Happy Thanksgiving

I wish you a happy Thanksgiving, and offer some random Thanksgiving thoughts.

This week the New York Times ran a great piece on Thanksgiving food in all 50 states.  There are enough recipes in this one article to get you through the coming winter, though there are many I think I’ll skip, either due to opportunity or disinterest, there are plenty that sound really amazing! I was pleased to see that my home state, the state I’ll always consider my state, New York included an apple pie, which I think is my all-time favorite dessert. Pennsylvania, my adopted home state’s item is maple glazed bacon, and that sounds good, but I’m not making that any time soon.

I am endlessly fascinated by what people eat at Thanksgiving, and love to hear about your lasagna, and someone else’s collard greens, I think my family’s assimilation is most apparent at Thanksgiving. That being said, I don’t recall ever having mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving, something that many people find quite shocking. We did have sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows at least until we were all in our twenties, and decided to start looking for more ‘grown up’ fare. Over the years we’ve settled on a menu we like, which is a combination of recipes collected from Gourmet and Bon Apetite  magazines, and a mix of cookbook favorites. For dessert I think we’ve always had the same three pies, pecan, some variety of apple (the pie we eat now is cranberry-apple) and pumpkin. Last year we went a little crazy and added ice cream to our dessert course, because we really felt we weren’t consuming quite enough calories! Thanks to my sister and brother-in-law, we always have excellent wine.

We start with soup, which is also a fairly recent addition to our traditional meal. I think we added that about five years ago. Our stuffing of choice is a sausage and apple themed one, and we definitely stuff our brined bird; we’ve been brining about as long as we’ve been having soup. We are way too foodie (please excuse me for this word) for canned cranberry sauce, that disappeared long, long ago, and we toyed with numerous recipes until we found the one we like which is very chunky and citrus-y.

Last year, like Jews all over the USA we were thrown into a mild tizzy by the unprecedented coincidence of Hanukkah with Thanksgiving, and mercifully we don’t have to deal with that again! We can go back to being just American, and save the latkes for December 16th, rather than trying to incorporate them into an already heavy meal.

This year there will be more of us than usual, as my brother-in-law’s family will be joining us, bringing our number up around twenty, something we haven’t seen since we were kids, and ate on cloth a covered ping-pong table that was able to seat about 25 people (there may have been a kids’ table too, this is really ancient history).  We generally spend most of Wednesday cooking and doing prep work. Thursday the athletes head off to a morning run, and we get back to cooking. Then showers and into our ‘party clothes’  a custom I have protested, with no success as everyone else seems to enjoy getting dressed up, as if we haven’t spent the entire day together in our jammies and yoga pants… At least I can wear flat shoes.

My entire family convenes only twice a year, and we are currently on an ebb in population. No doubt soon my nieces and nephew will marry (or not) and start adding babies to the mix. This year with Dave’s family joining us we will again enjoy a three generation Thanksgiving which will be nice. Though the weather forecast is messing with everyone’s’ travel plans, I am looking forward to seeing my family, catching up, relaxing, cooking and enjoying my favorite holiday. I wish you a very peaceful, delicious and happy Thanksgiving, filled with love, family and friends.