I think I like the day before Thanksgiving more that I do the day itself. Mary Ann and I (and lately, Mary Leigh, too) spend the whole day cooking. We're thinking about how wonderful all the food will be, and we're all in a good mood. No rudeness when one is where the other needs to be in the kitchen, or asks where something is. Thanksgiving morning, the pressure makes everything different, as we start out snipping at one another, then sniping, and then declaring war. But that's tomorrow.
My chores were fairly easy. I had a cheesecake to bake, root beer ham glaze to simmer, a batch of buttermilk biscuits to form into clouds, and two turkeys to brine. So why was it that I was in the kitchen all night long? It didn't hit me until the next day that my clean-up efforts were being at least matched by the mess-up activities of the Marys, particularly the younger one.
While I can't claim to be a neatnik in the kitchen, I do know that the more you allow the pile to get ahead of you, the harder all other operations become. So I just kept washing, drying and stacking. But by mid-morning on Thanksgiving, I knew two truths I had long feared:
1. A person who does nothing but clean up in our kitchen will find that all his time will go into that effort, and that he will not likely cook anything; and
B. The mess-makers don't seem to think there's anything wrong with this scheme.
My cooking worked out fine. For once, I didn't have to go to bed after midnight or wake up at three to put the cheesecake into the refrigerator. That deed was done by seven or eight this evening.
I held back on making the ham glaze until Jude returned from the airport with his girlfriend. I treasure something he said six or seven years ago, and I was hoping to hear it again. Back then, he was home for the holidays from Georgetown Prep. As soon as he set foot in the house, he caught a whiff of the ham glaze under construction, and said, "It smells like Thanksgiving in here!"
Neither he nor his girlfriend noticed it this time. And this was an unusually good batch of ham glaze. A jar of lime marmalade Mary Ann bought me a couple of years ago was this year's experimental glaze ingredient. It had so much pectin that the glaze–which never gets much thicker than pancake syrup unless I overcook it–was a genuine gel. This is what I have been after for years, with the thought of making the product available to the public. (A project that has now moved up in priority from #54035 to #54031.)
Written by Tom Fitzmorris November 27, 2013 15:58 in
