Happy Thanksgiving!
Today we are paid a visit from the ghost of AYI Past, as we look back on a piece I wrote in 2007 detailing the first Thanksgiving my wife and I decided to tackle preparing on our own. I retrieved it from The Internet Archive, since I never kept good offline records of my work.
Unfortunately, the Wayback machine didn’t save most of the images that accompanied the piece, and 2007 Hatter was very big on lots of pictures integrated in his articles. (To quote Alice, “And what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?”).
Fortunately, most of the pictures in this piece were not pirated without copyright consent (like in most AYI pieces), but were taken by my own digital camera. This was before I ever had a capable camera phone. I don’t think I got a smartphone until 2013. I think I remember which ones they were and have reinserted them accordingly.
2007 Hatter was not very big on proofreading or editing, though. I decided to leave the piece as it was, typos, grammatical errors and all. I made an exception for the title. I originally published it as “Pilgrim’s” instead of “Pilgrims’”, and it honestly bothers me so much, I had to pull a George Lucas and change that.
So enjoy this blast from the past, complete with Justin Guarini, Big Ethel and Redskins references, and me still referring to Native Americans as “Indians.” Yeesh.
(Originally published November 23, 2007.)
It’s November again, time to celebrate the anniversary of the Pilgrims getting through that first difficult winter with the help of the Indians. And what better time to celebrate getting through the winter than 250 days after?
Pilgrim: Squanto, my good fellow, we would like to invite you and your people to dinner this Thursday… dress casual.
Squanto: What, like this?
Pilgrim: I said, “dress casual,” not “clothing optional”.
Squanto: Yeah, yeah. So what’s the occasion?
Pilgrim: We celebrate your friendship and assistance in getting through the long, cold winter.
Squanto: Shit, man, that was like eight months ago! You’re just acknowledging it now?
Pilgrim: Well, uh…
Squanto: We haven’t even heard from you guys since March. We get your pansy asses through the winter, and suddenly you’re too good to come to our lacrosse games, is that it?
Pilgrim: Okay well see, the thing with that is—
Squanto: Oh I get it. Winter starts again in a month, now you want to come running back and prepare for another season of mooching off our cornucopia.
Pilgrim: …
Squanto: …
Pilgrim: There will be pie.
Squanto: Thursday, huh.
Usally our parents cook, but this year Wye (my wife) and I took it upon ourselves to make Thanksgiving dinner. And by “my wife and I”, I mean mostly my wife. But I cheered her on in my own special way. With sarcastic comments, and talking out loud while I watched TV.
The menu was actually rather ambitious for people who’ve never cooked Thanksgiving before:
- Mashed potatoes and gravy
- Green beans with lemon
- Cranberry sauce
- Macaroni and cheese
- Apple sausage rice stuffing
- Lemonade
- Pecan Pie
- Soylent Green
Let everyone know too: Soylent Green is.. TURKEY!
Time to go shopping. I took it on myself to make the cranberry sauce. In my mind, there is no substitute for the cranberry in a can, that gelatinous crimson log which bears no passable resemblance to the fruit it pictures on the can’s label. And America agrees with me, when I went to go buy it, the shelf was rapidly emptying.
Preparation of such fine cuisine is a talent I acquired through years of study under Bobby Flay. I pass the secret on to you now in these never before published photographs: (2025 Hatter: I don’t have the photographs anymore, and they weren’t on Internet Archive)
This looks about as appetizing as Big Ethel from Archie comics. But everyone eats it every year. I think to placate me, really, because they all stare at me when I put it on their plates.
Preparing the turkey was a fascinating project. We had an eight pound turkey. Small, but there was only going to be five of us. The turkey we bought was nice enough to come prepackaged, but it sorely screwed up my understanding of turkey anatomy. As I currently understand it, the turkey’s intestines are located in a plastic membrane in its ass with the words “Keep away from children, danger of suffocation” on it.
Once the bird is in, you look for ways to entertain yourself. Initially we thought the Thanksgiving halftime show would do it, but it was evident that not only had Kelly Clarkson regained all the weight she had lost, but all of that fat was now clogging her vocal cords. Kelly was so terribly off-key, you could see a stadium full of 60,000 people wishing they had voted for Justin Guarini instead. My wife came in from the kitchen to ask if the TV was broken. You can actually see her voice dying in this picture.
If you have kids at your Thanksgiving, typically you use this time to talk about the story of the first Thanksgiving. Everyone loves the first Thanksgiving. Nobody ever tells the story of the second Thanksgiving, which is really the one that made it a tradition:
Pilgrim: Squanto! There you are, my friend!
Squanto: Oh, it’s you. Look, “friend”, I can’t let you mooch off my peace pipe tobacco anymore. You’re gonna need to starting buying your own. But I can sell you some. Got any beads?
Pilgrim: No, no, no. I mean only to invite you to dinner again this Thursday to celebrate, the way we did last year.
Squanto: You may want to tell that uncle of yours to celebrate a little bit less than he did last year. I believe your exact words to me were that it wasn’t going to be clothing optional.
Pilgrim: We will have stuffing!
Squanto: Homemmade?
Pilgrim: From the box.
Squanto: Oh, I just remembered, I told those Quaker folks I was gonna go to THEIR “Let’s eat all of our food now instead of saving it for the upcoming winter” feast this Thursday, but you know, maybe I’ll stop by.
Pilgrim: We can play “football”! You can be the Redskins!
Squanto: And who are you gonna be?
Pilgrim: We will be the Raiders. Our objective is to take possession and push you back deep into your territory, and—
Squanto: Um, I don’t think we want to play this.
I read a biography about Squanto once when I was a a little kid. He’s always made out to be some kind of classic “How. Me ‘Squanto’, This here is brother, ‘Cooking with Cranberry Log’.” In truth though, the guy had lived in England for a few years and came back to his tribe before any of this Pilgrim stuff ever happened. So I’m sure he really appreciated all the Pilgrim’s whining about how hard that Mayflower boat ride was. He had to do it twice.
Anyways, back to Pilgrimfest 2007. It turned out pretty well. It was a phenomenal amount of food for five people, but having leftovers is not a bad thing. The turkey looked great. It was now time to carve the turkey. Correction: it was now time to Google “how to carve the turkey”.
After commemorating the Pilgrim’s devoutly religious lifestyle with brazen displays of gluttony, we were satisfied. It was all over, nothign left to do but await the 24/7 airplay of “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” on every single radio station. Oh wait. Damn.
A lot has changed in the 18 years since that Thanksgiving.
We now have 3 kids. They have clearly inherited my affinity for “gelatinous crimson log” cranberry. We buy four cans now. As we multiply, so do the cranberry cans.
Thanksgiving is regularly held at our house now and we have been in charge of cooking it every year since that post. It’s amsuing to me to read this 2007 piece and recall how daunting a task Thankgiving preparation felt like at the time.
We have it down at this point. I cook most of the dishes now, including the turkey. I can brine and roast a turkey by muscle memory. It shocked me to read that we cooked an 8 pound bird back then. I never see those in the supermarkets anymore. That low a weight, you can get a turkey breast, but I never see whole birds that weight. This year we’re rocking a 12 pound bird. It’s sitting in the brine in the fridge as I type this the night before Thanksgiving.
I don’t know who came up with the rules of how many days per pound to thaw a bird, but it’s not enough. We have some wiggle room because the brining will accelerate it at the end, but every year, I feel like I should have had allowed 1 or 2 more days in the fridge. Everyone’s a believer in global warming until they realize it’s been 3 days and their turkey is still in the ice age.
Our 2025 menu includes:
- Brined and Roasted Turkey with Gravy
- Apple Sausage Rice Stuffing
- Gratin au Dauphinois Potatoes
- Green Beans and Mushrooms
- Crispy Asian Brussel Sprouts
- Cranberry Jelly Log
My wife still cooks the apple sausage rice stuffing. It’s the best part of Thanksgiving; my only criticism is that she doesn’t make more. I included links to all the recipes we use, except the potatoes and green beans which we take straight out of Joy of Cooking. The cranberry preparation has already been thoroughly covered in the 2007 piece.
If there is a second favorite dish of the family, it has become the gratin potatoes. For years, the potato dish was the responsibility of my sister-in-law’s boyfriend of that year. We half used it as a measuring stick: The Thanksgiving Potato Test. Was this boyfriend gonna cut it (both literally and figuratively)? We didn’t ask for anything fancy either. Just mashed potatoes. As each of them struggled year after year, my wife and I would look at each other with the same thought, “Yeah, this one ain’t the one.” Granted, these were just young guys in their early to mid twenties, but some of them looked like they had never attempted to cook for themselves in their life.
One year, my sister-in-law was single. Since there was no boyfriend to assign potato duty, it fell on me. I decided to mix it up and make Gratin au Dauphinois potatoes. They were a hit. “That’s why Hatter passes the test,” my in-laws joked.
Eventually my sister-in-law found “the one”, got married, but my family won’t let me relinquish potato duty. My brother-in-law might have 7 years of marriage and 2 kids under his belt now, but he has never been properly vetted with the Thanksgiving Potato Test.
So Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, I hope you enjoyed this look back in the AYI Archives with me. Now go give thanks for the company of relatives complaining about their fantasy football teams.
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