Thanksgiving

Cooking is one of my favorite things. I love to try new recipes. I love eating out and then coming home and trying to recreate what I have eaten. I love traveling the world and learning all the different ingredients and techniques used in different places. This is one of the most ardent passions of my life, the creation of good food.

However, I dislike cooking the Thanksgiving feast. I hate spending the entire day in the kitchen all alone and then sitting all stiff together at the table, eating, and then spending another hour or so cleaning up all alone again. I love the discovery part of learning to create all my favorite Thanksgiving dishes. I love adding, subtracting and finding the perfect combination of foods for my table. But, I get lonely.

This year it was just the four of us for Thanksgiving. I have accepted that we are never going to spend the day with either of our families and we have not lived here long enough to be close enough with anyone to share such an intimate holiday - so it is just us.

This year I decided to make my family help me cook the feast. At first I was hesitant because with the exception of Lily none of my family like to go in the kitchen for more than a drink out of the refrigerator. You should hear them complain about having to boil water to make instant Ramen noodles or to get one of them to wash dishes or even to rinse a plate is to have to endure the most unimaginable amount of complaining you can imagine. I am weak and usually just let them off the hook. But, this year I devised a plan.

I set up work stations for each person on the kitchen table. I gave them each a job. I gave them all the ingredients, tools and recipe necessary. There was a little bit of complaining, but eventually they started having fun. We started in the morning with the desserts. Jeff made the pumpkin pie. Mandy and Lily made the banana pudding. I stuffed the turkey. We were all together and working it was a lot of fun. I let them all leave while I cleaned the dishes and cleaned up the whirl win of work.

Next was the side dishes. A few hours later I had created work stations for the side dishes. I gave them each a job and we got all the side dishes ready to be cooked in less than an hour. I again had to clean everything up. Then I just had to do the finishing touches on the side dishes and dinner was served.

Lily and I had decorated the table together sometime during the intermission between the first work session and second work session. We even used a table cloth this year. I got it at a garage sale. We even ironed it. Lily and Jeff had picked oranges and lemons in our yard the day before and I used them to make a cute center piece. One of our trees was confused by a warm spell and had sprouted some pretty purple flowers, Lily and I picked a few and added that to the bowl of fruit. It felt really nice to have a bowl of pretty things from our yard in the middle of the table.

We have a small kitchen table and no dinning room or big fancy table. This year instead of having all the food on the table and passing it around as is tradition, we did a buffet in the kitchen and then brought our plate to the table. I enjoyed having the extra room at the table more than I enjoy the passing the food around. The family was very relaxed and the conversation was lively. I made sure to compliment everyone on the dishes they had created. They were all so proud. I think that the food turned out better this year than ever before. I think that it is easier for me to delegate than to keep track of all those details all by myself. This year was a mixture of tradition and new. I hope we can keep the whole family in the kitchen as a part of our Thanksgiving tradition because that was a lot of fun for me.

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving.