I still can remember how excited I was,
back when I was a newlywed, about planning, cooking and hosting my first
Thanksgiving dinner.
Now, over 45 years later, I’d be
perfectly happy just to buy some sliced turkey from the local deli, slap it
between a couple slices of bread and eat it in front of the TV…while spending
Thanksgiving Day in my pajamas.
I’ll never forget the first Thanksgiving
dinner I ever cooked. It was a big deal for me because I’d never prepared a
feast before, and I was going to be cooking for seven people. To me, that
was the equivalent of having to feed an entire football team.
The month before Thanksgiving, I bought
just about every woman’s magazine on the market and carefully studied all of the
recipes in them. I didn’t want to make just basic, traditional holiday fare.
No, I wanted my meal to be fancy and unique. I decided to make orange-cranberry
relish instead of just plain cranberry sauce, and pumpkin-chiffon pie instead
of the usual run-of-the-mill pumpkin pie. I also liked the idea of adding roasted
chestnuts and wild rice to my turkey’s dressing.
By the time I bought everything I needed to
make the meal, it ended up costing me so much, I probably could have hired
Wolfgang Puck to personally prepare and serve Thanksgiving dinner for me.
As it turned out, despite all of my careful
planning and research, I encountered two major problems on Thanksgiving Day.
The first was my roasted turkey, the main attraction. It looked beautiful –
picture-perfect and a nice golden brown in color.
And it was so tough, it actually bent
the knife when my father tried to carve it.
“This turkey must have died of old age,” my
husband muttered, frowning, after he’d spent 10 minutes unsuccessfully trying
to chew the first bite.
My aunt, also struggling with chewing, made
a comment in Russian, her native language. I had no idea what the translation
was, but judging from her expression and the fact she nearly needed the
Heimlich maneuver after she finally managed to swallow a piece of the turkey, I
was pretty sure she wasn’t saying, “Mmmm! This is so moist and delicious!”
And in the time it took my father to saw off a drumstick for himself,
a lumberjack could have taken down a couple giant redwoods.
The fact I’d left the bag of innards still
tucked inside the turkey when I cooked it didn’t help gain any gourmet points,
either.
The second problem was the mashed potatoes.
I still have no clue what type of potatoes I bought, but I’m pretty sure they’d
been cross-bred with rocks. After an hour of boiling them, they still were hard
and crunchy. Desperate, because my guests already were arriving, I shoved the
potatoes into the microwave, then took them out and mashed them.
The rich, creamy potatoes smothered in
gravy I’d envisioned for the meal ended up sporting lumps the size of
jawbreakers. So I added more cream and butter to them and poured everything
into the blender.
The end result had the appearance and
consistency of white glue.
“Please pass the gravy,” my husband said
after taking a big mouthful of the potatoes. His request, however, came out
sounding more like, “Puz pash ba gubby,” because his teeth were stuck together.
That meal forever came to be known as, “the
year of the turkey-jerky.”
Thankfully, through a lot of trial and
error over the years, my subsequent Thanksgiving dinners became increasingly
better – and some even garnered rave reviews.
But experience also taught me there was
something I could do a week before Thanksgiving to ensure that the meal would
be absolutely perfect, from appetizers through dessert, with no stress
whatsoever...
Make reservations for Thanksgiving dinner
at a really nice restaurant.
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