Segullah » Thanksgiving

Thanks(giving) for the Memories

Linda — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 10:58:56 +0000

Our typical Thanksgiving dinner

On a recent flight, my daughter sat next to an actress affiliated with a Chicago based comedy troupe. The actress needed some ideas for an upcoming Thanksgiving sketch routine and asked my daughter if she had any funny family holiday meal stories. The story my daughter shared was one my husband and I have no memory of. She insists we were there. Clearly the scene made a vivid impression on her.

She was a teenager, and we were enjoying a delicious feast with my sister’s reserved family when for no reason my daughter could fathom, my husband started talking about beef testicles – their size, texture, cultures that eat them and how they’re prepared. For you Westerners, maybe this isn’t such an unusual topic (what with your famed Rocky Mountain Oysters), but we’re Midwesterners with a strong dash of New England in us. Then again, my husband is a person of broad and varied knowledge and knows how to sound certain about things. He insists that he currently knows nothing about beef testicles in general and their culinary possibilities in particular.

I do remember a few odd Thanksgiving vignettes. In the mid-1970’s I was eager to get from Boston back home to Chicago for Thanksgiving. I saw a posting for someone looking for other Chicago-bound students looking for riders in their car. Five of us – three of us complete strangers to the others – squeezed ourselves into a Volkswagen Beetle and drove 18 hours straight, making only occasional stops. At one stop in the middle of the night I ordered a cup of chili at the all-night rest stop restaurant and spooned up a gnarly chunk of gristle that I swear was hairy. By contrast that year’s Thanksgiving meal with my family was beyond fantastic. When the weekend was over, I flew back to Boston.

When Chris and I were first married we joined our friends to make a feast. Not being totally comfortable yet with cooking and kitchens we wondered why the half and half never became whipped cream. We also learned the indelible lesson of making sure to have the lid on the blender before you puree the pumpkin soup.

One year my Chicago clan joined us in Boston for Thanksgiving dinner at Plimoth Plantation. The plantation was interesting with its period costumed interpreters who never broke character, but the meal was uninspired traditional fair served by waiters in a modern building with bland walls. More compelling was a visit to the Wampanoag Homesite where we got quite a different take on the first Thanksgiving Day.

What fond or funny Thanksgiving memories do you have? And, while we still have a little time before grocery shopping, can you share a favorite recipe?

Here are two exquisite recipes my family has nearly every Thanksgiving. (They’re recipes for flatlanders. Adjust as needed for higher altitudes.) In the picture above, the Rice Pudding is in the large yellow pot and the Praline Squash is toward the back in the orange pot.

Elegant Rice Pudding

1 c. water
1/2 c. short or medium grain white rice
1/2 vanilla bean, split (Whole Foods carries them. You can order them – and practically any other spice in the world from The Spice House.)
1/4 tsp. salt
2 c. milk
1 c (1/2 pint) heavy cream
1/2 c. sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 c. dark seedless raisins or dried sour cherries
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon boiling water

1. In 2-quart saucepan, heat water to boiling. Add rice, vanilla bean, and salt. Cook 10 minutes.

2. Add milk and cook over very low heat until rice is tender – about 10 minutes.

3. Preheat oven to 350. Lightly butter 1 1/2 quart shallow baking dish.

4. In small bowl, combine cream, sugar and eggs; fold into rice mixture along with raisins or cherries. Remove vanilla bean and pour rice mixture into buttered baking dish. Sprinkle top of mixture evenly with cinnamon.

5. Place baking dish into a large baking pan in oven. Pour boiling water into baking pan to a depth of 1 inch. Bake 30-45 minutes or until pudding is firm and top surface is golden brown. Cool to room temperature on wire rack.

Serve at room temperature or refrigerate (covered) to serve chilled.

Praline Squash

2 packages winter squash, thawed
4 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon salt
a dash of pepper
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3 tablespoons soft butter
1/2 cup chopped pecans
• Combine 1st four items and cook over low heat until butter melted in.
• Add this mixture to the beaten eggs.
• Pour into a greased 1 quart casserole.
• In a separate dish, combine the remaining 4 ingredients and sprinkle on
the casserole.
• Bake at 350o for 30 minutes. (adjust for altitude)

You can also find my dad’s fabulous apple sausage stuffing recipe (and many other great food related essays and recipes by LDS authors) in my book Saints Well Seasoned: Musings on how food nourishes us – body heart and soul here literally for pennies! (Warning: there are typos in Camilla’s cinnamon rolls and Jan’s Red Jello.)

Come, Ye Thankful People, Come!

Michelle L. — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 15:25:35 +0000

Only the comforting drip of water disturbs the silence of this sleeping house. It is Thanksgiving morning and everyone is counting their blessings with an extra hour (or two) in bed. I imagine that my sister is awake upstairs reading her scriptures and whispering to her husband before he departs for his rounds at the hospital; the little girls may be dressing dolls or turning the pages of their fairy books. But the boys, the boys with their wrestling and jumping from bed to bed are most certainly still asleep.

I love this holiday where we pull up the covers to relish in our blessings rather than leap out of bed to get something new. I intend to savor every moment of this day with my family.

It was a twelve hour drive through miserable weather in a too-crowded car to my sister’s house, but yesterday as I watched our children chasing each other through the garden, building block towers, laughing and dancing in the kitchen as we rolled out thirteen pies (two pecan, three chocolate mousse, two apple, two cherry, two pumpkin, two Toll House)– I felt incredibly blessed. Perhaps my favorite hour of the day was when my my three middle boys, inspired by a hat I made on the drive, begged me to teach them to knit. My nieces donated large needles and skeins of yarn as we formed a massive knitting circle– knit one, purl two.

And so, today, I’d like to hear/read your favorite moment of the holiday. Please share a glimpse of your happiness. Together, let’s knit and weave a long, grateful list that will wrap us in the comfort of God’s blessings.

Peruvian Thanksgiving

Melissa M — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 08:00:58 +0000

November 21st, 1984. I’d been on my mission for fourteen months. I was working in Puno, high up on the Altiplano at 12,500 feet on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Besides Elder Moore—a culture shocked, baby-faced elder straight from the States whose sunburned nose was blistering in the altitude and whose stomach was in constant upheaval at its strange new diet—I was one of few North American missionaries in the area. I was training a greenie from Lima, Hermana Francia, who kept hijacking the discussion when it was my turn to teach and who balked at the chuno in our soup. We spent our days traipsing up and down steep dirt hills and stepping over sewage running down the muddy streets; and teaching impoverished families in one-room adobe huts with dirt floors, guinea pigs squealing under the beds and chickens wandering in and out. At night we wore thermals under our pajamas, as well as gloves, socks, and hats, and we curled under piles of blankets and listened to the thunderstorms raging over the hills. In the mornings the water in our tap was so cold that it left ice crystals in our hair when we washed it.

I’d just found out after weeks of bloating and pain that my amoebas were back. I also had a cold and hadn’t slept well in days. That morning our investigator, Marisa, had been too drunk after a late-night party to listen to our charla; and our golden family’s baptism, scheduled for the following Sunday, had fallen through during their baptismal interview that afternoon when Hermano Roque confessed that he and Hermana Roque weren’t actually married. As dusk settled over the city, Hermana Francia and I trudged home through a torrential rainstorm, lightning flashing all over the sky, arriving home with soaked shoes and icy fingers. At supper, I quarreled with our pension lady over the bread—she refused to give us the two rolls promised in our pension agreement–and I ended up blubbering into my warm milk.

And then I remembered: the next day was Thanksgiving.

The next morning, with our district leader’s permission, Hermana Francia and I walked to the outdoor market, where sheep heads and pigs’ feet and slabs of cow stomach hung on hooks, stray dogs sniffing in the dirt below. Women dressed in their traditional colorful skirts and bowler hats, with babies slung on their backs, sold us potatoes, cobs of corn, apples, yams, and two scrawny chickens, and we carried everything home in our netted shopping bags. After we borrowed dishes and utensils from our landlady’s kitchen, Hermana Francia showed me how to pluck the chickens and clean out their gizzards. We sent the elders—who were excited at the prospect of an American feast (especially poor Elder Moore)—to buy butter and cream and to scout out an oven, and they came back reporting that a bakery down the street had agreed to let us use theirs. All morning we worked in our makeshift kitchen, peeling potatoes, stuffing the chickens, candying the yams. Feeling brave and reckless, I made an apple pie without a recipe, guessing as I kneaded butter and sugar into flour and scattered sugar and cinnamon over thinly sliced apples. While we boiled the potatoes over a Bunsen burner on our little table, the elders ferried the chickens and the yams and the pie to the bakery and back—and the bakery oven was so hot that the pie cooked in just twenty minutes.

At 1:00 our district—four elders and two sisters—as well as the welfare sisters, sat down to a miraculous feast, spun out of thin air, it seemed, assembled with ingenuity and hope in a missionary sisters’ rented room. I thought Elder Moore was going to start weeping as he lifted a forkful of mashed potatoes to his mouth. He ate and ate and ate, murmuring, “Que delicioso” over and over. Elder Jara told silly jokes as we feasted, and we laughed and chattered and ate until our stomachs ached. I have to admit, that apple pie was—and continues to be—the best apple pie I’ve ever tasted.

That night, Hermana Francia and I visited the Roque family and we talked about getting started on the papers they would need to get married. In their little adobe house nestled in the hillside, we taught Hermano Roque’s mother, a little, leather-faced woman who only spoke Quechua, the first discussion by candlelight as Hermana Roque translated for us. The little abuela clasped our hands and told us, through her daughter-in-law, that she knew we were messengers from God. Afterward we had a lively family home evening with the Roque family, played games with the children and listened as Hermano Roque recounted Inca legends while the wind whipped around the house.

We walked home through the muddy streets, the city lights below misted with rain, the hills behind us black and wet. A llama’s bell tinkled somewhere on the hillside. I pulled my sweater tightly around me and smiled in the darkness.

It was the best Thanksgiving I had ever had.

What are some of your fondest Thanksgiving memories? Have you ever had a transcendent dining experience, a meal that you will never forget?

Praise to the Lord from Whom All Blessings Flow

Michelle L. — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:45:51 +0000

Life isn’t fair.

It isn’t fair that God created this full, beautiful earth and sent us here to love, laugh, learn, work play; to ache, mourn, fail, to go astray.

And it isn’t fair that God sent His Only Begotten to be whipped and scorned and crucified for our sins.

Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift. 2 Cor. 9:15

May your hearts and homes be blessed on this Thanksgiving Day.

Home for the Holidays: The Good Times Abound

Melissa M — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:23:05 +0000

I have a *friend* who, although she loves her family dearly, finds her stomach tightening and her left eye twitching when holidays and family gatherings approach. Perhaps it’s the added pressure of having to dust all those high shelves and wipe those fingerprints off of the walls (and cabinets and doors and chairs and floors). Perhaps it’s because even when she does clean the house until it’s spotless and she puts fresh towels on her mother’s bed and mints on the pillow, her mother will invariably mention that the guest bathroom has no soap or that there’s a shortage of cheese in the fridge (don’t ask). Perhaps it’s the thought of having to *entertain* family members in the dead of winter, after the actual holiday is over, when there’s nothing to do except shop at T.J. Maxx and watch football. Or perhaps it’s the knowledge that when family comes to town, there will inevitably be some tension. Unresolved issues. Elephants in the room, taking up all the chairs. And this *friend* will often have to bite her tongue as she slips into the age-old roles of daughter, sister, daughter-in-law (now that one’s a doozy), trying to balance these roles with her current ones as wife and matriarch, finding herself mother and child at once.

As a young married woman, this friend and her husband alternated between his home and hers for the holidays. She found her in-laws’ customs to be foreign and strange—really, who serves creamed spinach as a Thanksgiving dinner side dish? And why did her mother-in-law so obviously dislike her? Holidays with the in-laws left her feeling homesick and unmoored, but when she visited home she still felt out of place; she was a grown up now, with a husband (!), so different from her childhood self. Her husband complained he was cold, with the thermostat set at 62 degrees instead of the 74 he was used to. And her parents hardly spoke to each other anymore and her baby sisters were no longer little girls.

Several years later, after my friend and her husband had a couple of children of their own and her parents divorced, she started hosting holidays at her house, making the transition from daughter to mother. But how nervous she was the first time she roasted a turkey with her mother-in-law in the house! Who did she think she was, pretending to be a grown up woman? And how capricious that bird, taking four hours to roast in the cooking bag instead of two and a half. Now, however, after years of practice my friend turns out a pretty decent Thanksgiving dinner (so she tells me), especially since she discovered the secret of brining the turkey. And when, aproned and smiling, she carries the platter of melt-in-your-mouth turkey to the lace-covered table and places it before her hungry, admiring audience, she feels like a woman in her own right. The matriarch.

Unless one of her parents is visiting, in which case she feels like a fourteen-year-old girl again. Chalk it up to the age-old need to please and seemingly-set-in-stone family dynamics. One visit from her family and my friend reverts to the dependable, boorish eldest child. The example setter. Bossy Boots, as her siblings used to call her. She is the daughter who is serious and straight-laced, a little too churchy, who can’t help but feel that she isn’t as fun or funny as her younger sister—who is the family entertainer and comedian, the life of the party, and (my friend secretly believes) her mother’s favorite. Her sister, on the other hand, believes my friend is her father’s favorite, but my friend knows her father doesn’t have favorites—except maybe their brother, who is the only boy.

Suffice it to say, then, that my friend knows family gatherings on holidays can be tricky. Because families are complicated and messy and sometimes dysfunctional, though we love them to death. Add in stepparents, a couple of in-laws, some buried resentments and unaired grievances, and you’ve got yourself a party. My friend can hardly wait. And I’ve assured her that the twitch is barely noticeable.

Do you find family get togethers during the holidays stressful? What helps you cope? Do you slip into childhood roles when your family visits and if so, what role do you play? Do you take turns visiting your family/in-laws for Thanksgiving or do you host? And if you host Thanksgiving, who comes to your house and do you enjoy entertaining? And finally, do you brine the turkey?