Pass the prime rib and pasta
If it wasn’t for the turkey part, I would have enjoyed Thanksgiving a long time ago.
I can get into the spirit of the holiday. I have much to be thankful for after all. Like the fact that I can go to Prado at the Montelucia and order prime rib.
Or I can stay home and make a batch of the best spaghetti this side of my sainted grandmother’s kitchen. I just can’t make homemade pasta the way she could.
For you turkey farmers out there, don’t email me nasty notes. It isn’t that I am anti-turkey. I hate chicken, too. If it weren’t for quail, I would be anti-bird.
One Thanksgiving when I was a kid, 11 or 12 I think, I asked for hamburgers for our holiday meal. My mother pointed out that there would be a gazillion people over for dinner, and except for me, everyone liked turkey.
I said it was football they liked, and another word for a football was pigskin. So let’s have pork chops.
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I don’t remember what she said, but I think it had something to do with I couldn’t have the car for the prom. Which was 5 or 6 years in the future. My mom planned everything, even my punishment for being a smartass.
All the cookbook writers in the turkey-eating world can’t seem to make 12 pounds of Butterball edible. It either can’t be swallowed (affectionately known as White Meat) or can’t be eaten without a mouth full of sinew (Dark Meat).
So, as is often the case, it is the authors’ fault. An editor early in the writing process would have changed the title from 56 Ways to Cook the Big Bird to Pass the Prime Rib. Thanksgiving would finally be rid of that Pilgrim myth we are served every 365 days.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Please don’t drip spaghetti sauce on mom’s fancy white table cloth.
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Dale is a book editor and ghostwriter who has countless words sitting on his computer waiting for the money to publish. Have a book or a book idea? Email for a free consultation. [email protected]
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1 年I'm with you, Dale: I do not care for turkey. Unlike you, tho', I like chicken and pretty much all other fowl--except geese is too greasy, I find. But I'll go you one further: I don't care for Thanksgiving period. As a kid it was always stressful. For starters, years ago, I don't remember it being as warm as it seems this time of year nowadays. So I didn't care for going out in the cold. And then there was the stress of my parents getting all four (later, five) of us kids together to trek across Brooklyn from Park Slope to Bay Ridge to my grandmother's (my mother's mother) for the big dinner. In later years it got only worse for me. One year when I was living with a woman I'd barely met for a few months we had my parents over for Thanksgiving and broke up the next day. I told my parents after meeting them she decided that she and I were not a good match. (I did later assure them I was only goofing when I told them that.) A few years later, that woman and I met each other at a stopped traffic light, pulled over to speak, had coffee, and wound up picking it up again. I moved in with her again for about three years. We broke up once more tho', this time on Thanksgiving Day itself. So, yeah, I'm no fan of the holiday.