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The ultimate unforgettable Thanksgiving!

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 14:00:00 +0000

If you’re a Thanksgiving host you’re probably nervous -- and understandably so. After all, your friends and family are all counting on YOU to make sure they enjoy the all-American feast.

That's why we've put together a plan to ensure that your holiday extravaganza will also be a memorable one.

First, invite your family to Thanksgiving with this invitation:

You'll want to impress them, so plan ahead with some recipes from highly regarded restaurateur Guy Fieri:

On Thanksgiving Day, serve them this bacon-wrapped turkey:

Or this one, "brined in Dunkin’ Donuts coolattas, stuffed with munchkins and served with coffee gravy and mashed hash browns":

Our Thanksgiving of discord

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 22:01:00 +0000

I was 6 when my parents negotiated their custody agreement: My father would get us on weekends, but my mother wanted us for Jewish holidays. Fine, said my father. But I get them for American holidays. Fine, my mother said. I like to imagine she smirked when my father looked at a calendar and realized the only American holiday Jews really celebrate is Thanksgiving.

There were other American holidays -- school vacations like Veterans Day and July 4, and, of course, my favorite, Halloween. But Halloween wasn't long for my family, because it is really a pagan holiday that religious Jews don't celebrate for fear of participating in idol worship. I know this because when my mother moved us out of my father's house and to Brooklyn, N.Y., she started on what ultimately became a very fast journey toward ultra-Orthodoxy. Full-on kosher home, sending us to yeshiva, skirts instead of pants, wigs when she eventually remarried, Sabbath spent in solitude as she withdrew from nicotine over the course of 25 hours.

That’s how the light gets in

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:30:00 +0000

The festival of historically sanctioned gluttony is upon us again, and soon families across America will be sprawled in their living rooms, idly watching the Detroit Turkeys lose for the 72nd straight year and contentedly sniffing the aroma wafting up from the basketball-size fowl roasting in the kitchen. I spend Thanksgiving every year at my mother's house in Berkeley, Calif., with my extended family. Our clan is relentlessly unreligious, but we say a kind of secular grace every Turkey Day, bowing our heads and holding hands, a sweet, unfamiliar ritual that always makes me feel a little shy. My mother usually speaks. She gives thanks for the fact that we're all here, and then often says a few words about the state of the world. Because our family is also relentlessly Democratic -- we are a veritable blue-state cliché -- her remarks on the latter subject are usually quite pointed. In fact, in recent years they can claim only a tenuous link to the theme of Thanksgiving, coming closer to Old Testament jeremiads or other sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God outbursts. This year, though, I'm expecting Mom to give heartfelt thanks for the return to sanity of the American people. And then, having given our thanks, we will begin to gorge.

Diary of a turkey killer

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:01:00 +0000

Harold came to me in a box that peeped when I opened it. Just three nights earlier, acting on a tip from a fellow urban farmer, I'd clicked on Murray McMurray, an online specialty hatchery, and well past midnight browsed the feathered fare. Should I order a flock of Toulouse geese? Some Chinese ringneck pheasants? My mouth watered at the thought of home-grown foie gras and as I imagined a medieval-themed dinner party. But in the end, good old-fashioned American pragmatism won out and I sprung for what the catalog called the Homesteaders Delight -- two turkeys, two ducks, two geese and 10 chickens.

When they arrived on my doorstep in Oakland, Calif., after 24 hours en route from Iowa, the chicks were thirsty. The turkeys looked like chickens, only bigger and with a pucker of skin on top of their heads called a pre-wattle. The unpacking over, I dipped each baby bird into a dish of water; they tilted their heads back to swallow, then squirmed for more. It took the turkeys three dunkings before they got the hang of it. Then they waddled over and joined the fluffy pile that had formed under the warming light -- called a brooder -- which I'd prepared for them. Soft and downy, they looked more like sleeping kittens than chickens.

Therapy for Thanksgiving

Wed, 22 Nov 2000 20:30:00 +0000

While most Americans are rolling pie crusts or picking up Aunt Joan at the airport on the day before Thanksgiving, my family is at the therapist's office. My sister Nadine is explaining how she feels when my parents invite her ex-husband to family events and remember his birthday but not hers. My mother is trying to make us understand why it is entirely reasonable that her blood pressure spikes when my father gives in to his poor posture and slumps in his chair.

Therapist Monica is recording it all on her laptop, presumably so she can refresh her memory before our next visit the following year. Occasionally she stops tapping the keys and looks quizzically at one of us. She tilts her head sideways and asks, "What's that like for you?" or offers a Kleenex.

In the decade before we started seeing Monica, my family had assembled for only one occasion -- my grandmother's memorial service. On that day, my oldest sister, Betsy, had invited the siblings, but not my parents, to her house after the ceremony. She hadn't talked to my mother, her stepmother, in years.

But even without Betsy's prickliness, discord simmered. When my parents visited the West Coast to celebrate the holidays with the rest of us, our initial jokes and hugs quickly slid toward meddling and edginess.

Goodbye to all that

Mon, 20 Nov 2000 09:01:00 +0000

Every year my Aunt Leona undercooked the turkey, and my mother -- her sister -- yelled at her for buying too big a bird. Every year, from the time my aunt got married until the day everyone in my family stopped speaking to me, the story was the same.

When I say undercooked, I mean just that. It didn't matter whether it was a large turkey or a small one, free range or chemically fed. My aunt never learned to cook. My mother insisted it was because she didn't get married until she was 37, and that it was her own fault. "She just isn't organized," my mother would say to the other guests. Then she would pass around the celery stalks and the sour cream and onion soup dip, and my aunt would go in the kitchen and baste and baste.

"Stop opening the oven," my mother would shout. "The temperature will go down, and the damn thing will never get done."

Of course there was stuffing -- raw stuffing. The salad was soggy. The frozen peas were cold. The dinner rolls were burned. My aunt usually put margarine on the table instead of butter.

"The war's over," my father would shout. "I don't eat axle grease."

Thanksgiving with my mom

Wed, 25 Nov 1998 18:02:00 +0000

Our pastor once told us about a T-shirt she'd seen that said, "Jesus is coming: Look busy." So I try. I do anonymous good deeds and in general also do pretty well by sick friends, street people and victims of disaster. But things fall apart when it comes to my mother. I often remember the words of Teresa of Avila, who said, "The Lord doesn't so much look at the greatness of our works, as at the love with which they are done," and this sounds fine -- except, again, when it comes to my mother. I call her every morning and try to see her every week, and bring a lot of love and patience to those tasks. But there's also all this other stuff marbled in: Someone once said that we have everything inside of us that Jesus has; only, He doesn't have all this other stuff, too. So I ask myself, if you do the great love part when you're with your mother, does it still count if there are also a few extras? Like hands trembling with rage? I think it does. I hope so.

Turkey fry

Tue, 24 Nov 1998 20:01:00 +0000

Some years ago, I found myself in love with a man who said he fried turkeys. At first I thought he was pulling my leg. I was a California girl, and we fry almost nothing out here. He would describe coating whole turkeys with Cajun spices and stringing lamp chain through their cavities. He described the dangerous volcanoes of boiling peanut oil as he carefully lowered the bird into a barrel-size pot set over leaping flames. He boasted of the crackly, spicy skin on his turkeys; the veins of scarlet hot sauce streaking the moist, flavorful meat.

It sounded, I thought, like the sexiest, manliest type of cooking -- a way of doing something really sacrilegious and preposterous to a national symbol. It turned out that frying turkeys was an underground trend among macho Southerners, outdoor cooking taken to its wildest, messiest extreme. I loved the idea.

But this man did not fry turkeys for me. He fried them for his wife and his children and their vast circle of friends. He would call me from his sport utility vehicle as he drove the back roads around his vacation home in the piney woods of East Texas.