The big day had arrived and everyone can get mad at us.  The gifts for Christmas have been bought, wrapped and bundled by family.  The Christmas cards and newsletters have been posted, and so have the Christmas parcels.  All the groceries have been bought and it was now the time to get everything put together to make the meal.  I think the hardest part is the timing of the meal, of course, if we say “get here at two,” I think most people nowadays hear “get here at four.”  My Bride couldn’t find the usual size turkey that she gets, so she bought a normal size turkey and bought another turkey breast.  The bird is always the hardest item to estimate the finished cooking time.

Of course, I try to avoid the drama of the kitchen scene, because the Lord knows that I am not a cook, all I do is read about cooking techniques and I eat.  We have two big roasters that we use for meals of this stature, so as not to monopolize the stove, and I had suggested that the roasters should be in different rooms, after the circuit breaker kicked off, the two roasters were placed in two different rooms.  The other problem we had, was that she had bought several bags of Romaine lettuce for her Caesar Salad, and of course there appeared on the internet that there was another potential scare, so we did not have that salad.  The house did smell good, right from the get-go, because she had fried up rashers of bacon, so she could prepare her side of Brussel Sprouts done with the bacon and then drizzled with aged Balsamic vinegar.  She was also making Armenian Pilaf, Mashed Potatoes and a big pot of stuffing.  There was some debate, because after decades of having some stuffing made on the side and some stuffed in the bird and then mixing the two together, they wanted no stuffing in the bird, and I was concerned that the meat would end up two dry, but my Bride used onions to fill the bird and she also used garlic-infused olive oil in hopes of adding more moisture and I have to say your idea worked.   There was still more food to be prepared, but she also had to start placing noshes out for the early guests to enjoy while everything was still cooking.  There was the traditional cheese and crackers, mustards and honey.  There were fruits and vegetables, and don’t ask me how, but the salmon and the shrimp was forgotten about in the fridge and no one noticed.  It was hectic.

I think part of the madness of the day, is that the world is intent on destroying the nuclear family.  No longer is Thanksgiving a sacred holiday for families to enjoy, the daily newspaper I think tripled in price for the one day, and shopping centers and big box merchants compete with each other to see who can open up the earliest, so that families can no longer have a day to themselves.  I am sure the executives of the chains and malls and the newspapers that revel in the end of basic humanity that has endured, enjoy the day with their family.  To counteract this nonsense the wines began pouring earlier and not just for the hosts.  We went through bottles of wine and I will only discuss a couple of them and then I will discuss a couple of more as I get to the actual meal.  There has been a bit of an undercurrent that the majority of the wines that we serve are too dry, so we attempted to lighten the whites to a degree.  The first wine is one that we picked up while we were touring some of the wineries in the Leelanau Peninsula of Michigan.  We opened up some Laurentide Pinot Gris 2016.  Here was a wine that can be bland and it had a very good nose and it was aged in Stainless Steel so that the fruit was more apparent and that seemed to work, by the response.  The other wine that we started off with for a softer approach was Banter Wines Chardonnay 2017 with a California AVA.  I would opine that this wine was done in Stainless Steel as it was crisper.  The guests concurred as the wine evaporated quite quickly.  I really could find no information about the winery, even though they had a page on the internet, that is all that they have at the moment.  Still more fun for Thanksgiving and I am not referring to the desserts.