Mike
Ball
Read Mike's bio and previous columns here
November 26, 2007
Thanksgiving at
Patrick’s House
Well, the first leg of the Holiday Triathlon – Thanksgiving, Christmas
and New Year’s Day – is over. As usual, my family spent a wonderful
Thanksgiving Day eating way too much food, drinking what some of us
consider just about the right amount of beer, and trying to ignore the
score of the Detroit Lions game. The only difference this year is that
we did all this, for the first time ever, at my son Patrick’s house.
I
would just like to make sure that you have the whole picture here. This
is the same Patrick who considers Slim Jims an essential food group. He
drinks milk straight from the bottle. He eats his soup with a serving
spoon, right out of the sauce pan. And if he happens to think of
crumbling crackers into that soup, he sends a press release to Food
and Wine Magazine.
I
know this, because he learned all these things from me.
So when he volunteered to host Thanksgiving dinner, I was a little bit
surprised. “I’m a little bit surprised,” I quipped.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll take care of every detail. You and Mom can
just show up and eat. Oh, and if you think about it, maybe you could
throw your turkey fryer in the car. And some oil. And some stuffing. And
a can of cranberry sauce. And whatever you need to make a pumpkin pie.
Oh yeah, and a turkey.”
Then the big day arrived. While Patrick’s girlfriend and my wife planned
the menu and tried to figure out if there were enough pickle forks and
radish plates on hand, Patrick and I spent Thanksgiving morning in the
really critical final preparation – installing a new set of
surround-sound speakers and a subwoofer on his television so the East
Ferretspleen High School Marching Band’s rendition of “Up, Up and Away”
at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade could blow the windows out of the
neighbor’s garage.
Now in our family we like to deep-fry our turkeys. We think that there
is just something really festive about injecting and caking a huge bird
with Cajun seasonings, then dropping it into a vat of peanut oil heated
to a temperature just slightly greater than that of molten lava.
The only downside I’ve ever found to frying a turkey is that you don’t
get any gravy, unless you want to mix milk and flour with nine gallons
of plasma-hot peanut oil. My wife solves this problem by chopping up and
pan-frying the bird’s “giblets” – the heart, liver, gizzard and neck –
and making gravy from that. This is a perfect solution for us
hearts-and-gizzards-and-other-disgusting-internal-organ-eating types,
but maybe not absolutely ideal for people less inclined to culinary
adventure. Oh well.
Our Thanksgiving dinner turned out great. The turkey was perfect, the
conversation was stimulating, the 30 pounds of mashed potatoes were a
balm to our Irish souls, and we never did tell Patrick’s girlfriend how
we made the gravy. Then, after dinner, as we all sat around the living
room slipping in and out of food comas and listening to his new sound
system broadcasting Alice’s Restaurant to the Space Shuttle, I realized
that my son had become a man.
And I was reminded of the first time I hosted Thanksgiving dinner, in an
old converted church near Boston where I lived with Alice and Ray and
Arlo, and we all had a meal that couldn’t be beat, and then after dinner
we took all the garbage to the dump, but the dump was closed . . .
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Copyright © 2007,
Michael Ball.
Distributed exclusively by
North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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