... And Stuff It!

Halloween decorations are going up in my neighborhood. You know what that means, right?

Yep, you guessed it! It’s time for Auntie to finish planning the Thanksgiving menu. I say “finish” because I begin to build it around May or June. At the moment, it begins with wild mushroom soup and ends with pecan pie, or maybe cherry. Unless I attempt a meringue. I’m not trying to make a perfect meal, I just want to make the best meal of the year.

Besides, I always identify with the mastermind. It’s a control freak thing.

All of which reminds me of a funny honest-to-real story about the very first Thanksgiving dinner I ever cooked.

This was in another century, in another town, in what amounts to another life.

Once upon a time, Auntie was very new to the whole cooking thing. Moreover, it was my first time feeding my extended family. I wanted to do it right. I baked the cornbread for the cornbread & sausage stuffing and went to the best French bakery I knew to get sourdough for the oyster stuffing. I studied how to cook turkeys. I made delicious hors d’oeuvres. I did end up buying the pies, though I make my own now.

You get the idea.

Of course the garbage disposal broke when I began to cook at 6:00 a.m., but that’s not the funny part. Okay, it’s kinda funny. I invited the plumber to dinner but he declined.

I’ll spare you embarrassing family-member stories. You have your own and they’re probably about the same.

In the end, dinner went about as well as can be expected. (See above about embarrassing family members.) The food came out fine. Everyone ate a lot and seemed to like it.

I really should have left it at that. Of course I didn’t. Remember, I was a typically needy 20-something at the time.

So the next day I asked my father what he thought of the meal. He’d eaten so much he couldn’t sit up and had to sack out on the couch. I thought priming him for a compliment wasn’t that much of a gamble.

I thought wrong.

He told me if I ever tried it again, I should get my grandmother’s recipe for stuffing.

That was all he said on the subject.

Years went by. Eventually, when I did decide to try it all again, I dutifully asked my grandmother for her stuffing recipe. I’ll give it to you right now, in its entirety:

Mrs. Cubbison’s. Sometimes with a bit of chopped carrot.

FYI, that’s the funny part.