So many lovely Thanksgiving wishes. Here in France its hard to get the ingredients without a whole lot more work than Im willing to do, so I usually ignore Thanksgiving. But I do feel I should share with you my holiday feast instructions, developed through my years in New York, just in case youre not a real cook (like me): I like making thanksgiving dinner in the states. The way I do it its easier than making breakfast: 1. Buy a Turkey. Cook it. 2. Buy a couple of pkgs of good dried stuffing and drench it in butter. Put inside Turkey before you cook it. 3. Buy a can of sweet potatoes. Put in glass pyrex dish, bake until hot, sprinkle with brown sugar. 4. Buy a can of pumpkin pie mix. Also buy a ready-made pie crust (in all U.S. supermarkets). Put mix into crust and bake. 5. Buy a can of cranberry sauce. Open a both ends and slide on to a dish. Leave the dents and rings in the can-shaped cranberry form unless company is coming. It slices more easily. 6. Buy gravy mix. Add turkey juice at bottom of pan to it, as well as whatever else they tell you to add to it. Find a gravy boat at some thrift store, wash it and put the gravy in it, last thing. (Theres never enough. Just face it.) 7. Boil some regular potatoes. Make someone else (younger than you are) peel them and pound away with a potato masher. Add a little milk and some butter. Put in heavy old-fashioned bowl with a chipped rim. (The potatoes are for the gravy. You cant really put gravy on anything else. Except the dry white meat from the breast of the turkey but who eats that?) 8. If you must, boil some fresh peas. This is not easy. Theres no way to cook them the right amount of time. Hopefully no one will try to eat them. 9. Lets see, what did I forget? Oh, buy a big, unsliced loaf of black bread with raisins in it from Zabars. Put it on a wooden board with a cutting knife. Buy a pound of unsalted butter. Mash it into a small wooden bowl and add a cute little butter knife from that same thrift store. Everyone will think you got the bread from some ancient bakery in Brooklyn and bought the butter in bulk somehow. This is not part of any tradition, but no one will realize that. Theyll think they were ignorant before today. Answer no questions. I did this for my sons and their high school friends once. My kids thanked me so much and were so awed that everyone knew this family tradition happened rarely. Thats all. Incidentally, if you substitute a big ham (mostly cooked already), cover with wet brown sugar, then slice cross-hatches on the surface and stick cloves into the crossroads of the cross hatches, and if you buy cans of apple pie mix instead of pumpkin pie mix, you can serve everything else exactly as described for your Christmas feast. If your family is like mine, theyll be awed and grateful all over again. (If they know whats good for them.) You are welcome.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 12:52:04 +0000
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