Oh no. Not another grateful Thanksgiving post….  Nah.  This will be the selfish woman living alone on Thanksgiving post. Get your forks out.

Somebody was up late last night making sausage, peppers, onions, sun dried tomatoes, and linguine sauteed in the fry pan, then frozen for dinner somewhere down the road. Insomnia equals cooking, I guess.  I hope the neighbor didn’t hear me chopping olives too loudly. She’ll be leaving for work soon, and I will know for sure because she will slam her door hard enough to tilt the sun, that lil darlin….

The kitchen is small and I ran out of room to put non-perishables, so there’s bags strewn on the living room floor. There was a moment when I was tempted to not even get involved in the whole tradition thing, but then it struck me:  there are some neighbors who won’t be seeing family or dining out this year, so eh, what the hell, cook some slop and dump it on their doorsteps.  Nobody doesn’t like sweet potatoes, right?

So, the inevitable ghosts of Turkeys Past arrive, and they’re welcome memories. Probably the best part of this tradition when I was a kid was Aunt Ruthie coming to visit and having foods in the house we only saw that time of year like cashews, olives, and pastel mints that always went into the milk glass candy dish.  (Had we dined at Aunt Mary’s there would have been heavenly ziti, homemade meatballs, crusty bread and butter, and you’d better believe the boisterous boys would be watching the game!)  This year I’m going to roast a chicken because fuck turkey.  This year I will do my best with cooking harvest jewels the earth hatched for us.  I will cry when chopping onions and try not to eat the raw stuffing. None of my teams are playing tomorrow, and maybe that’s for the best.  This year I’m sad not to bring a pan of whisky bread pudding to Mom in Laws, and I’ll be thinking of all those guys a lot.

Tiny kitchens, vegetable peelings, hour-long hors d’oeuvres prep sucked down in five minutes, armchair footballing, long-distance or down the street travel, sinks overflowing with dishes stuck with bits of gravy and mushrooms that Aunt Barbara hates, the food coma where we become snakes on a rock, digesting, and handmade desserts made just for you and you. Good times.