Don't mess with Thanksgiving

I love Thanksgiving. I love it so much. I love it because (a) I’m a wannabe foodie and no other holiday is all about food, and (b) it’s not all sentimentalized and commercialized like Christmas. I feel sorry for people who haven’t learned to savor Thanksgiving, but instead whip out their Christmas decorations the moment the Thanksgiving dinner table is cleared. I think Thanksgiving should be a multi-day holiday. At the very least, there should be a Thanksgiving Eve. My dream is to become the king of Thanksgiving. Someday I hope to be serving up legendary Thanksgiving feasts that people talk about for months after. I want people to leave my Thanksgivings thinking “Christmas? Eh.” That is my dream.

I’ve cooked, let’s see, at least 7-8 Thanksgiving dinners. Each year I improve a little bit, and I thought I’d pass on a few simple tips to any of my many readers who might be cooking dinner this year for family or friends.

1. Brine your turkey. It’s easy and it virtually guarantees that your bird will turn out great. And if you don’t brine, at least try using an oven bag if you haven’t already. Oh, and please cook a fresh turkey instead of a frozen one. That’s a no brainer.
2. Don’t bother to stuff the turkey with stuffing. It doesn’t really add any flavor to the stuffing and it’s kind of a salmonella risk. Just cook all the stuffing in a baking dish. It’ll be great.
3. Make your cranberry sauce from fresh or frozen cranberries instead of using canned cranberry sauce. Just buy the Ocean Spray cranberries in the bag and follow the recipe on the package. It is very simple and much, much better than canned. Also, you need to be eating cranberry sauce on your turkey if you aren’t already. I grew up not touching it because I thought it was some sort of quasi-Jello salad, and I think my family still suspects that it is even though I try every year to get them to put the cranberry sauce on their turkey when they eat it.
4. Press a thin layer of pulverized store-bought ginger snaps into the bottom of the pumpkin pie crust before adding the filling. It helps keep the crust from getting soggy as it bakes.
5. Two new tips I’m trying this year: keeping the mashed potatoes warm in a slow cooker (set to low) as I prepare the other dishes and using a thermos-style coffee carafe to keep the gravy warm on the table.
6. Be sure to have an indulgent but not overly filling breakfast (don’t ruin your appetite for later), like a chocolate-chocolate chip muffin or a big cinnamon roll. Remember, Thanksgiving is one of only four days during the year when you can eat whatever you want without any reservations at all, so take advantage of it. The other days are: your birthday, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve.
7. Finally, with Thanksgiving just 13 days away, you need to get some buzz going about your feast if you haven't already.
   

Old School P.E.

The starkest sign of a generation gap between me and, say, my youngest sister (she’s 25, I’m 36) is my experience of junior high P.E. versus hers. I’m surprised I’m not a Nevernude after junior high P.E. Our facilities and “Coach” were both straight out of the 50s. We had to wear uniforms (white t-shirts with navy trim, navy polyester shorts), of course, and we spent all kinds of time “crabwalking” up and down the gym floor and hucking medicine balls to each other. And, we were warned, if any of us got out of line, Coach Nichols would deliver a swift, size 13 kick in the butt. Sound bad? It gets much, much worse. Every Monday was swim day. And that meant we all had to strip down, shower up (communal showers, of course), and line up naked in the showers waiting for Coach to hand out these hideously ill-fitting brown trunks that we had to wear. I’ll never understand why we couldn’t wear our own suits. Don’t forget—this was junior high, so there was a nice mix of pre- and post-pubescence going on, just to add another layer of misery. My youngest sister, on the other hand, took aerobics in junior high. And no uniforms.

Twenty-three years later, I thought I’d left the Middle Ages of P.E. behind, but now I’ve gone back in time. My university has a completely decrepit gym and locker room but I got a faculty locker anyway so I could go lift weights on MWF. Going in there gives me serious flashbacks, but the worst is, one day I showed up and this dude, probably 30 years old, big, African American, totally dressed in street clothes, was just hanging out on the locker room bench, four feet down from my locker, leaning back against the wall and marking up some article he was reading while he munched on Fritos from his backpack. He wasn’t going anywhere, so I reached back to junior high, swallowed my modesty, and stripped down to change. It was seriously unnerving. Then two weeks later he was back!! I don’t get it. If he shows up again, I think I need to confront him, even if it means getting a size 13 kick in the butt.

Car talk

I trusted my mechanic Hasaan. My theory was, since 9/11 and the subsequent stigma of being Arab (not from me of course—I’m a sensitive, New Age guy), he would never ever screw any of his customers over because that would be it for him. So when it came time for my 100,000 mile tune-up, right before my 3,000 mile drive from DC to San Fran in August, I happily headed down to Hasaan’s shop only to find that he had been bought out by the Guatemalans! My mind raced. Can I trust these guys? Let me do a quick mental check of my racial stereotypes for any useful information. Just kidding. (Maybe.) I took the plunge. $900 and four new tires later, I was rolling home in my little Mazda wondering if I just got screwed. At least they didn’t tell me I needed a new Johnson Rod. (Carly, that Seinfeld reference is for you and you better get it or I’ll be disappointed.) They fixed my car’s long-standing stalling-out problem by jacking the idle speed up to 2,000 rpms. So now when I pulled up to a red light, everyone thought “Take your foot off the gas when you push in the clutch, moron.” But I thought everything was cool with my car, basically.

Four weeks after I got to San Fran, I finally got around to getting my car registered, or, I should say, making my first attempt at registering my car. As I write this six weeks later, I’m still driving around with Virginia plates. My first stop: Speedy Lube for my requisite Smog Check. “You’re idle is way too high. We reset it and now you have to drive for a week so your car’s ‘puter can gather more emissions data.” A week later, I stop by Speedy again. My car has zero emissions data stored after a week of driving. My soon-to-be-bud Lewis takes me aside in the waiting room: “Take a nice long drive down the Peninsula, then up into the hills over by the ocean. Then come back and we’ll check the ‘puter.” I do as I’m told. Still no data. Lewis connects his monitor under my dashboard, hops in the passenger seat, and we’re off for another drive. Along the way, Lewis informs me that California is great if you’re gay or an avocado. Hahahahaha. Oh, and still no data. I get to go back into the garage with my new bud and watch as he sprays carb cleaner all over the engine while it idles and thus discovers that I have a vacuum leak.

So it’s off to the Mazda dealership because only they can fix it. And now I have a new friend: Pine the Samoan. Two weeks ago he hooked up the smoke machine to my engine and we both watched together as wisps of smoke leaked out of my faulty “resonance chamber.” Parts and labor: $275. But the part had to be special ordered and now, two weeks later, I’m sitting in the dealership waiting room at 7:00 a.m. listening to Michael McDonald on the radio as they install my brand new resonance chamber. Will I be able to pass my Smog Check now? I doubt it. But I’m treating myself to a chocolate-chocolate chip muffin later and I’ll raise my milk to toast the friends I’ve made along the way: Hasaan, that one Guatemalan guy, Lewis, and Pine. Don’t spend all my money in one place, guys.

So it’s come to this

Inspired by the likes of Marcy, Carly, Kacy, and Christian, I’m throwing my hat into the blog ring. Think of my blog as a place to go to cleanse your palate between visits to other, more amusing blogs. Like when people at wine tastings munch a saltine before moving on to a new wine, or so I heard once.

A question to start things off: If you hail from Utah or southeastern Idaho, how do you pronounce the word warm? Because I just found out that I’ve been saying it like a Utah hick* for my whole life (no offense if you say it like me). And I have tried so hard to rid myself of all my Utonics. The worst part is, I can’t imagine saying it any other way and don’t think I’ll ever change. Apparently I have 19th-century St. Louis-ians to thank for it.

*The way I (and other hicks) say it rhymes with arm. If you say it like war with an m, you’re doing fine--enjoy being a non-hick.