I invite TWELVE people for Christmas dinner. We have exactly ONE small toaster oven, ONE wok burner, and .... well, that's about it. What the hell was I thinking! I wasn't, clearly. And, it didn't hit me (hard) until 2 pm, with everyone due to arrive at 4 pm. Even with the Thai total disregard for clock-time, I suddenly realized I was up the proverbial creek. Luckily, I had two paddles - my dear sister-in-law Nok and my equally dear friend Nong. They stepped up the usual Thai-mindfulness-pace and chopped the vegetables, arranged the flowers, and set the table (well, floor actually) in record time. My (dear) husband just kept saying - why didn't we do this yesterday? Good question. Particularly for a Thai person who never plans ahead. (It seems to be catching.)
Anyway, it all came off beautifully. With not a grain of rice in sight, my Thai family and friends cheerfully ate Waldorf salad, duck with cranberry-orange glaze, mashed potatoes (with a precious dollop of sour cream!), and carrot salad. A word on the carrot salad. We have here the most gorgeous fresh coconut and pineapple. Wow, what a carrot salad. We even had a respectable (bakery-made) apple pie for dessert. It was lovely, as you can see. (If you want to see more, click the More Pam's Pix link in a day or so.)
All of this holiday food wrangling reminded me of another story that I gave my family a couple of Thanksgivings ago. It's a turkey tale, and in my family turkey makes an appearance at both Thanksgiving and Christmas (when you've just barely choked down the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers). So, having made in through another Christmas weekend, I offer you a little tale about holidays past. Make that holiday repasts.
. . . . .
I love my family, but they are terrible cooks, every last one of them. And, their attention for dinner conversation is short. Holidays at home are always buffet served on Corelle from the Formica island in my aunt’s kitchen. The eating, because it is eating, rather than dining, is dispatched with quickly, so the day is mostly cooking and cleaning up with big doses of t.v. for added distraction.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my people. I love that total lack of pretension. Actually it is distain for pretension. And, I love the card games after dinner. Was a time that cards also meant cigarettes and whiskey, but those days are gone. Now it’s just cards. Competitive, chicks-only cards at the kitchen table. The young men sometimes get suckered into a hand or two, but the old guys know better.
I do have vivid memories of my grandmother preparing the Thanksgiving turkeys. The night before, a big store-bought frozen bird would get set down into the scrubbed stainless steel sink for an over-night soak. In the morning, early, the stuffing preparation would begin; because it takes all day to cook a turkey until the meat has fallen-off-the-bone, my grandmother’s doneness standard. I should clarify. Fallen-off-the-bone means, in fact, meat desiccated to the point that it shrinks away from the bones under a layer of whisper-thin, cracked skin. This solves any problem of the bacteria brewed in the over-night bath.
Stuffing pre-preparation actually began a week or so before, with the drying out of the bread. Sun Beam Bread set around on baking sheets and air-dried until slightly curled. You see, there was a desiccation theme. First thing Thanksgiving morning the cast aluminum meat grinder came out of its cardboard box and got clamped to the kitchen table. A big mixing bowl was set under it, and the bread and a couple of peeled raw onions brought to the table. And, now the fun part. In rapt attention with my nose right at the edge of the mixing bowl, I watched my grandmother turn dry bread into bread dust moistened with essence of ground onion. There was a fear factor which held my fascination. I’m sure I was warned against fingers in the hopper, yet she pushed and poked that dry bread and those wet onions dangerously close, it seemed to me, to that grinding mechanism. Sometimes I would turn the handle for her, and I loved the sound of the meat grinder chewing up that dusty bread. You could almost feel it scratching the back of your throat.
For flavor, my grandmother would sprinkle her stuffing dust sparingly with Bell’s Poultry Seasoning, the little yellow box with the turkey on the front. And, then the most graphic part of all. The bird was lifted from its bath, and with the back of a big spoon, my grandmother packed that stuffing dust into that bird, and I mean packed. Packed so tight, that many hours later at the table, she had to shave that stuffing out of that bird the way you shave hard ice cream out of its tub.
It was never my favorite part of dinner, the stuffing; but I loved to watch her make it. So, this year, as I plump organic raisins in Spanish port before making my dried fig and cranberry compote, I’ll remember all the wonderful lessons about the pitfalls of pretension that I learned from my family.
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