Thanksgiving Observed

I disagree with T. S. Eliot. April is not the cruelest month. February is. The days are cold, short, and gray. It seems as if spring will never come. The daily arrival of more seed catalogs feels like a mean-spirited joke.

Some years ago, I decided to fight back by having Thanksgiving Observed in February. I buy a turkey when they go on sale in November. When I’m tired of shifting the turkey around in the freezer to get at the food below it (typically in February), I invite some friends over and make a full Thanksgiving dinner.

I don’t find Thanksgiving dinner hard. Time consuming, yes. Hard, no. Any meal that revolves around a big piece of roasted meat is not hard. Meals that involve a lot of ingredients, measuring, mixing, fussing, and/or phyllo dough are hard. I started a week in advance by making a loaf of sourdough bread, cutting it into cubes, and drying it for the stuffing. I also defrosted the turkey. Perhaps my biggest intellectual breakthrough regarding Thanksgiving dinner was the discovery that it takes pretty much a whole week to defrost a turkey in the refrigerator. They say three days. HA! That’s a guarantee that you will find yourself the morning of with a big ol’ frozen block-o-bird. A fully defrosted turkey is the key to getting the darned thing done on the schedule described in the recipe.

I had quite a day Friday. I am going to miss a lecture in a couple of weeks because I am going to a conference. Thus, I taped the lecture Friday morning. I fooled around some with trying to insert some prepared videos from the textbook into my video. Not only was I not successful in doing so, I also screwed up the editing software somehow so that when I played back my video—which had taken two hours to edit, BTW—the quality was horrible. The original recording was still okay, praise be, but I had to edit it all over again, which was frustrating.

At the end of all that, it was nice to go to the kitchen and cook. I sautéed the onions, celery, mushrooms, thyme, sage, and rosemary for the stuffing. I made the pie crust and the cranberry sauce. I showed the cranberry sauce to Terry and told him that if I found it in the refrigerator Sunday morning, I was going to be mad. He assured me that he would remember. The back story to this is that years ago, Terry had wished through the entire Thanksgiving meal that there had been cranberry sauce, but had been too polite or too afraid to mention it. The cranberry sauce had been in the refrigerator the entire time.

Saturday morning, I baked the pumpkin pie and mixed up the stuffing. 

Pumpkin pie with pecans for treats at the end.

About noon, I got the turkey out of the refrigerator to warm up a little. Following Ina Garten’s recipe, I put salt and pepper in the cavity and stuffed it with garlic, onion, and thyme (Ina uses a lemon too, but I didn’t have one). I brushed the outside with butter and sprinkled it with more salt and pepper. How easy is that? Into the oven at 1:45. I roasted it back-side-up for the first hour and a half, then flipped it for the last half of the cooking until the breast meat was at 165°F. It was perfect.

A lovely turkey

Meanwhile, Hilda made mashed potatoes and corn casserole. I whipped the cream for the pumpkin pie. Jane came early to make gravy from the pan drippings, as I am gravy-challenged.

The rest of the guests arrived. We had a fabulous dinner, if I say so myself. We played one game of Farkle before dessert and rounds 12 through 5 of Mexican Train after. It was one of those magical evenings when we were all in just the right sort of good mood to relax and enjoy ourselves. We talked about books. I got to recite poetry (“archy interviews a pharaoh” by Don Marquis). There were frequent bursts of song and much, much laughter.

To give just one example, when it was Hilda’s turn at Mexican Train, she needed a seven. She looked at her tiles and said, “I don’t have one.”

Nancy, who was seated next to her, said, “Yes, you do.”

Hilda: “Cheater! You peeked!” And we all cracked up.

There were 8 of us at the table until 9:30 having a great time. Throughout it all, there was not a single electronic device in sight. Just saying.

And today the winter blues don’t seem so bad.