Thanksgiving Follies

And a good time was had by all anyhow.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

This year, I had a simple mishap with my holiday assignment — cranberry sauce. I dutifully stopped at my favorite Greenmarket to get the cranberries. My first mishap was adding too much water. I kept adding marmalade and bits of apple to create enough pectin and finally got the sauce to thicken. Then I discovered the fatal flaw. The cranberry skins were tough! Who ever heard of a cranberry so tough that you had to spit out the skin? Back to square one with a bag of tender, ever-faithful commercial berries. Success!

This reminded me of an epic fail many years ago. My sister, her boyfriend and my grandmother were coming to my apartment for Thanksgiving dinner and I wanted to impress them. My grandmother had visions of her idea of a traditional British dinner and wanted roast goose, creamed onions, chestnut stuffing, mashed potatoes with turnips, green beans and baked sweet potatoes. I foolishly agreed, thinking that it would be easy to roast a goose as beautiful as the picture above.

I was wrong. First, I had no idea where to purchase said goose until a student of mine offered to take me to her source. We looked at a pen of geese and pointed at our choice. A few minutes later, I was presented with a disconcertingly warm bundle - my goose. I prepared it (the less said about this step the better) and roasted it. It came out looking as good as the picture.

The sides were outstanding. I was in my glory until I tried to carve the goose. Shoe leather. No one had told me that goose needed to be aged. Tried gently cooking slices in broth. Shoe leather. We fully enjoyed the perfectly prepared side dishes and laughed ourselves silly. The closest we came to protein, though was pecan pie.

It still makes a great story and certainly was a memorable Thanksgiving. And a lasting memory!