But as soon as I reached O’Hare, as soon as I stepped outside in Chicago, I knew the real world still existed, that it had gone on while I drifted and aged. It was hard coming back. It was like the end of the summer, after eight weeks at camp, when I walked the house, marveling at how small it had all become. “Good God, it must be inhabited by the Lilliputians! My father could dance in the palm of my hand.”

This was especially true returning from New Orleans, where suddenly, just like that, I had been thrown from the straight lines and earth tones of the Midwest into a rank, lawless, swampy neon squiggle of a town, where the drinking age was 18 and a cop once told me, “Have a few drinks. You’ll drive better.” I was now being called back to my old role, the little brother, Pluto in our private solar system, last in line and furthest from the sun, neither gas nor solid, called on whenever a difficult equation needed a solution. Now and then, to settle a dispute between my brother and sister (I’m the youngest of three) my father would just have me apologize to everyone.

Exiting the highway, seeing again the bare houses and spindly trees of my street, the car began to shake. I was John Glenn sizzling on reentry. I don’t want to give you the impression I was sad to go home. In fact, I loved it. Had I less shame, I would have taken out all my old toys and played right on the lawn. But I feared it. That first world, the world of your parents and siblings, it calls you like a race-car bed with the blanket turned back, a little sleep, a sick-day-nap that can last the rest of your life.

There had been some bad years in high school. It was a hard time for my parents for reasons I was too young to understand. In general, it might be explained with the terms used by psychiatrists; in particular, it was my father on the road working and my mother prescribed into a haze. She kept it together for years and years, but fell apart as soon as my brother and sister left for college. I was like the guest forgotten at the party, in the back bathroom when the lights went out. Still here? Sorry, pal, it ended hours ago. Then, when Thanksgiving or Christmas came around, and word came that my brother or sister had landed at the airport, my mother was out of bed and into the shower, out of the shower and into a red dress. As if by magic, the refrigerator filled with crab claws and fruit salad. She wanted them to think it was like this all the time.

What a sham!

One year, I asked my friend Mark to come over and observe, in the way of an official from the U.N., a blue hat. “What am I looking for?” he asked.

“Tell me if it’s as unfair as it feels, or if I’m insane.”

Mark stuck around for half a day. “It’s even worse than you feared,” he eventually told me. “I don’t know how you stand it.”

My family had a few Thanksgiving rituals. Each year, when we were small, my father would take us into the woods along the Des Plaines River. He would give us toy guns and we would shoot the hell out of some bushes and he would go back and return with a turkey, a butterball, wrapped in plastic with yellow netting. And we carried it home in triumph. And I believed it because I was young and small and kids are morons. For years, I thought the Frank Sinatra song “My Way” was the national anthem because, on “The Main Event,” before he sings it, Sinatra says, “I will now sing the national anthem, though you needn’t rise.”

Our Thanksgiving meal was never very good. No one in my family can cook. One year, for example, they asked me to make gravy. I found a bunch of stuff and mixed it. It came out brown and looked like gravy, which is good for a TV shoot but not for a meal. I ruined everything.

For many years, my life was little more than a search for the harmony of “Happy Days,” to find a perfect mother like Marion Cunningham. A dozen years ago, I went to a Hollywood party with my mother, and there, across the room, I saw Marion Ross, the actress who actually played Mrs. Cunningham. I was so excited. I put my arm around her. I said, “Mrs. C., I love you even more than I love my own mom.” And my own mom heard me, and she died inside. Just a little. You could see it. I told her I was kidding, but I was not kidding, not that night.

I would have made out with Mrs. C. if I could.

After Thanksgiving dinner freshman year, I met all my old high school friends at a party. It’s a ritual: first time back, show off, compare. This was at a house near the lake, the cars spilling out of the driveway and into the street. That night, I tried to impress on my old friends just how much I had grown, how cool I had become, and how they had not grown and were, if anything, even less cool. We would probably not even be friends if we met now, ha ha, but, you know, well, a shared past, a heritage, etc. (It’s the etc. that keeps us friends!) I met a girl at that party, honestly the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She went to Ohio State and had gone to a different high school than us before that. She was wearing a football jersey and long underwear, or leggings or something.

Can that be right?

It’s sounds wrong, but it’s what I remember.

And we talked and drank. And then she went her way and I went mine. And that night, very late, she came to my house and threw a rock at my window, a pebble, like in the movies, and I came down and we went outside and walked in the yard and the air was smoky and cold and there was snow coming. You could feel it. And there were a million stars, each surrounded by planets, by worlds, and on some the Indians had wiped out the Pilgrims and there was no Thanksgiving, and on others the little brothers were first and the big brothers were last, but most were dead worlds with no living thing. And she took my hand and kissed me. And it was better than kissing old Marion Cunningham. And she went home. And I slept the sleep of the righteous. And I thought, yes, yes, I can see this, I can live here and marry this girl, and we will be a fixture in town, with our own children loving us more each day, and our house will be modern, and our friends will be rich, and our cars will be convertibles, and the little one, the baby, we will love him most of all, though, of course, we will hide it from the older ones, but they will feel it deep down. And the next morning, my friend called and told me that this same girl, my girl, had been kissing another guy that night at the party, then went outside and threw up in the trees, then drove to my house.

By the following afternoon, I was back in New Orleans. It was still there. And I was thankful.

Rich Cohen, the author of “

Sweet and Low

” and “

Lake Effect

,” did not marry the girl in the leggings.

You can imagine how I looked forward to the weekends my sisters and I spent with my father. We would eat normal food, go to movies, go swimming. We ate cheeseburgers and French fries for every meal. Like so many divorced families, I perceived my weekends with my father as a vacation. He was not homework and doctor’s appointments and bedtimes, like my mother was. He was ice cream and TV all night and shopping trips. It was easy to prefer him for these things, for children are many things but deep is not one of them. But I eventually learned I was alone in that thinking. In the religious divide that was deepening in our family, my sisters chose Orthodoxy. Which means, they chose Mom.

Slowly, certain things changed. My sisters wouldn’t eat non-kosher meat. Then they wouldn’t go to the movies on Friday night, due to restrictions on traveling on the Sabbath. Then they asked my father to kosher his kitchen. They began to find reasons to stay with my mother for the weekend, because it was so much easier than to listen to my father’s angry, betrayed questions.

My father hoped it was a phase. I’d sit alongside him in his car, desperate to reassure him that I wasn’t going anywhere. He called me his “only true daughter,” something he still calls me, an endearment that was as lovely as it was lonely.

“Religion,” I have heard him say many times, “is what ruined my life.” He no longer had his daughters. He no longer had his weekends. He no longer had cheeseburgers in the middle of the nights or ice cream sundaes from any old ice cream store. He had, instead, Sabbath candles and challah and ceremonies he didn’t want and prayer and blessings and rigid time commitments.

But he still had Thanksgiving. Once he realized what a raw deal he got when it came to holidays, Thanksgiving became more important to him than it ever was to any Pilgrims or Native Americans. You can, of course, still do Thanksgiving as a kosher-keeping family. But you must cook your food in a kosher kitchen, which my father’s was not, and you must make sure to make substitutions in certain foods — say, no milk in your stuffing since you may not eat dairy on the same plate as meat. You also must buy a kosher turkey, which is a little harder to find and a little more expensive. My father is an excellent cook, and he tried doing this for a few years, but his heart wasn’t in it. His resentment clouded the decision-making parts of his brain, and inevitably, some screw-up would happen — “You mean you also can’t have fish with meat?” he asked, wild-eyed and crazy — and my sisters would wring their hands and look down and tell him they just couldn’t eat the things he’d prepared. It was too much of a mess.

He would sit, head in his hands, and he would whisper to me, “You would never do this. You are my only true daughter.” It is the promise all middle children secretly want — a superlative — but deep down I knew it was not because of who I was but how I wasn’t, which is not the same as being someone’s favorite at all. Still, I hated my sisters for their betrayal of him, but also for their betrayal of me. Why did they have to be different like this? Why couldn’t we just be normal, like everyone else?

I live far away now. An ironic twist of events that started out with my dating a Catholic boy has rendered me Orthodox, something that still bewilders me and my father. My family is in New York while I am in Los Angeles. After I moved five years ago, my father stopped hosting Thanksgiving. The kosher problem became too fraught, and my sisters realized they were old enough to decide they didn’t need to listen to my father rant about something he maybe should have gotten over by now. Besides, nobody has custody over us anymore, our schedules are no longer the product of a divorce agreement.

I make Thanksgiving with the same group of friends each year, all of us from New York, all of us without family here. We sit and we say that we are lucky to have each other, that we are family for each other now. But we are not family, not really. We are good friends. Family is something different; whatever feelings you have toward your own you must admit at least that. But still I’ll sit with my friends, I will tell them I’m grateful to be with them, and I will mean it. But I will miss my family, my actual family, my only true family, in New York, spread out at three different Thanksgiving tables in just one city. I will wish I was with them. I will even imagine that if I were there, this separation never would have happened.

I think back on those Thanksgivings, those fraught and tense holidays, eating a kosher turkey in a cloud of huffy resentment that is tinged with love and understanding of the unique relationship of our relations. I think of the way a room feels when it smells of sweet potatoes and the aftermath of shouting. I think of the silence you can eat dinner in. For all those things I had and hated, I long. 

A few weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day, I did something almost as stupid. I wasn’t as careful as I should have been when handling the turkey (you know — wash your hands frequently, use a designated cutting board, disinfect surfaces …) and I spent the night singing whale songs into the deep, mysterious hole at the bottom of the toilet. The next morning, I was in the emergency room.

The CDC estimates that in the U.S. there are 76 million food-borne illnesses per year and over 5,000 deaths. Bacteria-laced poultry is the leading source of food poisoning. So there were others like me in the E.R. that morning, women and men with mint-green faces, wretchedly hunched over cramping bellies, clutching an assortment of decorative bathroom trash cans under their chins. One trash can had mockingly happy Disney characters on it. After a miserable, interminable wait, I was given IV fluids, Phenergan and another deliciously heady medicine that had me nattering on about how creepy it is that Mickey Mouse wears gloves but no shirt.

It was pretty easy to give up turkey after that. The next Thanksgiving, I brought a Tofurkey to the family gathering. It wasn’t bad, just a little eerie in its fleshy texture, and in general, if I look at a food product and envision the manufacturing process — a large vat, gelatinous slurry, an extruder — it’s an appetite turnoff. When it comes to the Thanksgiving feast, meat substitutes are unnecessary. There are always plenty of meat-free offerings among the casseroles and side dishes. I’ve never gone hungry.

The most difficult adjustment has been editing recipes to suit a less-than-adventurous crowd. When you remove meat from your diet you have to replace the flavor with other ingredients. Sometimes those ingredients are unconventional, even weird, and Thanksgiving seems to bring out the traditionalist in everyone. They want the same green bean casserole, the same sweet potato soufflé, the same stuffing. If I’m being honest, seeing the same spread year after year is reassuring, comforting. My mother and my mother-in-law are still with us, still healthy, and on Thanksgiving, the kitchen is still their domain.

This year, I’ll bring a bowl of vegetarian gravy and a big salad with homemade dressing and croutons. I’ll join the matriarchs in the kitchen, chop pecans for the stuffing,  set the table, make sure the bread doesn’t burn. I’ll wash my hands a lot, and remind them to do the same! And I’ll be oh-so-thankful I’ve had one more year as a “kid.” 

Bellwether’s Vegetarian Gravy

I promise you won’t miss the pan drippings! If you’ve ever had a vegetarian gravy or stew and the flavor was “thin,” lacking umami, the missing ingredient is nutritional yeast. It’s a staple in a vegetarian pantry. I add it to soups, stews, gravies, pot pie and shepherd’s pie fillings. You can buy it at any health food store, just be sure you don’t pick up brewer’s yeast by mistake.

Note: To make mushroom gravy, add a cup of chopped mushrooms to the oil when you add the onion. To make tomato gravy, add a large tomato, finely diced, to the pan once the onions are translucent, and cook until the tomato is softened before proceeding with the rest of the recipe.

“MO-OM! Why do we have to have RICE? I want potatoes!”

“Rice is good,” Mom would say. “And Dad wants rice.”

End of discussion. (This is another thing Chinese-American kids get to whine about: We never get to have the last word. Ever.)

Thanksgiving, according to my grade-school teachers, was the most American of holidays, a time to celebrate our common heritage by bonding around indigenous American foodstuffs. So I decided it was up to me, as a patriotic native-born American, to protect the sanctity of the holiday from creeping Sinofication.

“You know what Auntie Pat puts in her turkey?” Mom said one night, a week before Thanksgiving, “Naw mai and lop cheung.”

Dad’s eyebrows raised from behind the Wall Street Journal. “Mmm,” he said.

“MO-OM! NO!” my sisters and I yelled in unison. Not that there was anything wrong with naw mai (sticky rice) and lop cheung (dried Chinese sausage), but these weren’t Thanksgiving food. They were everyday boring food. The kind of stuff we ate while relatives interrogated us about our grades and asked us why Mom didn’t have any sons (as if we could possibly formulate an intelligent answer to this question).

Year after year, we successfully fought off rice-stuffed turkeys and stir-fried side dishes. We also managed to increase, ever so gradually, the proportion of toasted marshmallows on top of our absolutely mandatory sweet potato casserole. And as my sisters and I assumed more and more responsibility and control in the kitchen, our Thanksgiving spreads became less Norman Rockwell and more Martha Stewart: Pumpkin flans and souffles are more our thing than pumpkin pies.

These days, we count our victory over immigrant dorkitude nearly complete. But the purity of our red-blooded Yuppie American Thanksgiving feast lasts only until the dishes are cleared. That’s when our Martha Stewart idyll ends, and Mom’s annual turkey jook production begins. (Jook is often described, unappetizingly, as rice porridge or gruel, but it deserves to be rebranded as a savory and soothing cream of rice soup.)

While the dishes are still in the sink, Mom puts the turkey carcass (denuded of stuffing and any pieces of meat large enough to save for sandwiches) in a slow cooker and covers it with water. She tosses in a cut-up carrot and a stalk or two of celery, (Neither of these are traditional Chinese soup ingredients, but that’s how she rolls.) Then she turns the cooker on and lets it do its thing while we do the dishes and attempt to foist foil-wrapped packets of leftovers onto our guests.

The cooker stays on all night, and early on Black Friday morning, Mom removes and dumps the carcass, and adds several handfuls of leftover rice from the night before. (Yes, we still have plain boiled rice every Thanksgiving. Since almost no one touches it except Dad, we can always count on leftovers for jook-making.) Within an hour, the rice will have dissolved, turning the rich turkey broth into a silky ivory cream — just in time for a comforting, very traditional Chinese breakfast for late risers.

In the end, that pointless bowl of Thanksgiving rice always manages to redeem itself. And we always end up with a real Chinese dish for Thanksgiving — albeit one with an all-American backbone. And none of us have ever complained about it.

As always, Mom and Dad get the last word.

- – - – - – - – - – -

Jook is traditionally served at breakfast or as a late-night snack. It can be made with fish, meat or poultry broth, and usually contains pieces of the corresponding meat. (I’ve heard of jook based on plain water, but this would be unthinkable in my family.)

True confession time: I’ve never hosted a full-on Thanksgiving dinner, so I’ve have never had unfettered access to a turkey carcass. (Yes, I know — I’ve missed a crucial milestone of American womanhood and should probably just go and join the Taliban right now.) But I have made jook many times, and it’s dead easy. The recipe below produces a more modest portion than Mom’s — a good starter size for newbies and doubters. It calls for raw rice, since I assume most non-Chinese don’t typically have cold cooked rice lying around. But you can use a larger portion of cooked rice and cook the soup for a shorter amount of time. 

Turkey (or chicken) jook (Velvety rice soup)

I am a firm believer that Thanksgiving dinner should not be an exercise in discovering your panic attack trial time. And yet, year after year, food magazines and websites flash their neon disaster-porn nudie signs: DON’T JUMP! FINALLY, A STRESS-FREE THANKSGIVING. It’s cynical culinary fear-mongering at its worst, and it doesn’t mean we’re entirely above it here at Salon Food. Because there are, sometimes, occasions to freak out. Like when you drop your pie on the way to the table. I hate to even bring it up, but as someone who 1) was That Guy who slipped on his way to getting a diploma at high school graduation and was also 2) That Guy who celebrated a friend’s housewarming by tripping up the stairs and sending my lovingly made pot of homemade hot fudge flying all over the living room, I feel like it’s important to have and to share emergency go-tos.

And my greatest emergency dessert go-to is unparalleled in its showstopper points-to-minutes-spent ratio, a little something I picked up from a diner in Charlottesville, Va., called the White Spot. Say hello to my little friend: crackly, caramelized doughnuts.

Gussied-up doughnuts? What did you expect, a 30-second microwavable yogurt sponge cake good enough to serve in a four-star restaurant? You go to my man Michael Laiskonis for that. The ace up my sleeve came from a menu that also features a dish of sausages and gravy called “ONE HELL OF A MESS.” But that doesn’t take anything away from the startling surprise and the utterly satisfyingly pleasure of biting into a warm, squishy, chewy doughnut whose glaze unexpectedly crackles with a caramel shell.

The key is in sugar’s always-amazing ability to take the form of syrup, chewy candy or brittle glass, with just temperature as the cue for these transformations. Once you recognize that the glaze on a doughnut is really little more than pure sugar, it’s not a hard leap to understanding that, with a little sear on a hot pan, you can turn that thin coating of sugar into caramel, and let it cool into crispness. Serve it with some ice cream, and you’re givin’ ‘em something to talk about.

So I wish you the best of luck in your Thanksgiving adventures. But while you’re shopping, you might want to slip a little box of glazed doughnuts into your cart, just in case.

Crackly caramelized doughnuts

Adapted from the oddly named Grillswith, at the White Spot in Charlottesville, Va.

Special equipment: A thin metal spatula is very, very handy

Oh, and by the way, here are some links that might come in handy as you gear up for Thanksgiving. Enjoy!:

• Disappointing turkey no more!
• How to make amazing mashed potatoes
• How to roast vegetables
• Slow-sauteed greens
• How to sauté mushrooms the right way
• Sausage-roasted squash
• In-a-pinch Russian apple cake