We received a rare phone call this morning: a child using a cell phone to call home to ask for advice. It wasn’t just a tossed-off text. It was not a “like” on a Facebook post. It wasn’t even an Instagram selfie. It was an actual conversation that ended in, “Thanks!” Be still our foolish hearts! The Tall One was calling home from his university digs to ask a question about food! (Although, to be completely honest, he scraped the bumper of a parked car while driving down a busy street and needed to know what to do next.)
We chose to believe that his true purpose in calling was to ask us food advice. And we were thrilled to pieces. He wanted to know how much food he and his equally clueless roommate need to buy and prepare before throwing a pot luck Thanksgiving feast for sixteen of their friends on Monday night, before everyone scatters and departs for home. We advised him to buy a large ham and many rolls and biscuits, in addition to the turkey he said they would be roasting. A very large ham.
I find it just amazing that he will be eating a veritable Brobdingnagian feast on Monday night, and then will be able tuck into another meal of epic proportions at home on Thursday. I think our meal might look Lilliputian to him.
The Tall One is an absolute furnace for food. Last year he was training for a triathlon and we plied him with great snow-shovels-full of carbohydrates. He was like a trained dog- nothing ever hit the floor. It was all consumed with aplomb and nonchalance, and rapidity, with regular repetitions. Now he is training at a Cross Fit gym every day and follows the Paleolithic Diet. I doubt if our ancestors ate half as well as he did on a recent flash visit home: 6 organic cage-free extra large eggs, fried, with half a rasher of applewood-smoked bacon (at $8.99 a pound!) for one breakfast alone. I recalled with great affection the good old days, the mornings when he would eat a bowl of oatmeal. One boy, one pan. Now the stove needs a good scrubbing after each splattering batch of bacon and eggs, and I provide the elbow grease. (I may have neglected to mention that The Tall One is now 6 feet 4 inches tall and is thin as a rail…)
I am finalizing our Thanksgiving menu and shopping list, as I am sure you are. I’ve ordered the fresh turkey. Check. I have learned that there is a difference between stuffing and dressing : stuffing goes inside the bird, dressing is cooked in a dish for us salmonella-phobics. We have decided yes, we will have a multi-layered cake instead of our customary flourless chocolate cake – quite a departure for us. Green beans? Check. Potatoes? Check. We are well on our way to a normal, traditional Thanksgiving, the one day out of the year that we forget the Atkins Diet, calorie counting, and other moral constraints, and focus on a real family feast. Which I guess is an everyday meal to the Paleolithic Set, which consumes a global distribution of food daily.
I cannot imagine preparing enough food for 16 college-age eaters. This week’s Food Friday illustration shows you the Biblical proportions of the The Tall One’s first course last year. And since there is so much brown and beige on that plate, let me enumerate: 1 cubit of green beans, 1 mountain of mashed potatoes with a reservoir of gravy, a hectare of sliced turkey and retaining pool of gravy, 2 cubic feet of corn bread, 2 pillow-y crescent rolls dabbed with a furlong of butter and a generous outcropping of sausage and corn bread dressing. He proceeded to fill his plate again, and again, and then to fully partake in the dessert extravaganza that was the customary flourless chocolate cake. All was washed down with a hearty Belgian beer. Appetizers had also included many pigs-in-blankets, cheese and crackers and sausage cheeseballs left over from breakfast.
There is a good amount of comfort that is derived from the predictability of the same meal for every Thanksgiving, a quality that is reassuring year in and year out; the sameness that is a distinct contrast to the vagaries of our crazed day-to-day lives. At Thanksgiving we never step too far from our comfort zone, because we do enjoy it. Time is fleeting! The Tall One can have ham and turkey at his feast. We’ll have turkey and chocolate cake, and something tofu-y for the Pouting Pescatarian, at ours. Cheers! Happy Thanksgiving! Gobble, gobble! And a very Happy Hanukkah!
And if you would like to add a little drama to your holiday feast, here is a very instructional video about sabering your holiday Champagne…
https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/article/champagne-sabering-video
“Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.”
― Ann Brashares,
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