thanks a lot...revisited

I started the following piece eight weeks or so ago and there are plenty of good cases that could have been made for just letting it lay as a draft forever, maybe tweak it a bit next year and put it out then.  But, I've finally realized that it's not the quality of my work that's gonna attract the attention of of the Times or the Atlantic.  Nope, it'll be the sheer prolific mass of what I crank out that will finally get me the notice I deserve.  Or get me permanently banned from Blogger.com for being so terminally boring.  There's no such thing as bad PR, right?

We're now nearly a full two months past the holiday and I'm ready to brag it up that we've survived the Thanksgiving crunch here on Laurel Avenue.  And did so with style and grace, at least by our pathetically low standards.  It seemed remarkably smooth though I suppose that there could still be some unforeseen repercussions which might surface.  Like when the credit card statements come due.

I finished off the last nub of pumpkin pie a couple of weeks after the fact and did likewise to the last of the squash lunch the same week.  I'm like David Sedaris's father when it comes to scraps of food; I'm still willing to eat them long after Miz Susan has lost interest.  We still have a few quarts of my turkey soup in the freezer along with a single homemade TV dinner (having eaten one earlier this week) so Thanksgiving will actually stay with us well into the new year.  If we survive that long.  The Christmas season, though also past, could still do us in.

It was a smallish family gathering at our house.  Damn smallish, to be honest: Miz Susan, my mom and me (for muscle and dishwasher loading acumen).  Smallish but lovely.  We may not have had all the traditional Thanksgiving fare; no Lamberton corn nor green bean casserole, for example.  But we had more than enough to fill our plates to overflowing with plenty of leftovers to divvy up.

It took some advance preparation and fancy footwork in our challenged-for-space kitchen and oven to pull it off.  But good, old-fashioned American ingenuity and classic Puritan work ethic won out in the end.  What could me more fitting for the best of all American holidays?

We baked up a butternut squash or two and Susan made stuffing balls the weekend before and froze them until Thursday.  We moved our 14-pound turkey from the freezer to the fridge on Sunday.  Our fridge has been acting more like a freezer than a fridge ever since the weather turned cold and, consequently, the turkey was still a bit on the frosty side on Wednesday night.  But that wasn't anything that a night in a tub of brine didn't take care of by Thursday morning.  And into the oven he (or she?) went.

Our oven is so small that we had to bring some auxiliary cooking  methods into play.  The microwave, the toaster oven, the top of a radiator to raise the frozen buns.  I offered to fire up the gas grill out on the deck but Miz Susan wasn't buying into that idea.  Despite having grown up in Little House on Plum Creek territory, she's apparently lost some of her pioneer, make-do spirit.  We had to start the turkey on the lowest oven rack in the covered roaster and then, for the final hour of uncovered browning, took off the cover, moved the rack up a notch, slid the turkey back in and positioned it just so that the drumstick peeking up over the top of the pan was exactly between the heating elements at the top of the stove.  A team of heart surgeons couldn't have done it any better.  We didn't do as well with the toaster oven (RIP) which burned out after some food stuff or another came in contact with the heating coils.  Sigh.  Oh well, Menard's needed our $29 for a new toaster over, didn't they?

Like I said, it was lovely.  Turkey, stuffing balls, squash, Alison's corn souffle, mashed potatoes and gravy, pumpkin and pecan pies, nary a sign of a vegetable unless you count the onions in the stuffing balls.  It was quiet and conversation took center stage.  Which beats fighting the young adult crowd for seconds (their thirds and fourths) on the mashed potatoes.  No 40-mile round trip.  Maybe we'll give some thought to making this more than a once-in-a-lifetime event.  There are plenty of things to be less thankful for.