Saturday, November 21, 2009

Thanksgiving...validated

Pie.

I love pie.

Apple.
Peach.
Blackberry.
Pumpkin.
Sawdust and White (trust me on these).
Pecan (puh-kahn, NOT pee-can. Sheesh.).
Not a big cherry fan.
Snickers or Oreo or Cookie.
O, dear...

However, if it's not my grandma's crust, I'm always leery of eating a piece. She makes the flakiest, mildest, bestest crust ever.

And I do mean EVER.

She can whip out pie filling from memory.
Her crust gets the recipe book out every time.

I will eat her crust raw. Whenever she was making it while I was there, after she'd put the top crust on, she'd trim the edge with a knife all the way around the pan. I'd eat myself sick on raw pie dough (there's no eggs in her crust - flour, salt, oil, and ?). I'm salivating just thinking of it.

Anyway...my mother-in-law's pie crust leaves loads to be desired. It's usually heavy and way over-salted. She doesn't use enough fillings, so her top crust always falls in. Tom used to love his mom's apple pie. Now? Not so much. Oh, he'll still eat a couple of pieces to make her happy, but he dreams about Grandma's crust as he's doing it. Mmmmm.

Pie...what comes before pie? The rest of dinner! - where have you been?

I love turkey. I prefer the white meat of turkey (but it's got to be dark meat on chicken. Why is that?). Grandma's always turns out moist. It's kind of sad, but his family's not really done many Thanksgivings together in the last couple of years, so we've gone to my grandparents' house. I'm going to miss the hell out of them this year. With turkey comes...

Dressing! You know how you're 'not supposed to cook the dressing in the bird? Hells with that! Grandma has for most of her married life, and we're all still happy and healthy. There's always two thermometers - one for the bird and one for the stuffing. I know that my grandma chops up the innards that come with the bird uberfine and puts them in the stuffing, but I try not to think about it.

Potatoes - regular white mashed and cut sweet, roasted in a butter/brown sugar glaze; none of this marshmallows charred to a crisp on the top of mashed (blergh). Yum.

Broccoli rice casserole - broccoli, rice (really? imagine that), cheezwhiz, onions, celery, mushrooms, cream of mushroom soup, and lots of butter.

Salads - green and jello (usually pineapple/cottage cheese in lime jello - it's awesome!)

Cranberry sauce - we've always been the 'jelly from a can' family. We can't help it.

Rolls - not homemade (there's too much other stuff to worry about bread).

Corn - from the garden that was put up to freeze.

And always pumpkin and pecan (puh-kahn not pee-can. Sheesh) pies. Never Cool Whip, always Heavy Whipping Cream that's had the fight taken out of it.

Now that I've talked about my favorite (only thing missing for me is green bean casserole - total yum) Thanksgiving dinner, I hope it's put you in the mood for yours.

Happy early Thanksgiving, Dear Readers.

Be safe out there, and heepwah.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Be safe out there.