We asked for your best Thanksgiving memories in our Thanksgiving forum and, boy, did you all deliver! From heartfelt to hilarious, your stories have been making everyone smile and dish their own special memories.
But one story, from La Dilettante, really made us laugh and we couldn’t help but share. Channeling her inner David Letterman, La Dillettante posted a charming and chuckle-worthy send-up her dear mom. Check it out:
La Dilettante
“I can only post this because my mother does not own a computer and will never read it. I’m sitting here enjoying all your posts, vicariously living through your warm childhood memories of ambrosial food, etc., and wishing that my mom had known how to cook. She had (still has) many sterling qualities, but talent in the kitchen wasn’t/isn’t one of ‘em.
Top ten reasons our holiday meals were mostly enjoyed by the dog as ‘leftovers’ (sometimes during the feast itself, if Good Boy happened to be hiding under the table):
10) Mom did not believe in preheating the oven. ‘Waste of time and electricity,’ she scoffed. Result? Casseroles scorched on the bottom and still wiggly in the middle.
9) That oven, installed sometime during the Kennedy administration, and a mighty stylish ‘Coppertone’ classic, malfunctioned at some point, and the repairman crossed some wires so that ‘BAKE’ and ‘BROIL’ functions were reversed. No problem for Mom, but any kitchen helpers who didn’t know about this often broiled the rolls. ‘Oh, we can just peel off the black tops,’ Mom would say cheerfully as the smoke alarm screeched. Which we did, revealing the raw dough underneath.
Unafraid of raw eggs (in that uncooked roll dough) but mortally terrified of salmonella, she would bake (or broil) the poor turkey until it was literally falling off the bone, and dry beyond the help of gravy.
7) Her gravy—well, the less said the better, so on to:
6) The cornbread dressing. Pure sawdust. ‘My own mother’s recipe,’ she’d boast. Having had my grandmother’s dressing, I knew this was a bald-faced lie, and once (I think I was eleven) actually told her so. ‘Your grandma died when you were little,’ she replied, ‘so you couldn’t possibly remember.’ Okaaaaay…
5) Sweet potatoes with about nine cups of brown sugar and three sticks of butter. Mom was Paula Deen before Paula Deen was cool.
4) The cranberry sauce had to be Ocean Spray brand, and plopped right out onto her mother’s cut-glass relish dish. It was still shaped like the can—ridges and all—on the table. One year I suggested we at least slice it, but nothin’ doin’. ‘People want to get the size hunk they want.’
3) Appetizers? Foreign concept. ‘We don’t have drinks, so we don’t need canapes,’ she’d assert. This did change after my husband and I, who very much did want and need drinks before another holiday meal in Hell’s Own Kitchen, began a BYOB policy.
2) Dessert. ‘Why do we HAVE to have a sweet potato pie, when the sweet potato casserole on the sideboard contains the exact same ingredients?’ I’d rant in my younger days. ‘Because,’ she’d respond calmly, ‘the pie has a CRUST.’ (?)
But my favorite is the salad she made after I’d been a vegetarian for about a decade (which she was well aware of):
1) ‘I know you won’t touch the turkey, so I made you a delicious broccoli recipe!’ It had about two cups of BACON BITS in it…”
TELL US: Have a funny or heartfelt memory of a past Thanksgiving? Share it in the comments area below or visit this thread for more stories!
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