Do you help out? Or do you just chit chat while everyone else is working?
Everyone at work assumes that because I possess a vagina, I want to organize the holiday potluck or the going away party for so-and-so or the baby shower for whatserface. Whenever I tell the guy who is making the suggestion that I’m not the floor social director but there’s nothing stopping him from doing it, suddenly he changes his mind about how great another party would be. And then sure enough, a woman eventually does step in to save the day. I know I shouldn’t let it annoy me, but it does.
My mother grew up in one of those huge “EVERYONE pitches in” families. Yes, for Thanksgiving, the men’s level of pitching in involved manning the bar, getting the leaves into the table, making sure the sidewalk was shoveled and de-iced, and other manly activities. But everyone pitched in. Every family brought a dish. Every woman who wasn’t active in the kitchen before dinner, knew that if she was older than six, she was in the kitchen after dinner.
She spent years hosting family dinners for the next generation and was always disappointed in my fathers family - his brothers married women who sat. And his mother was of the opinion that once you had daughters in law, you sit. Which means that my mother and sisters and I pulled off every family holiday while they sat.
But my mother always said, and I agree, that as holiday dinners go, Thanksgiving is easy. The menu is planned, you buy the same things every year. The pies bake up fine the weekend before - and pumpkin pie isn’t hard (in my family, the second pie is pecan, which can be a pain in the butt). The day of, you are making “fancy” green beans by opening a can of the french kind and dumping a can of cream of mushroom soup over the top, popping a stuffed turkey in the oven, mashing a bunch of potatoes, cooking up some sweet potatoes, and slicing bread, cracking open the can of cranberries, and you are done - gravy when the turkey is resting and the cleaning up. If you were organized, all the potatoes got boiled and mashed on Wednesday, so today you are just throwing everything into the oven or microwave.
Its sort of a disagreement between my mother in law and me. I think that Thanksgiving dinner should be the same every year, and it should be things that can be made in advance or cook all day, because the idea is to spend time with the family. She wants to mess with new recipes every year, and spend all day in the kitchen, because to her, cooking the meal is the fun part (I like to cook, I’d just rather not do it when I have company).
I just weighed a couple of potatoes, 13 oz. each. That would feed 19 people, not counting the weight of any milk/cream that might be used in the taters.
I have my doubts as to the veracity of that interview. I did notice the shot of the wine glass, though. Think the interviewer was on the ball enough to remember to bring a clos du bois?
Perhaps the problem is that I am not a fan of mashed potatoes, so to me, more than a spoonful is too much. But my Google search results are telling me that a pound of whole potatoes results in two cups of mashed potatoes and that a “standard” serving is about 3/4 cup per person. So the fifteen pounds specified by Marney should result in about thirty cups of mashed potatoes or enough for about 40 people. Given the number of families involved, I can imagine that there might have been that many people at Marney’s house for dinner.
Also, thanks for the link. I can imagine that she was pissed at the idea of being made fun of and that’s the reason she was a little terse in the interview.
I don’t see why everyone is giving this person such a hard time. After all, the other 364 days of the year, this person is defending our freedom to have Thanksgiving in the first place without giving a second thought to personal welfare, so I think that others can hold off for one day a year…wait, what?
“Marnie”?
Not “Marine”?
(Seriously, when I read the subject, I swore it said “Marine”…)
3/4 cup of potatoes is a pretty big serving when it isn’t Thanksgiving. For Thanksgiving you have (in this case), stuffing, green beans (or asparagus), squash, turnips (which everyone hates, but must be brought), turkey, cranberries (I would assume), bread or rolls (same assumption) and pie with ice cream. And beforehand, everyone has been noshing away on beer, wine, Lisa’s veggie tray, and Michelle’s prosciutto pinwheel. Because of the number of dishes that go out for Thanksgiving, that is a lot of potatoes. Or they have a family that loves their potatos and doesn’t like green beans or squash. And if there are 30 people coming, they need more pie. They have sixteen pieces of pie and a gallon of ice cream.
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