Thanksgiving prep takes its toll on me
This year, due to family scheduling conflicts, we celebrated Thanksgiving two days late. Since the meal would not technically be on Thanksgiving, I saw no need to go all out.
I told myself, “This is just a family dinner on a Saturday with eight people. No big deal.”
I never listen to myself.
Regardless of the day, I was always going to treat this as the biggest meal of the year; that’s the whole point of Thanksgiving. There are no Thanksgiving carols, no hiding of Thanksgiving eggs. Nobody sets off Thanksgiving fireworks in their backyard. A huge meal is the whole shebang.
“Thanksgiving dinner is not about how well one can cook; it’s about how much one can cook.”
At first, I planned to just roast a good-sized chicken, a passable substitute for turkey. But what if that wouldn’t feed eight of us?
I decided to cook a ham as well.
Of course I would make mashed potatoes to go with the standard stuffing, peas, corn, gravy, etc. But with ham, one needs potatoes au gratin. And in any case, there would have to be pies.
Soon, I was looking at a full-on feast.
Thanksgiving dinner is not about how well one can cook; it’s about how much one can cook. No matter how simple I pretended the meal would be, the color-coded cooking schedule I drew up three days ahead of time exposed my lie. Normal meals do not require formal outlines, much less footnotes.
And, much as I do in other areas of my life, I tend to self-impose arbitrary standards that make Thanksgiving dinner unnecessarily challenging.
I recall that my grandmother, as she got older, started giving in to conveniences, things she would once have considered cooking heresy. Out shopping with her one day, I caught her tossing a two-pack of premade pie crusts into her cart.
She shot me a look, shrugged, and said, “I can’t be bothered.”
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, however, I wasn’t thinking about my grandmother’s late-in-life culinary rebellion. I was busy consulting my Gantt chart for the scheduling of each dish’s preparation.
Late that afternoon, a friend called, saying, “Hey, pies just went on sale in town. Go get some while they last.”
I’m sure she meant well.
But I was, at that very moment, dicing up chunks of pig fat to be melted down and strained through cheesecloth. (The resulting white lard, blended with butter, makes a flaky homemade pie crust.)
At a loss for words, I finally said, “Have you met me?”
She apologized and quickly hung up.
It sounds like a humble brag: “Thanksgiving is hard for me because I go above and beyond when it comes to preparing everything from scratch, right down to my own shortening.” But it’s no brag, humble or otherwise; in fact, most people seem to find my interest in processing animal fat more off-putting than impressive.
To each his own.
I do tend to eschew prepared foods, mostly because of my inner miser. I refuse, for instance, to pay $4.65 per pound for stuffing mix when I can chop up bread myself. And while nutrition and flavor play roles as well, even they don’t justify the labor I will go through to create an entirely homemade meal.
For all that, I’m an unimaginative cook. My Thanksgiving repertoire ranges from “plain” to “plain but with a dash of pepper.” Yes, I’ll cube my own bread for stuffing, but I’ll die before I ever add anything as audacious as chestnuts or oysters—imagine!—to the mix.
And if I give off any hint of Martha Stewart snobbery in my insistence on whole ingredients, it’s more than offset by my lack of attention to presentation. Our dinnerware is mismatched. All the forks are salad forks. And we only own three dessert plates, so most of our guests have to eat their pie out of cereal bowls.
I don’t know why I can’t be so laid-back about the food itself. I could buy the stuffing and the pies. No one would care.
Except me.
I wonder if I’ll reach an age, like my grandmother did, when I decide it’s all too much. Maybe someday I’ll crumple up my Thanksgiving spreadsheet and free-throw it into the recycling, saying, “I can’t be bothered.”
If that time does come, I hope it’s soon. Thanksgiving was a week ago, and I’m still recovering.
