A friend and I were talking about our Thanksgivings, past and present.
She's being adventurous this year, going out of state to friends and then to her sister's house, also out of state.
Last Thanksgiving I was scheduled to go to a friend's house (in state) but my legs and back gave out the day before while shopping at Safeway. I spent the rest of the week in bed.
This year I'm staying home, but not in bed! I bought a box of stuffing mix and a can of cranberry sauce and will make a meal of it. Stuffing is my favorite.
My mother made the best stuffing, so she set the gold standard. She used Pepperidge Farm bread and very few ingredients. She didn't pack the bird with anything except the good stale bread, sage seasoning, butter, onions and maybe celery, oh, and an egg.
One Thanksgiving, while in Sri Lanka (where I lived for 14 years), I made dinner for a bunch of friends. I cooked one turkey the day before and one at o'dark hundred the next morning. Turkeys in Sri Lanka weren't the behemoths we have here in the US, hence two birds were necessary to feed everyone.
I also made a spicy shrimp dish with large prawns, extra stuffing (of course), and a sweet potato dish with marshmallows. It's not easy to find marshmallows like the ones we have in the US. They have square ones in pastel colors.
Someone brought a salad, which I think is a waste of time for Thanksgiving as there are no carbs in salad.
Tables were set with a festive flair. The food was laid out buffet style.
When it was time to eat, there wasn't much conversation.
I think I'm fairly accurate when I say that leftovers are the best part of Thanksgiving. But after that meal there was not one piece of meat left on the two turkey carcasses! The shrimp dish was devoured as well as the mashed potatoes. The only thing that wasn't touched was the sweet potato dish. That's because no one took off the aluminum foil cover! Or maybe because of the pastel marshmallows.
Thanksgiving in 1984, I cooked for my friends who had no place to go for Thanksgiving. Not quite a fiasco but certainly a late dinner because we watched Prince's Purple Rain video at least a dozen times. Seemed more important to all of us to watch that rather than watch the turkey cook. (Who was smoking what?)
I don't remember much of Thanksgiving at home when I was a kid except that my mom made rutabaga (ugh) and mincemeat pie (ugh). Not a fan of either, to this day. Apparently that's what her mother served so it was tradition. A bad tradition in my opinion. I would have rather had apple pie, or key lime pie (my favorite).
After cooking a turkey a year or so ago I decided that that was the last time. I'm not fond of taking the meat off the carcass and I really only like the white breast meat. So why bother?
What's a girl to do?…enjoy myself, home alone with my three cats (don't laugh!), watch a movie with the furnace blasting, and have stuffing and cranberry sauce. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Lucy Llewellyn Byard is currently a freelance journalist for the Record-Bee. You can email her at lucywgtd@gmail.com
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