A preemptive Thanksgiving rant

The BBQ Pit
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Holiday dinners like Thanksgiving are as much about tradition as they are about good food. This is unfortunate when you come from a family of mediocre (or worse) cooks, because mediocrity gets ingrained into the tradition.

The cooks in my family are not really mediocre, as such; it’s just that most of my family members have seriously underdeveloped palates, and the people who cook just don’t see the point in going to the extra trouble when nobody really cares anyway.

In the last few years, since my gourmet tendencies have pronounced themselves, I have tried to incorporate some actual flavor into my family’s Thanksgiving dinner. One of my first attempts was real cranberry sauce, made with actual cranberries, rather than the canned abomination we usually had. The only problem was that one of my cousins, ever since she was 7 or 8 (she’s about 20 now), had made a big deal about being the one to cut the cranberry sauce, so we had to have a can, too. I don’t find that bothersome, really–we had both, and the people who cared agreed that mine was better. :slight_smile:

My Thanksgiving dinner this year will be on Friday, and just for CrazyCatLady and me, since we can’t make it home. It’s weird what we each consider to be integral to the proceedings. For her, Thanksgiving has to involve a sweet potato casserole (with marshmallows), and a cranberry-marshmallow Jello salad that her grandmother used to make.

For me, it isn’t Thanksgiving without dressing (made with cornbread, onion, celery, and lots of sage), mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and yeast rolls–big ones with lots of little air pockets to soak up gravy. (Yes, I am another who feels that Thanksgiving dinner should be a beautiful meal sitting beneath a half-inch of gravy.) So we’re doing all of that, even though it’s just the two of us. I expect to emerge from the coma sometime on Sunday.

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Mmmm… chicken chunks. Drool.

Not only was the recipe for molded gelatin salad, but it was for ambrosia molded gelatin salad! The little ol’ church ladies are playing hardball.

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Damn, you get pierogies on Thanksgiving? I hate you-we only have them at Xmas and Easter! Well, to be fair, sometimes my mother will make them for no reason at all, but they’re a lot of work, so we don’t get them all the time.
I think I posted the recipe here once.

We’re having JELLO cheese cake from my gramma’s recipe instead of pie-none of us really like pumpkin pie all that much. It’s yummy-sort of a mixture of JELLO and pudding, with a graham cracker crust. Then you sprinkle some of the graham cracker crumbs on top. YUM! (And the extra graham cracker crumbs-made with extra sugar and butter make a devine topping for ice cream if there’s any leftover).

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I do the cooking here, and I have one basic rule. I will not do the dishes. I do clean up after myself in the kitchen, a habit learned from working in restaurants. That said, my brother will be doing the washing and wiping, as he usually does. :smiley: Want to borrow him for a few hours Maureen?

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Whereas the only thing I clean around here is my plate… :smiley:

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sigh…It’s good to have friends… :stuck_out_tongue:

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You’d have to pay him three “Match Games” though.

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And a “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy”. He is hooked on GSN and football.

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gobear, check your e-mail.

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Sigh! The downside to a great temp job in a beautiful city in the Netherlands is that nobody will feed me any turkey today—in fact, I couldn’t even get a turkey in the supermarket even if I had an oven to roast it in. No drumstick, no dressing, no mashed potatoes, no cranberry relish, no pumpkin pie… sigh. When everybody’s serving dinner today, would you please pretend you’re fixing a plate for me and I can imagine eating it? Thanks!
[sub]it would happen that the once-a-decade-or-so occasion when Thanksgiving falls on my birthday is the year I’m in a no-turkey zone …sigh.[/sub]

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Bummer. Happy Birthday, I’ll try to e-mail you some pie.

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Sweet potato casserole with all the syrup, sugar, marshmallows and sugar - also known as the Diabetes Starter Kit - why must people do that to a perfectly delicious vegetable? You take the sweet potatoes, bake them just like a regular potato. Cut them open and add a big glob of butter and you’re done. Eat and enjoy and your teeth won’t ache and your blood sugar won’t rise off the scale.

I didn’t eat sweet potatoes for the longest time because I had tasted one of these horrid marshmallow concoctions once as a kid. I was a kid, I ate sugar sandwiches and I couldn’t eat anything that sweet! My mother always made the simple baked sweet potato for my dad and sister every year but I thought it would taste like the marshmallow crap so I never tried it, then one year I got brave and tasted it. I loved it and couldn’t understand why people feel a need to add more sugar to this already naturally sweet and tasty veggie. I doubt that anyone who eats sweet potato casseroles has any idea what a sweet potato really tastes like.
Uncle Cecil on yams and sweet potatoes

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Ah, but you see, I replace the marshmallows with sour cream and the syrup with brandy. That way you can start down the road not only to diabetes, but also obesity and alcoholism – A winning combination!

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Don’t knock it 'til you try it! The juice running into the turkey…mmmm.

It’s not just the German families; my Czech family has had a pot of kraut at every Thanksgiving since, well, forever. (Until this year, our first without dad).