Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-11-20 - 9:23 a.m.

Crackers! Eat The Crackers!

I'm hoarding food for Thanksgiving.

That's weird. "Don't touch that, that's for Thursday!" Like I'm not going back to the store between now and then. Like I couldn't buy more lettuce.

I must be channeling the pilgrim thing again. They saved up for their feast. "No! No yams today, they're for Squanto!" I don't know. Something about having a third of my refrigerator inhabited by a giant dead bird makes me all food-weird and stuff. I don't even want to think about what we're eating in the next few days. It's all about Thursday. Can't they WAIT to eat? Jesus.

"There's cottage cheese. Eat that. That's not for Squanto." But the kids have their eyes on that loaf of white bread. They've never seen white loaf bread in this house. "No! That's not bread! That's bulk stuffing. Leave it alone!"

Okay, stuffing is strange. The IDEA of stuffing is strange. I know Pilgrims didn't invent it, but I still have an image of this deranged Pilgrim woman with a bunch of stale bread, eyeing that turkey's ass. I'm just not that creative. I could have invented the turkey sandwich, but ripping the bread up and putting it - no, that's beyond me. I had to be shown about that.

My kids won't eat stuffing. Fine; more for me. I don't know what their problem is. They like ripping up the bread, but then they watched me do my Woody Allen Turkey Stuffing Routine: "Hey! At least you could've WASHED before you came in!" and suddenly they aren't so interested in stuffing. Wimps.

The produce guy at the store today had a good laugh. When I told my older kid I was looking for the cranberries and she said, "It's not going to be homemade this year, is it?" I heard him smother a guffaw. I said I'd buy her some canned stuff too. Then we had the same conversation about applesauce. "You're not making it out of apples, are you?" Yep, Squanto, I am. And you should see where I'm planning on stuffing it.

I did ask the kids to pick a side dish for the meal so that they'd have something they know they'd enjoy. Older daughter considered carefully and chose spinach dip with french bread for an appetizer. Younger child considered and said hopefully, "Pizza?"

So I've got seventeen pounds of dead bird, and it's a very small crowd this year. But Thanksgiving is about too much to eat, right? "Hey, I'm grateful I can eat too much ANY TIME I WANT!" Except the Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Put that BACK.

I will boil the carcass afterwards because that's what good thrifty domestic types do, and I am all that. Boil the hell out of it, and then strain the broth and burn my fingers picking out the turkey meat and returning it to the broth and using every damn empty margarine container in the cabinet freezing neatly labeled "Turkey Broth, 11/01". Then I'll clean out the fridge next summer and toss all that freakin' useless turkey broth that's taking up all the space which I need for frozen pizza, coffee beans, blueberry waffles - USEFUL food. I ought to keep it a year so we'd have something to eat with our cottage cheese before next Thanksgiving.

There's a lot of abundance in my life; not everything, but a lot. There's a lot of freakin' food in that refrigerator right now, and I am planning on being grateful for all of it right up until Thursday morning, so don't go thinking you can eat it or anything. It all fits carefully into my tightly controlled "Oh Christ! I'm out of SAGE! How could anybody run out of sage?" plan of having a beautifully orchestrated Martha Stewart type Thanksgiving day, complete with children in hobnail boots and some quiet guy in a loincloth scarfing yams.

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