TURKEY DEBUT
My wife and I made our Thanksgiving dinner debut last night, to a delighted audience of her parents. Some highlights from this momentous rite of passage:
1. Wandering aimlessly in the grocery store like the stereotypical clueless husband, twice in a four-day span, while racking my brains deciding whether "heavy cream" was the same as "heavy whipping cream" and accosting any motherly type to ask what in the world "tressing needles" looked like.
2. Winning a twenty-pounder for spending a certain amount at our grocery store, and then being able to give it away to a family in our church because Amy was able to score a fresh turkey (killed that week) from the dentist she works with at her job.
3. Watching the fridge slowly fill up with desserts in various states of completion; Amy rarely has the time to bake, but when she does, she can be pretty darn prolific.
4. Waking up Thanksgiving morning and coming downstairs to find my wife, with apron on, stirring a pot, chopping veggies, and thumbing through two cookbooks, all while yelling instructions on our cell phone to the poor nurse who had to work Thanksgiving day and who was paging Amy every half-hour with questions and problems.
5. Sweeping, swiffing, and mopping every hardwood floor in sight, and tackling the bathroom with such strong cleaning agents that I almost passed out.
6. Jumping into the cooking fray when Amy tired in the early afternoon, and somehow pulling off a giblet gravy that the cook book needed two pages and change to describe -- all while catching up with a high school buddy on the phone, flipping the turkey every half-hour, washing dirty dishes, and watching the football game on a tiny, grainy, black-and-white TV we have in the kitchen.
7. Setting up the dinner table -- and by dinner table I mean eight-foot folding table – and cobbling together four chairs, only two of which match and one of which was borrowed from our tenants upstairs
8. Enjoying an evening of good food (go Amy!), pleasant conversations, and funny Thanksgiving stories from the past
9. Packing up two huge containers of turkey, one of which will go in the freezer since we probably won’t finish the other for another two or three weeks
10. Falling asleep, thankful for food in my belly and not even giving a second thought to sleeping in and letting someone else get the jump on Christmas shopping
My wife and I made our Thanksgiving dinner debut last night, to a delighted audience of her parents. Some highlights from this momentous rite of passage:
1. Wandering aimlessly in the grocery store like the stereotypical clueless husband, twice in a four-day span, while racking my brains deciding whether "heavy cream" was the same as "heavy whipping cream" and accosting any motherly type to ask what in the world "tressing needles" looked like.
2. Winning a twenty-pounder for spending a certain amount at our grocery store, and then being able to give it away to a family in our church because Amy was able to score a fresh turkey (killed that week) from the dentist she works with at her job.
3. Watching the fridge slowly fill up with desserts in various states of completion; Amy rarely has the time to bake, but when she does, she can be pretty darn prolific.
4. Waking up Thanksgiving morning and coming downstairs to find my wife, with apron on, stirring a pot, chopping veggies, and thumbing through two cookbooks, all while yelling instructions on our cell phone to the poor nurse who had to work Thanksgiving day and who was paging Amy every half-hour with questions and problems.
5. Sweeping, swiffing, and mopping every hardwood floor in sight, and tackling the bathroom with such strong cleaning agents that I almost passed out.
6. Jumping into the cooking fray when Amy tired in the early afternoon, and somehow pulling off a giblet gravy that the cook book needed two pages and change to describe -- all while catching up with a high school buddy on the phone, flipping the turkey every half-hour, washing dirty dishes, and watching the football game on a tiny, grainy, black-and-white TV we have in the kitchen.
7. Setting up the dinner table -- and by dinner table I mean eight-foot folding table – and cobbling together four chairs, only two of which match and one of which was borrowed from our tenants upstairs
8. Enjoying an evening of good food (go Amy!), pleasant conversations, and funny Thanksgiving stories from the past
9. Packing up two huge containers of turkey, one of which will go in the freezer since we probably won’t finish the other for another two or three weeks
10. Falling asleep, thankful for food in my belly and not even giving a second thought to sleeping in and letting someone else get the jump on Christmas shopping
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