Pondering Some Thanksgiving Stuff(ing)

Is it wrong that I don’t know how to cook a turkey?  Growing up, I only saw it done once a year, on Thanksgiving, and that annual family ritual didn’t provide the best of training. My father, who for 364 days of the year never entered the kitchen unless ordered to do so at gunpoint, would completely take over this domestic domain for Thanksgiving.  His mission:  to stuff the turkey. 

Now mind you, my mother still had to do everything else for Thanksgiving dinner, but she wasn’t allowed in the kitchen to do any of it until the turkey was stuffed.  And woe to the child who hadn’t eaten breakfast before Dad commandeered the kitchen, because we were no longer permitted to enter.  One year he actually cordoned off the area with ropes.  So we got pretty hungry on Thanksgiving Day.  This was good planning on his part though, because by the time dinner was served, we would eat almost anything, even his stuffing

The making of the stuffing was quite the production.  My dad would wear an apron, which was an endless source of amusement for us kids.  It wasn’t one of those unisex barbecue aprons; it was always one of mom’s, complete with flower-embroidered pockets.  It looked particularly ridiculous on a bespectacled bald guy wearing a starched shirt and pressed pants.

We didn’t hang around to be amused for long, though….This was due to my father’s almost religious belief in onions, those succulent vegetables remarkable for their pungent odor and taste, and their ability to clear a room.  My dad fervently believed in mass quantities of onion, even for only a small quantity of stuffing.  He would buy 4 or 5 enormous bags of chopped frozen onion, enough to fill seven turkeys, and his intention was to stuff every last one of them into our one unfortunate turkey. I’m surprised we never had a bird get up and run.

Before the stuffing could be made, however, the pungent vegetable matter had to be fried.  My dad would load up the fry pans with butter, and commence the frying process.  Then he would get bored, and decide that – contrary to all proven and established culinary law – they did NOT need to be stirred while frying.  So he’d wander into the other room to watch a little football.   Soon, the heavy “fragrance” of burning onions filled the house, along with the not-so-melodious sounds of my father’s swearing.  On the bright side, we always learned a couple of new word combinations that day.

He would then holler for my mother, and sometimes actually make the overdone onions her fault.  This was truly artful, as she hadn’t even been allowed to enter the kitchen during the frying process.  At this point, however, he was willing to grant her passage to the sink, so that she could wash the fry pan.  He would holler for my brother, and get him to take the cremated mess out to the trash.  He would holler in general, because now he was behind schedule, and the pressure was on.

Fortunately – or unfortunately – depending on your perspective, he always had more onions.  Most years, he went through this process two or three times before it resulted in onions that could actually be used for the stuffing.  I’m sure we all would have been disappointed had it gone well on the first round.

Given this Thanksgiving heritage, is it a big surprise that I’m not interested in learning to cook a turkey – how could I possibly compete with such a rich tradition?   The birds are safe from me – and so are the onions.