Image above by Jill Wellington from Pixabay.
It’s the day before Thanksgiving. What’s going on in your kitchen? Is everything planned? All the ingredients bought? Wine chilling? Turkey thawing?
If so, good for you! If not, help is only a phone call away.
It’s estimated that 40 million turkeys will be cooked on Thanksgiving Day in the US. That’s an amazing number, and it probably informs the sign we saw today outside a church in southern Alabama. It said
“Only turkeys don’t give thanks.”
Thanksgiving for our family involves an annual trek to the retirement home outside Mobile, Alabama where Mike’s dad lives. We’ll eat dinner with Dad and some other family members in the facility dining room. It’s not the typical Thanksgiving tradition, but it’s ours. We’ve been doing it for 15 years, and that big room full of retired people and their families are now part of our extended family. (It’s also been long enough that Mary says she may have forgotten how to cook a turkey.)
But we know many of you will be roasting the birds, making the green bean casseroles, and baking the pumpkin or pecan pies. No matter how many years you’ve done it, it’s still a logistical challenge, with plenty of opportunities for heart-stopping failures.
To help you get through the day, we’re providing some entertainment. Read and watch it early, before the cooking and the drinking start in earnest.
For starters, here’s a New York Times article about food writer Alison Roman, who cooks a full Thanksgiving dinner – complete with turkey, stuffing (about which she is an adamant traditionalist), multiple vegetable dishes, canned cranberry sauce and a pie! – in a tiny New York City kitchen. If you’re cooking in anything bigger than a shoebox, you’ve got it better than Alison. And if you’ve ever cooked the full meal, you’ll appreciate her thoughtful approach to planning and execution.
Here’s the companion video, so you can watch Alison’s cooking adventure.
For those of you who may be less certain about the details, and worried about the outcome, we’re including some information about the Butterball Turkey Talk Line. It’s been in operation for 38 years. Starting on the first of November, 50 operators with calm voices will take 100,000 calls until December 24.
If you need some advice from a Midwestern home-economics teacher on how to cook your bird, these are the folks to contact. And even if you don’t need advice, it’s still fun to read about their experiences or watch the NBC News profile of one of their experts. (One big hint: You can’t tell if the turkey is done by the color of the skin. Get a meat thermometer!)
Whether you’re cooking for a big family, being a guest at a family dinner, or eating in a restaurant or retirement home dining room, Thanksgiving Day is not just about the food. It’s a time to gather round a table, big or small, with people you know and love. It’s a time to reflect and be thankful for all the things that are going right in our lives and for the people who make them right.
And yes, it might mean eating canned cranberry sauce. But come on. We all have to make sacrifices!
We hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving.
What is your most vivid memory of Thanksgiving Day? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Happy Thanksgiving to you two!!