It was so apparent to me that moving our Thanksgiving gathering to the Sunday following Thanksgiving was the “right” thing to do. I felt the decision deep in my soul and wasn’t surprised when things lined up perfectly. The icing on the cake came when I learned that dear friends would be in town that weekend and had accepted my invitation to join our family around the table. The blessings and bonuses were adding up and my anticipation of good times to come was hampered only by a familiar gnawing in the pit of my stomach (likely place for such a feeling!) that I couldn’t pull off a good meal. Cooking isn’t something that comes particularly naturally to me.
The day before the event, I began to make the things I could do ahead of time, among them the no-bake cookies the kids love. Done right, I am able to pack up individual fudge-like cookies into little boxes that the kids can take home. This time there were no individual cookies at all, but rather one heavy glob of a sugary mass that would affectionately become known as “no-bake sludge”. I hoped this cookie flop was not a telltale sign of things to come.
On the morning of the big event, I arose earlier than everyone else and began making the rolls. As the mixer labored to knead my bread mixture I thought about a conversation I had had the night before with one of the friends who would be eating with us. She had said that one of the most difficult things she had to give up when she got a divorce was their huge family Thanksgiving gathering and the blessing of many hands in the kitchen. She spoke of how deeply satisfying it was to help cook. Now I laid that thought over top of another: my mother’s idea that the perfect gathering was when none of her guests had to lift a finger to help her. Having carried all these years my mother’s idea of what it means to be the perfect hostess, it would never have occurred to me to ask my guest to help prepare the meal. Yet in a sudden epiphany, I realized that was exactly what I needed to do.
Soon my husband and our guests were sitting around the table having coffee while I stood over the mixer and shared my epiphany asking my guest if she would indeed like to help me with the meal. She seemed deeply grateful and in perfect chorus, so was I. I was now looking forward to the rest of the cooking.
But the mixer, age old and very faithful…up until now, began making a strange noise. Rather than overburden it with all the flour the recipe calls for, I decided to finish the dough by hand. I spilled the dough onto the counter and watched as it amoeba-ed all over the place and threatened to pour onto the floor. As I tried to corral the stuff, I lifted my hands from the sticky glob but they remained firmly attached by multiple stands of dough. I was stuck and the three at the table began laughing at my predicament. Finally my husband came and dumped as much flour into the mix as it took to free me and return the dough to some semblance of actual bread. I formed the dough into rolls and left them to rise.
Meanwhile, I asked my guest if she would like to make the gravy, something I have always chickened out of. She laughed and related the story of her own gravy-making woes, particularly recently when her gravy ended up as a one-unit entity, or, yes, a glob. But she said she’d try once the bird was finished cooking.
The bird. It was time to dress our fresh bird with the “liberal amount of salt” it called for. I asked my husband for help and the next time I looked, the bird appeared to have been snowed on. It looked like way too much salt but we popped the thoroughly plastered poultry in the oven. I had numerous things to work on while the bird cooked but was not too distracted to notice the wonderful aroma of baking turkey wafting through the house a couple hours later. Excited to see a nicely browning bird, I decided to peek under the enamel dome and found to my dismay that half the drumstick meat had all but melted right off the poor bird. I hastily pulled it out, thinking that leaving the stuffing out of the bird had made it cook awfully quickly. But as I reached to reset the oven temperature for the next food item, I realized with horror that I had forgotten to turn the heat back after the first 45 minutes of browning.
With the bird out, the gravy could be made. My guest siphoned out the sumptuous looking juices from under the bird and began her gravy making. When she was done, it looked like gravy, and acted like gravy and she was very pleased with herself. Until she tasted it. She hadn’t known that the bird had been salted within an inch of its poor life and neither my husband nor I had given any thought to where all that salt would wind up. The poor woman nearly gagged on the saline-saturated gravy she’d just made.
By this time the meal, such as it was, was ready. The table was decorative, the food all looked edible and none of the cooks mentioned the various kitchen fiascos as we gathered to give thanks and eat. I even tried to be thankful for dry turkey, super-salted gravy and bread that tasted like spoonfuls of dry flour straight from the canister.
It was a lesson in humility to simply say “thank you” to the many compliments from the other nine around the table. Inwardly, I wondered how they could be so gracious. But as I ate, listening to the thoughts and banter of those I love I slowly began to realize that the food, tasty or not, was not the purveyor of blessing as I had been taught to believe. By the end of that day, as I lay in bed, recounting the hours spent, I could see clearly that the blessings had added up to a glob more than the fiascos.
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