Thanksgiving: The Pressure Cooker of Holidays

Experts opine that Christmas is stressful. All the decorating. The wasted money buying useless stuff for your obligation list of people you don’t like and never see. Suicides rise, families with normally good relationships… fighting like monkeys slinging poo. But if you ask me, Thanksgiving is a compressed version of that. Focused solely on a meal.

But it’s THE meal. The granddaddy. The big pilgrim. Or maybe it just seems that way to me. For those of us who are cooking-challenged, Thanksgiving is our Everest— without a Sherpa guide. An adrenaline rush, sweat-on-your-brow marathon. It’s smoke-filled kitchens and alarms going off. And that’s just for my pumpkin bread.

The stint in hell commences at 7 am. ETA: 2 hours to the not to be missed Macy’s parade. Goal: Turkey in the oven– still full of promise in it’s dewy, solution-injected, naked glory. Too early in the day for it to be the smoldering ruin it may become. Pumpkin bread cooling on the rack, (along with the second string coffeecake in the event of pumpkin tragedy). The family ready to plop in front of the television for three glorious hours of channel surfing for the best parade angles. 

For a quarter century, my Thanksgivingpalooza goal of butt in chair by 9 am has worked. Until last year. For the cooking-challenged ( a recognized disability), multi-tasking becomes difficult. Great chefs remind me of chess players. They’re always three moves ahead. This is not me.

Last year, The turkey was in the oven by the aforementioned deadline. A little cocky, I leisurely sipped coffee as I prepped my pumpkin bread batter. Smug smile on my face, I did not recognize this arrogance as a premonition of doom. Bread in the oven by 8:15, I began humming (off-key) as I prepared the rest of breakfast, not knowing I had just set disaster in motion.   

By 8:45, aromatic spice of baking pumpkin drifting through the house, I was congratulating myself. After 25 years, I OWNED this. I was Martha Stewart’s sarcastic, inept second cousin. Until the smoke alarms started blaring. Bemused, I wander to the oven. Because what the hell could possibly be burning this early? 

Our turkey in better days.

Alas, I’d forgotten that on Thanksgiving morning only– I have to cram everything on the bottom rack of the oven. My beautiful pumpkin bread– on the top rack, had risen into the oven coil and had begun the ignition process. At T minus thirty seconds until inferno, arrogance had been replaced by lump-in-my-throat fear of actual fire. I jerked the pan from the coil. Of course, the incinerated part stuck to the coil, causing a wave of glorious pumpkin batter to slosh over the side of the pan . . . onto the turkey roasting below.

That year, my pumpkin bread looked as though someone had performed surgery midway through baking. By the parade’s first commercial break, our second-string coffeecake was called off the bench to enter play. But the best part of that day? After the smoke cleared (literally) and the smoke detectors quieted– later in the day when I removed the turkey from the oven, we discovered it blanketed with a crusty orange sweater. We found another large, toasted pumpkin crouton inside the bird. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen Pumpkin-Sweater Turkey on Top Chef. Feel free to try it yourself this year. Me? I think I’ll take a pass.

In some families, parents pay kids for chores.

Good grades. Athletic ability. Kindness to a particularly annoying sibling. Or for a job well done. Sometimes, it’s a flat out bribe. “Please take the dead mouse out to the trash,” shrieked while perched on top of a chair and hubs was away on business. For the record – the price escalated to thirty bucks before I had any takers that night. 

Confident parents can readily admit the effectiveness of bribery in an overall child-rearing plan. In our house, we instituted a policy of remuneration (and antacid tablets) for the willingness to try foods that might end up being digestively unpleasant. Inadvertently unpleasant. It’s not as though I set out to torture them. Except that one time involving quinoa.  

Hence, the rule of five bucks for five bites. My girls could refuse the money. And the dinner. Peanut butter was readily available– purchased by the case. But accepting the challenge– the culinary odyssey of the evening –– meant going the distance. Five bites. No less. Healthy bites, not nibbles. No show of fear when the meatloaf oozed. No panicking when the appetizer round involved a fire extinguisher. Power through was our motto. Wimps need not apply.  

My intentions: create an edible dish. But edible is such a subjective term. After two decades doling out fivers equal to at least a year of in-state tuition, my girls survived their childhood. Through a genetic miracle or the serious possibility they were switched at birth, they can actually cook now as adults!

In hindsight, I can safely confirm that little things matter. Details– like measuring. That danger lurks in the false sense of bravado one feels when the recipe is ‘easy’. A dash of spice that probably shouldn’t be there. Me thinking– what if it turns out GREAT? After two decades, I’m here to confirm– it won’t. In the meantime, a little bribery never killed anyone. At least not at our house.   

Is consistency possible?

The beloved Big Mac I scarf down in Times Square (with no guilt, I might add) will taste virtually the same as the  one I ate in Italy (try not to judge) a few years ago. Okay – sidebar on the Big Mac in Pisa – my gastronomic tour of Italy was suspended for one meal the afternoon we visited Pisa. Turns out restrooms in Pisa left much to be desired. As a trade-off for the use of a restroom more aligned to my personal comfort zone, I was forced to indulge in the deeply satisfying, though not at all authentic cuisine I could have otherwise discovered. The reason? A super secret lavatory password could only be found on a receipt. That one time I happily traded gastronomy for convenience. 

Back to the consistency question. Is replication possible? In my kitchen, the answer is an emphatic ‘no’. Sadly, the rare happy accidents that result in something delicious (approximate frequency = a Yeti sighting), are typically (okay– never) replicated. Take my scrambled eggs. I love to make eggs. But there are so many ways to go wrong. A splash too much milk. Not enough cheddar. Too much pepper. Too little salt. And that time I started yakking to my daughters’ friends while preparing said eggs. Completely unaware the pan had overheated. Before my beautiful, cheesy eggs ever hit the pan, they were destined to become the smoky, inedible mess I unknowingly served.

Luckily for the girls that day, I am a seasoned veteran of the Burning Meals Rodeo. I’ve been thrown from this horse before. I’d bought a coffee cake to go with my eggs. After one bite of smoldering eggs, the coffee cake was attacked with a ferocity I’d only seen on a National Geographic special about wolverines. Coffee cake and polite smiles. And those pained expressions I’ve grown accustomed to that say ‘we need to hit the drive thru once we leave this house’.

Something I am consistently good at in the kitchen? A backup plan. Which usually results in a Big Mac.