Let's Talk: Take It Easy--It's Just Thanksgiving

It started about a month ago. No, maybe two months ago. You know the way Christmas creeps earlier every year? Bruce and I actually saw Christmas ornaments on sale at a chain store in mid-September.

But no, I'm not talking about Christmas. That's a done deal. It's been creeping forward since I was a kid. I'm talking about Thanksgiving.

And not the holiday. The storm.

At first, it's a pleasant flurry. How to put back enough stock for your Thanksgiving table. Yams or potatoes--how to choose that essential Thanksgiving side dish.

Then it starts to howl. This year, roast your turkey at 200F (93C). (They neglect to tell you in the headline that the method takes ten to twelve hours, so you better find the masochism setting on your alarm clock.) Thawing your turkey with ace bandages. (No joke.)

Finally, it morphs into an outright blizzard. Until I'm reading enough tweets and blog posts and articles that even I'm starting to get a little nervous. And I'm a food writer. Married to a chef.

How to chew your own wood pulp to make Thanksgiving invitations.

OK, I'm kidding about that last. But still.

I'm a professional. I'm supposed to keep up. But I wonder how it feels when you're not in the business.

Sometimes, I fear we've reached a point where the non-restaurant food industry runs on shame and sadism. You're not doing it right. You're not doing enough. You darn well better start trying to be up to par.

Look, it's just Thanksgiving. It's not about the meal. It's about the thanks. That's the point: family, friends, around a table, more conversation and laughter than stress and insanity. In fact, I would argue that this is the one meal a year when you don't need to impress anyone. You need to have a glass of wine and chill out.

At the risk of offending my fellow foodie friends, let me try to take the bubble off the boil with three suggestions.

1. If making all that food stresses you out, buy parts of it--and buy the best you can comfortably afford. Thanksgiving is probably not the day to become a full-fledged locavore. And if you're not up to roasting the bird, buy a preroasted turkey. Try to get an organic one. I'm in Austin right now and I was in one upscale supermarket that offered roasted heritage birds for pre-order. Pretty nice, that. Or have a bakery make the rolls. Shoot, have a bakery make the pie. Maybe not the bakery in your local grocery store. If your budget allows it, go up a level, to a small local bakery where they're actually baking the pies. Or search out people online who bake pies and rolls in their homes at this time of year to sell to customers who place orders.

2. Don't get locked into a turkey. One way to step back from the frisson of shame and sadism that runs behind, under, and around the professional food business is to forego the traditional menu entirely. Make a ham. Have a pork loin roast. Grill some steaks. Make a slow cooker stew. Have a nice mac-and-cheese with some vinegary salads on the side (green beans in vinaigrette, a cabbage slaw, some sliced tomatoes). If you step back from the incessant, you'll find that you can slow up and be thoughtful. Which is the point, after all.

3. Bring back the dinner party. Not at Thanksgiving but for the rest of the year. Invite friends over, cook up a storm, impress the heck out of them--on the third Saturday of January. If you have more dinner parties, you'll find that the food you serve on the holidays will be far less important. The meal will be less about impressing people--you've done that earlier in the year--and more about enjoying your company.

Most importantly, even if you go whole hog, be thankful in ways meaningful to you.

And say it. Because that's the hard part, right? Maybe that's why we get wrapped up in the food: to avoid harder, more important things. Being thankful--and being thankful out loud--is the meat of the matter. Tell your spouse, your friends, your family that you're thankful for them, that you love them, that your life is better because they're in it, that your life is possible because they're in it. Look them right in the eye and say it.

That's much harder than making dinner. And much more rewarding. Not to mention much, much more healing for the soul.

Beer Braised Pot Roast with Mushrooms

When I first met Bruce, he wouldn't touch beef chuck. He thought it was too cheeky, too fatty, too much of everything. A great chef or not, he might have cooked it--but he wouldn't eat it. He was too busy being a waif-thin New Yorker.

Leave it to a good Southern boy to change his mind.

Nothing spells dinner like pot roast. It's what we had after church on Sundays, for holidays meals, for no reason at all.

Except ours was a tad gummy. We often had it out of the pressure cooker. And so we lost the most important parts: the browning and the long braising--which infuses every bit of that melting fat and collagen with flavor.

So here's a meal that can change a New Yorker's mind, that can keep him at the table: that chuck roast, cooked in a streamlined version of the famous Belgian stew, carbonnade flamande.

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Chinese-Style Braised/Roasted Leg of Lamb, Part 2

Let's be quick about this. No blather about holiday neuroses. Sometimes, food's the thing. Real food at that. The big task for this recipe is done. Now for the finish.

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Chinese-Style Braised/Roasted Leg of Lamb, Part 1

What is it about holiday meals? Why are they so often the last resort of the hackneyed, the familiar, the tried-and-true?

Is it because of Great Aunt June's harping on politics? (What is it with her and Grover Cleveland? Did they have a thing back in the day?)

Is it because someone's bound to bring up something uncomfortable? ("Dear, I remember fondly those lovely daffodils that I gave you last year and that you managed to kill.")

Or are we just so jangled in this modern world, so made-nuts by bloviating pundits and know-nothing wags, by bail-outs and world-wide collapses, by wars compounded on more wars, that we finally succumb to the ordinary, if only to (as Annie Dillard once wrote) "stick a nickle's worth of sense into our days"?

Whatever the cause, I'm here with a cure. For the Easter doldrums. (Other things will have to wait.) This Chinese-style leg of lamb will turn the table on its head and offer something new among the staid traditions: the pastel hats and foofy dresses.

Or you can fix this wonder anytime and be glad of it.

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