Best Thanksgiving ever [View all]

[chowmama]

My mom, as has been said before, was a wonderful person with many fine talents and qualities. None of them involved food. For one thing, she was anorexic at a time when that really wasn’t a common diagnosis, even if she’d ever gone to the doctor about it. She was also overworked and short of time in every other part of her life. She did her best and did what was seen as solely her job when it came to feeding us, but the results were largely unmixed. Mostly, they were the Four Basic Food Groups, executed average to awful.

So, Thanksgiving seldom went as planned. My father wanted the whole Norman Rockwell experience – the biggest turkey that would fit in our oven. All the sides, multiple treats and pies. Cold Duck for the adults. (Anybody remember Cold Duck? A sparkling mix of cheap red wine and cheap champagne, and not the slightest hint of dryness. It was the only alcohol my mom would drink and we all grew up thinking it was the height of sophistication.)

First – frozen turkey. Frozen behemoth turkey. Mom even hated shopping for food, so she put it off until Sunday, meaning that this sucker was still hard as granite by Thursday morning. We woke to the sound of water in the sink, running over the boulder to try to thaw it enough to pry the neck and giblets out of it.

It went on from there. We always had our dinner hours after it was scheduled, by which time Dad was in a foul mood and Mom was snappish and exhausted. The worst time, we ended up at 9PM carving underdone tough breast meat off Gargantua and microwaving it until it wouldn’t kill us – we hoped. If you ever decide to try this, don’t. It’s nasty.

So, when we grew up (four sisters, no brothers), we began to lobby Mom to let us do it for her. She’d done it enough, it was time for her to put her feet up and relax. She refused for years. We brought the pies, so at least she didn’t have to be up all the night before. We helped on the sides. But she just wouldn’t give up that damned bird. It was her job.

Finally came the year she’d had enough. We could do the bird. She had also bought a free-range organic turkey from a co-worker who raised them. It had never been frozen. We were pumped. This was going to be the best Thanksgiving ever!

Thursday morning, early. Coffee, rolls and get to work. Made the stuffing according to Mom’s recipe (which is, frankly, great. DH won’t allow me to use any other). Melted butter, prepped the roaster and unwrapped the brown paper from the completely unfrozen bird.

I’m not sure what was wrong with that bird, but I’ve come to theorize that they didn’t bleed it out right. Or at all. It was one giant turkey-shaped bruise. It looked like it had been beaten to death with a baseball bat.

We just stood around it, staring. Once in a while, somebody would say “Maybe if we trimmed…” “What if…” But there was nothing, literally nothing, to be done.

And then, being it was us, somebody snorted. And we all started laughing. Started calling in people from the other rooms. “Hey, you have got to see this!” Even Mom finally laughed.

Now this was a small Wisconsin town some time ago. No restaurants were open on Thanksgiving, no groceries. If we wanted something to eat other than what was in the house, the only thing available was some day-old egg salad sandwiches down at the gas station.

There was hamburger in the freezer and the makings of what my Mom called goulash – homemade hamburger hot dish. That was the Thanksgiving main dish. With all the sides, pies, treats and, of course, Cold Duck.