother-in-law for the chair at the corner of the table where this bean and mushroom dish is located. Deviled eggs are another Thanksgiving favorite in our family. Every year, as the dish makes its way toward me, I promise myself that I will only have a couple of halves because I don't want my cholesterol level spiraling up into figures that would rival the national debt. The moment I get the plate in my hand all that resolve evaporates. Sometimes I will keep serving myself until my wife takes the plate away from me before I explode. One year I actually got though 22 halves before she smacked me across the back of the head. A couple of Thanksgivings ago a new side dish turned up on the table, concocted out of something that originated accidentally in my garden. Not that I was attempting to grow it, I assumed the ocean breeze had wafted the seed all the way over the Atlantic Ocean from some place in western England. Around July I assumed it wasn't a weed so I let it grow and, lo and behold, it produced a type of vegetable. At least I think it was a vegetable. By late October the invading vine had taken over most of my garden and produced several dark green, ribbed squashes, each about the size of a candlestick bowling ball. At first I was going to throw them away but then my wife told me they were acorn squash and she could make something out of them for the next Thanksgiving dinner. She cut them in halves, removed a pit slightly larger than a ping pong ball then did some magic with them by cutting out the insides, mashing them up and putting them back in the skin. She then baked them in the oven for a couple of hours, or at least the time it took to watch a football game, and served them sprinkled with brown sugar. They turned out to be absolutely great. The only part I didn't enjoy was the skin and later on in the evening I was told I wasn't supposed to eat the skin. I figured that, with the dozen devilled eggs I had put away, no little rind of squash was likely to stay inside me long enough to do any harm. Of course, Thanksgiving wouldn't be Thanksgiving without a turkey. Since I have a rather large family the turkey is usually the size of a Volkswagen. It used to take two men to carry it to the table but, for the past few years, it had to be carved in the kitchen because we are all getting a too old to carry something that heavy. Now the turkey is carved on top of the stove and plates filled with white and dark meat. I always end up with one of the legs because everyone knows how much I love dark meat. To be honest I really don't love the leg that much but I do love feeling like Fred Flintstone gnawing on a Brontosaurus leg. I may have to seek therapy for that one day! The only thing that changes from year to year is the stuffing. Maybe this is because we don't use the same turkey every year. One year, I remember, the stuffing had a distinct greenish hue to it. I was told that the base of the stuffing was spinach and that it was good for me. Looking around the table and seeing every type of food that promised to kill me from arterial overload in the next 48 hours I wondered why it was so important to have healthy stuffing. Thanksgiving is also the one meal of the year when there is enough gravy to go around. I love gravy and always seem to run out of it at other meals but at Thanksgiving we have a Niagara of gravy. Naturally, I cover everything with gravy. Even the string bean mixture with the mushroom sauce. I flood my plate with gravy so that it looks like some kind of soup without the bowl. I don't particularly care what goes into the gravy either. The women in our family like to experiment and one year it was walnuts, another it was raisins and another it was little potato pieces. I had no idea what they were so I called them lumps, which my sister-in-law didn't appreciate, but I ate them anyway so I don't see what she has to complain about. In fact, one of my sisters-in-law warned the smaller children not to go near me while I was eating because I might stick a fork in them and put them on my plate too. I didn't know this at the time and wondered why the younger kids wouldn't come anywhere near me once I was seated at the table. You would think that after everything I had forced down my throat and into my ever expanding stomach during Thanksgiving dinner I might actually have to stop eating for a while. You would think wrong. This is because there is always dessert! In our house dessert is a big family tradition. So much of a tradition that we reserve a separate table just for the desserts, strategically located between the dining room and the living room. We do this so that it is impossible to get from the dining table to the chair in front of the football game without being reminded that we haven't had dessert yet. We would hate to deprive ourselves. The dessert table is a Technicolor delight. There are pumpkin pies, apple pies, blueberry pies, pecan pies and mince pies. Homemade pecan pies are always better than store bought pies because of the ooze factor and it always requires a couple of paper towels just to remove the deliciously sticky pecan syrup from my fingers and chin. There are also these delicious little bite-sized cheese tarts that I think have been baked just to taunt me because they fit so perfectly into my mouth one at a time so that I don't realize how many I am eating. Before the afternoon is over I probably will have ingested enough of these to provide a partner for each of the devilled egg inside me. One year, one of my cousins admonished us that we should skip dessert because of the huge amount of food we ate during the main meal. He was right of course and he made us all feel terribly guilty. Which is why we never invited him back! I get to feel guilty all the rest of the year. So, from now until New Year's everything but guilt is on the menu!
The End
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
