Thanksgiving traditons

[cactuswatcher]

borrowed from anneth
When I was still fairly young my father invested in a kitchen rotisserie. We went instantly from dry turkey every year to perfect turkey every year. It was so good we rarely had any meat but turkey for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. My mother's oven roast chicken was perfectly okay, but she frequently used the rotisserie for chicken at other times of the year. She had to be a little careful at Thanksgiving because there were turkeys in the stores larger than would fit in the rotisserie. I remember one year at Christmas the fit was pretty tight.

I never really liked cranberry sauce, but I tolerated it. It looked inviting out of the can. So when mother insisted we take a little of everything it wasn't a problem. I ate it, didn't love it. Wished the bright red juice would stop spreading under everything else on the plate. Years later my mother found a recipe for a cranberry-in-Jello salad with pecans and little marshmallows. 100% better. It was worth the mess to get out my mother's old-fashioned food grinder to smash the fresh cranberries. Everybody says that sauce from fresh cranberries is fine. But I'd take that salad any day. Mother always had a lettuce salad besides the cranberries. She started making a layered lettuce salad later on, with peas, cheese, bacon and Miracle Whip. It was good and we didn't have to mess with bottles of salad dressing on the overcrowded table.

We usually had green beans like everyone else. I didn't like fresh green beans as a kid, but Thanksgiving was safely into the canned green bean season. That is store-bought canned green beans. Home canned food was the source of endless arguments and hurt feelings at our house, but I don't think mother ever canned her own green beans. I wish that nasty soup & green-bean casserole would disappear from the face of the earth. I like all the ingredients just not smooshed together in a sloppy mess.

I was the only one in the family who didn't like sweet-potatoes or yams. Putting citrus juice and/or marshmallows on them was just the same as putting lipstick on a pig. It made the whole thing both ridiculous and disgusting at least for me. One year my mother forgot to buy sweet potatoes, so she had to make do with white potatoes, which we had probably 5 nights out of 7 my whole childhood. Nobody said a thing against them, and thankfully my mother quit buying sweet potatoes there after.

Thanksgiving dessert could be anything. I liked apple, pumpkin and pecan pie (I'm having pecan this year.) The rest of the family liked cherry best. It was my least favorite, but it was all right and we didn't have it very often. My mother experimented with pudding and odd mixed-fruit cobbler and a number of things at Thanksgiving. It was all good, but in general my father didn't like her experimenting when we might have guests, even theoretically might have guests. Fortunately she had experience with a lot of different things. We might have something like pineapple upside-down cake, but I think we had that more often for Christmas. We could not have desert without ice cream. Before the days of the availability of a zillion flavors all the time, vanilla was just fine with everything. I remember my brother liked pie and ice cream, but not ice cream on pie. At home he would ask for separate dishes, so he could have both, but not together. Maybe he didn't like the ice cream cooling the warm pie or the pie melting the ice cream, or both!

If we had guests there would be coffee, no one in our family ever drank the stuff except my father. He didn't ask for it unless we had guests. I guess the instructions with my mother's coffee percolator were good, because guests said her coffee was good.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it this week!

Comments

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Happy Thanksgiving to you!