Surviving Thanksgiving

I have to tell the backstory here or most of you will think you're reading a crazy man's rant.

Eight years ago my wife and I toddled down to Texas (yeah, I know) for a massive family gathering at my sister's house. She's 60 now and darn near a master chef in the kitchen, but tried a new turkey recipe (there were three turkeys, it was a big group). It was stuffed with apples or pears or something and was nearly inedible. Sauce from these birds went into a gravy that defies description, and another sister tried reworking said gravy with vinegar. Yes, it made it worse. Neighbors who apparently had never cooked brought side dishes that seemed to have been dug up the night before then put in the freezer.

As everyone greedily dug in, there were side glances, light chokings, grunts, and more as everyone tried to see if they were the only ones whose tastebuds had gone completely haywire.

It took a couple of weeks for my sister to get over it, and I wrote this to cheer her up. It may sound sexist and male-dominant, but believe me - in our clan, the men would all be living in the sewers if we didn't have our ladies to run things for us!

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Dear ladies:

I'm probably breaking all kinds of double-secret guy codes here, but I'm going to give you a peek behind the curtain. I have heard that women are always wondering what men are thinking. Hopefully this will give you some insight.

We hate Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, Rachel Ray, the Iron Chef, and all other TV cooking personas. We despise them with the white hot intensity of 1,000 suns. Why? It's nothing personal, we just don't like what they want you to put on our plates. You see, these folks have to keep their menus new and interesting. Oh, they may fawn over the word "traditional", but what they're really interested in is ratings. They have to keep you tuned in. No one's going to watch them make the same meal every year. They use words like "whimsical" and "fresh". They want you to believe that we'd enjoy a change of pace this Thanksgiving with some ostrich or shark. Same goes for Redbook and Family Circle and Good Housekeeping.

So carve this in the wall somewhere in your kitchen.

You just don't mess with Thanksgiving dinner.

At three meals a day, there are 1,095 cooking opportunities available to you per annum. You pretty much have free reign to experiment with squid soup, tostadas de aardvark, filet of possum, hickory nut bread, various soy concoctions, lime and pumpkin souffle, and whatever your heart desires. If we're hungry enough, we'll probably be glad to have it. We may or may not tell you what we think of it, but we'll eat it.

But - you just don't mess with Thanksgiving dinner.

Throughout the year, while we're fighting zombies, slaying dragons, and keeping the homestead safe, we dream of Thanksgiving. Occasionally the large vacuous space between our ears plays host to other thoughts - such as sex, oil changes, wrench sizes, and how much longer we can make it without buying new underwear - but these fleeting notions are usually pushed aside with dreams of Thanksgiving.

It's what we live for. It is our Mount Everest of dining, our paramount cuisine experience. And it is something on which we don't care to compromise.

So if outsiders (correction: guests, neighbors, friends, coworkers, etc.) should force their way into our clannish clique on this day of days, we will welcome them warmly. We will throw open our doors and do all we can to make them feel at home. We will enjoy hearing their stories, and invite them to play our games.

We just don't want their food.

Why? I'm sure you heard this somewhere. You don't mess with Thanksgiving.

They can pour the drinks, set the table, light the candles, and move stuff around in the kitchen as needed. In the safest possible measure, they can even bring an extra dessert, if there's enough sugar in it, but note that this is an EXTRA dessert. It is not THE dessert. It's just a backup, an option. To be super safe, they can bring several packages of brown-n-serve rolls. They can furnish the wine, the whiskey, the lemonade - virtually any beverage, as long as it's not THE beverage and we still have Clara's Texas Tea to drink, so sweet and syrupy that a spoon will stand straight up in it.

It's turkey - just regular ol' turkey. We understand and appreciate that this takes a while to make. But it's what makes the day so special. We don't get much real turkey the rest of the year, so we reeeaaallly look forward to it. Turkey gravy, and you can leave out the mystery chunks. Mashed potatoes. Standard, simple green bean casserole. Mom's classic cornbread sage dressing. Brown-n-serve rolls, with butter, not margarine. These are the basic elements. There are plenty of other beloved options, to include cranberry sauce, pumpkin/apple/pecan pies, apple cake, fudge, fruit cups, those celery things with the orange stuff on them, and real whipped cream.

Now - please understand that other elements may be introduced as an addition to the above-stated items. We're not complete troglodytes. We will nod approvingly and say things like, "Hmmm, bet that took a lot of effort" and "Lovely color, are those real artichokes?" - and we might even give them a try after our third helping of the regular stuff. But we are absolutely not interested in having the fundamentals go awry. Options, yes. Additions, yes. Replacements - no way, no how.

You see, we enjoy having folks over. We enjoy demonstrating our stuff and showing off our new guns and personal empires. But we have a vague suspicion of Thanksgiving guests. It's something we can't quite put our fingers on, but we're wondering, "Why aren't these people at someone else's house? Don't they know how to cook? And if not, why are we encouraging them to bring their non-cooking skills to our table?"

You don't need to apologize to them. Blame it on us. Politely tell them, "No thanks, but we've learned from the cavemen that we are not to mess with Thanksgiving dinner."

Do this for us, and you'll have much better presents under the tree.

Great point. What we tend to do in our family is have the old reliable dishes and throw in one new thing just for a little variety. So if the new dish fails, like they sometimes do, people just laugh and eat something else. One year my wife made a butterscotch pie that failed to gel. So it became butterscotch soup.