So this may sound self absorbed, but my sister-in-law has done Thanksgiving for years. Her daughter, Is getting married next year. So, this year, she’s having us & the fiancé’s family. I said to my husband, if this is going to be a tradition for her & her family, I don’t need it to be ours. I just don’t need to spend Thanksgiving with my niece’s in-laws.
We’re heading over to friend’s for Thanksgiving, and they just announced it will be gluten and dairy-free. Sigh. I AM trying to lose weight, so there’s that.
It wouldn’t be my favorite meal style but it can be done. Since it doesn’t seem to be meat free you could have turkey. Potatoes and gravy are doable, as long as the gravy is thickened with some non dairly fat. There are flours that are gluten free that aren’t too bad, for rolls. And veggies could be seasoned nicely and steamed. It’s the desserts that would be an issue.
Today was the day! Five days before Thanksgiving! They exceeded my expectations.
Ah, well. I just might be able to swing it this time, so we’ll see.
We are doing it again with a larger group this time. My Greek friend is making her incredible pastisio and there will be another charcuterie board with stinky cheese and crackers and pate. I’m making my ex-mother in law’s lemon jello cake. She so happened to be visiting my ex-wife and we all got dinner a couple of nights ago and I borrowed the original recipe card hand written by mom decades ago.
Well, I’m glad to say that I just back home from this years “Fakesgiving.” Now I’ll be able to just enjoy a long weekend this week.
In addition to Thanksgiving, we were invited to a Friendsgiving party tonight at a brewery. Everyone attending has signed up to bring something. I’m making pinwheels (flour tortillas spread with cream cheese, smoked salmon, pimientos, dill). Rolled up then sliced into bite sized treats.
It’s finally coming together; we now know who’s coming for dinner (& for some of the out-of-towners it’ll be our third dinner in a row - not three years, three nights in the same week) but the best part is when I called to place my usual, unusual order the woman remembered me & what I get. 
Question: I feel obligated to invite my 85 year old father and his girlfriend over for Thanksgiving, however, for several reasons I don’t really want them to accept the invitation. There’s probably a 71.5% chance he’s already gotten an invitation to attend his gf’s family Thanksgiving dinner and if I extended no invitation at all would probably just go there without another word being spoken. Is there anything you can think of that I could say to still fulfill my obligation to invite yet reduce the chance that he’ll not accept or feel obligated to attend my T-day when I call to invite?
Tell him that you want to give them a presentation about your new home business opportunity
i will either be home eating bassett’s turkey and fending off cats… or eating turkey at my cousin’s and fending off cats and dogs.
depends on the weather.
Or tell him how excited you are in giving Tofurky a try for your first ever vegan Thxgiving.
Or, both of the above, if you want to be sure.
← notice my avatar
I’m pleased to announce that I’m going to be back in *over *the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade again in a larger-than-life version of my wonderful self!
How much larger than life, you ask?
- 44 feet tall or as high as a 4-story building
- 77.5 feet long or as long as 11 bicycles
- 34 feet wide or as wide as 5 taxi cabs
My wife will going skiing on T-day. It’s not crowded because well T-day.
She will swing by Whole Foods on the way back to get basically a precooked T-day dinner. But probably just turkey, mashed potatoes and stuffing for two.
We’ve done this before, it’s pretty good.
As with last year, my friend is coming for a short visit tomorrow. I’ve ordered our Thanksgiving dinners from Wegman’s which will be delivered tomorrow afternoon for heating on Thursday.
For all of you getting the pre-made meal: make sure it is already cooked and ready to heat up. I worked in a grocery store that sold a comprehensive thanksgiving “kit” that had all the dishes but was still frozen at time of pick up and not even pre-cooked. So many angry people showing up on the way to their big meal finding out they were not getting a hot and ready to eat meal. Now, it said in not fine print that the kit needed to be cooked but that didn’t seem to help. After the first year, we made people sign a waiver when they placed the order that they understood this fact but that didn’t seem to help either.
And make sure to go to the same store you ordered it from. The store on Maple Street won’t have one for you if the store on Market Avenue is where you ordered it.
I used to like Thanksgiving, when I was a kid. My mom was a good cook and we’d have a houseful of people invited over, set up three different dining room tables, dad would fire up the grill for veggie kababs and corn-on-the-cob, and there’d be lots of fun and fellowship long into the night.
When I met my wife I was introduced to a much different set of traditions. Her family’s cooking abilities are… not heroic. Their signature dish is something orphans in Dickensian London wouldn’t eat, I’m sure1. Everyone sits around the periphery of living room eating off of paper plates. They also eat at 1pm in the afternoon. They’re uber religious so the afternoon usually/always incorporates some low-level bible discussion – these people are bible literalists so every. single. fucking. year. I have to hear about how its this type of modern food ::points to the same big heaping Dixie plate of food they have every single year:: is what prevents people living for 900 years like they did 6000 years ago when the book of Genesis was written by Jesus himself. And everyone agrees and discusses how awesome OT people were. All while they continue to scarf their second or third helpings.
Thankfully my wife doesn’t subscribe to their particular brand of fanaticism. We were (and are), however expected to be there every year. So I stopped going to my parents for Thanksgiving ca. 2000. Now my mom’s gone and I don’t have the chance even if I had the choice. Thankfully my dad doesn’t really care so I don’t feel guilty about missing something that doesn’t exist anymore.
But I still have to go to my in-laws.
Since I’m the only decent cook in the family, the menu items that I will be responsible for are:
- The turkey
- The gravy
- The cranberry sauce (I think I’m using canned this year. I used to make it using Chefguy’s recipe but this year I might just say to hell with that. It’s an outstanding sauce but I just don’t have the desire to add to my workload.)
- The potato salad (my son is making this, thankfully)
- The stuffing (I’m cheaping out and using boxed stuff)
- Cookies – two different types, peanut butter temptations and traditional chocolate chip. My wife is doing the PB temptations.
- Maybe some mac & cheese but probably not because I have enough to do.
- Two apple pies
- Hot mulled apple cider
And of course “dinner” is at 1pm so I have to be up at like 4am on Thursday to start getting shit ready.
And I have to work through Wednesday afternoon.
I already have the turkey thawing. I’ll make one batch of cookies tonight, my wife will do hers tomorrow. Tomorrow as soon as I get home I’ll start the turkey brining. If I decide to do the mac and cheese I’ll do that Thursday morning while the turkey’s roasting. The turkey cooks in a countertop roaster so the oven will be free… but crap. The pies. Shit.
I haven’t figured out how to do the cider without driving over to the in-laws in the AM, setting up a crock pot with the cider, turning it on, coming back home, and getting on with the rest of the meal. It takes time to do its thing.
And then the whole spread has to be ready by noon to load into the car and drive it over to my in-laws.
Then we have to repeat this whole charade – same menu, same schedule – on Christmas.
Shoot me.
So yeah, I’m kinda done too.
1My FIL cooks a ham by basically simmering it. He puts a huge ham in an even huger roasting pan, puts a few inches of water in the bottom, tightly covers the whole pan with aluminum foil, and cooks it until it’s done. It actually tastes pretty good, although the resultant meat is really dry. This isn’t a particularly novel cooking method for hams but there’s something about this one that makes the ham dry. It’s still quite edible and I always have some on my plate.
It’s what comes next that should be a war crime.
While the ham is cooking my MIL takes a crock pot and fills it full of those wide, thick egg noodles. She doesn’t just pour some in but really packs them in, filling every available square centimeter with uncooked egg noodle. Then she puts a very generous helping of salt into the crock. When the ham is done-ish she takes out some of the water that the ham has been cooking in and fills up the crock pot – the ham water simply fills all the little cracks, of course. She then turns on the crockpot and waits… and waits. Since there isn’t really enough liquid to cook the noodles properly (is there anything proper about this monstrous abomination?) the noodles slowly turn into this kind of paste. She gives it a stir every once in a while and… well, I have no idea how she can tell when it’s done. When it’s finally time to serve the resulting goo has an off-white color and is the consistency of mayonnaise with little chinks of overcooked noodle suspended in it. I tried it once, when I first met my wife, and nearly gagged. It was just starch flavored paste, and so salty as to make my mouth burn. It’s clearly one of those great depression inventions that somehow has managed to survive into the modern holiday recipe rotation. It is so incredibly, monumentally vile. Unsurprisingly, very few people eat it – only my wife’s immediate family (including my wife, much to my disgust).
Good grief, stop going over there! It makes me feel ill just reading about it! What a miserable way to spend two holidays every year! Do your kids like going there? Would you all be better off at home? Is this the happy memories you want your kids to have of Thanksgiving and Christmas? Have they ever even had a happy Thanksgiving or Christmas celebrated joyously with happy people?
You’ve been sacrificing your and your family’s happiness for too long.
Why don’t you tell your in-laws that your dad really misses you and wants you to eat at his house this year? Honestly, you should have been alternating for the past 24 years.
This made me laugh and honestly, the reasons are pretty similar to why I “abandoned” traditional Thanksgivings about a decade ago. I’m more gen x and the ones I avoided were “the greatest generation”, watching football and being served and doing jack shit to help. It always made me so mad!
I have to say, during the many years of doing the trad thing, preparing and sweating in an overheated kitchen with the other women, dressed up, it would have been awesome to have had a young man helping and hanging out with us, would’ve made the day so much better.
Here’s what I did- decided to start my own tradition. The next year I asked if anyone would like to dine out for Thanksgiving, steeled myself for the hurt feelings, and made a reservation at a fancy restaurant for those who did. I was met with resistance at first, not a lot of takers (fine with me!), but after 10 years, folks have come around and we have a fancy night out, splitting the bill, and I actually look forward to it.
Start now, don’t shackle yourself to a lifetime of a tradition that you kind of hate, lol. But don’t desert everyone- I’m sure they love you being there, so much. Start your own tradition, you could own it the rest of your life!
Good luck, and I hear you. 