The parsley rant is a loving shout-out to my sister-in-law. Some content sourced from the Delish article, “50 Traditional Dishes You Need For The Ultimate Thanksgiving Menu” (mince pie is conspicuously absent from the list). Thanksgiving deserves its own “dishes”… and it’s own season. Is it because the Thanksgiving season is special, and you don’t want to dilute the magic by having your favorites year-round? Yes, I think that’s the reason. Your Thanksgiving dinner will no doubt include a favorite “dish” or two this season (glass? metal?) which should also make you wonder why you don’t eat it more often. But if you ask me, she’s missing out on the real dessert. The spiked whipped cream is so good my wife skips the pie and has a dollop of the sauce instead. And don’t forget to soften the blow with a little brandied hard sauce on top. It’s like pecan pie – or concrete – only ten times as dense. The result is a pie that is scrumptious in some books (mine) and a veritable construction material in others (everyone else’s). Mincemeat pie really did include meat back when the Pilgrims were celebrating Thanksgiving with swans and seals, but eventually someone (who deserves a medal) thought to remove the meat and add a whole lot of sugar to the chopped dried fruit, distilled spirits, and Thanksgiving spices. We conclude my favorites with the most underappreciated, over-carb’d dessert of them all. The relevance of parsley to the Thanksgiving meal (and to any “dish” for that matter) remains a mystery. Parsley is transported from wherever it invaded your plate (and what the heck is it doing in my wife’s stuffing, anyway?) to your bread plate, where it lays until its ultimate demise. Speaking of garnishes, can we all agree parsley is the perfect example of one? Yes, you’re adding color to the plate, but don’t you always wonder what you’re supposed to do with those little green trees? Just like the colorful toothpicks you sometimes find holding your sandwich together, parsley is the first thing you remove (at least cranberry sauce rides out the plate for the entire meal). Turkey seems to acknowledge cranberry sauce as a garnish at best: something ornamental instead of “food”. I think cranberry sauce was created to brighten an otherwise autumn-colored “dish”. How many people really make the perfect Thanksgiving “bite” – a combo of turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce? Not many. Is there a more wasted food on earth than cranberry sauce? Seriously, this poor little enhancement sees the light of day only once a year, where it sits on your plate for the length of the meal before being scraped mercilessly into the kitchen trash. Forget the turkey… if a food ever deserved to be called “main course” it’s my wife’s stuffing recipe.Ĭranberry sauce. It ends with a ton of seasonings and spices, including sage and something called “parsley” (more on that later). It starts with ground sirloin and pork sausage and a whole lot of butter. You could hibernate for an entire holiday season on my wife’s stuffing recipe. I’d ignore it or push it around a little but most of this autumn pillow fluff never made it onto my fork. Stuffing used to be that little pile of gently-spiced spongy material sitting benignly aside your helping of turkey. Okay so I made that up, but I find it funny when a food that is “inside” by definition was never, ever inside. Nine out of ten Thanksgiving stuffing recipes never made it into the bird in the first place. Here are my three favorite Thanksgiving dishes for your consideration: In fact, the better question is, if your Thanksgiving “dish” is a “favorite” then why don’t you serve it all year round? Have a favorite dish at Thanksgiving? Of course you do everybody does. Well, yes, I do, but somehow we’ve stretched the definition of “any container used at the table” to also mean what’s in or on that container. Are yours made of pottery, wood, metal, or glass? Oh, you thought I meant food. Let’s talk about Thanksgiving dishes today. Am I losing the battle of the Thanksgiving season with a full week still to go? Maybe I need a different tack with my campaign. Finally, we’re seeing strings of colored lights and decorations on houses already. Then we stopped by Chick-fil-A and my wife asked if they had their Peppermint Chip milkshake, which of course they did because it’s “Christmas season”. For heaven’s sake it’s not even November 25th, people. Earlier this week the first Christmas card arrived in the mail.
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