giving thanks, again

I had a wonderful Thanksgiving with my family; Mr. Strega and I cooked on both Wednesday and Thursday nights; we got everything on the table by 6:15. We had a 15-pound turkey, stuffing, 2 kinds of yams (I made candied yams, one dish with and one without marshmallows on top--I have reached the ripe old age of 46 without once ever having candied yams with marshmallows on top. My mother always scorned the marshmallow topping on candied yams, claiming this sort of thing to be "trashy"--she was pretty strongly opinionated about all sorts of things. Well, once in awhile, it's good to be trashy--the marshmallow yams were a huge hit). We also had Mr. Strega's cranberry/apple/orange relish (his mother's recipe, green beans with toasted almonds, mashed potatoes, gravy, and stuffed mushrooms. Plus, I made four pies, three pumpkin and one berry (the berry one was for for my fifteen-year-old, who hates pumpkin pie; the recipe comes out of an ancient, falling-apart pie cookbook for "farm wives" that I literally do not remember buying anywhere--it's one of those cookbooks that seems to have wandered into my collection somehow). Mr. Strega (who loves to cook, thank God) and I got everything on the table hot (it was a marathon worthy of Iron Chef), and I wonder still how my mother managed to host enormous Thanksgiving feasts for all the relatives and get everything on the table perfectly and piping hot, without the craziness of foil and padding with towels Mr. Strega and I employed to keep the food from cooling off, to say nothing of microwaving. Mom did seem to have a knack for timing everything and starting whatever she could a few days before.

When I was a kid, the weeks after Thanksgiving were cookie-baking and strufoli time, and our house was like a bakery, with my Aunt Anna and my grandmother coming over to help at least a couple of times a week. One incredible memory I have is of the time my Aunt Anna and my mother made homemade ravioli--our dining table was literally covered with one huge sheet of pasta! They rolled it out on floured muslin or something, using dowels my dad had gotten cut for them at a lumberyard. Jeez--were a thousand Italians coming over for dinner? I think actually it was the Thanksgiving my grandmother was dying and living at our house--all our relatives came from back East to see her one more time and we had some huge dinners. On Thanksgiving, my grandmother--very fragile and literally eight weeks away from death--told my aunt Ellie that she wished she could see the Thanksgiving table, even though she couldn't, at that point, eat any of the food and wasn't strong enough to sit with us (my mother had picked up some beautiful Waterford crystal goblets in a really lovely shade of soft rose, etched with tiny flowers, and my grandmother wanted to see them on the table--I know that's a little materialistic in some ways, but my grandmother liked pretty things like this). My Uncle Roland came into my grandmother's room (she wore a robe and slippers when she wasn't actually sleeping), picked her up, and carried her like a baby out to the dining room so she could see the table, all set and ready for Thanksgiving.

Well, back to what I did--I also decorated the living room and dining area with some candles and my collection of fold-out turkeys . I have three, two vintage and one sort of crummy modern one, the wings of which keep falling out of the honeycomb body. The vintage ones are the same kind my mother had; she apparently didn't think that honeycomb tissue paper fold-out turkeys were trashy. I think they are trashy in a funny way and put them out to be a little silly. My Christmas decorating gets pretty elaborate, especially with lights, but that is another story.

Anyway, I spent the last two days cooking (Mr. Strega and I lamenting, as usual, the lack of serving spoons, though I did manage to score a huge turkey platter at Long's last year after Thanksgiving for five dollars--it has the requisite ironically cheerful turkey in bas-relief--and is bordered with apples, pomegranates, etc., so we no longer have to cram fifteen pounds' worth of turkey onto a saucer)--so, now I am tired and am going to sleep. I wish I could have dreams like my elder daughter is having--she dreamed last night of my paternal grandmother, Annie Belle Cain McMillan, coming to her and telling her she was watching over her. I think I dreamed of mashing potatoes or something. Oh, well, c'est la reve. Bon soir.