Things I've Learned from Thanksgiving

Since becoming an independent adult and a mom, I've been responsible for cooking several Thanksgiving dinners for my family. This responsibility has taught me many things about myself and about life in general. Here goes:

I am incapable of cooking rolls or bread of any kind. Not that I ever really try to cook bread or biscuits from scratch. I usually get frozen yeast rolls or the Pillsbury canned biscuits. No matter, I burn them every single time without fail. Needless to say, I no longer put bread or rolls on my menu for Thanksgiving (or any other meal frankly).

Sweetened condensed milk and evaporated milk are two different things. Really, I have a strangely sweet and kinda soupy pan of homemade macaroni and cheese to prove this. 

Turkeys scare me! The first time I ever cooked a turkey on my own was when I was in college. My workplace gave all their employees frozen turkeys for Thanksgiving. I brought it back to my little apartment and called Mom to ask how to cook a turkey. That's when I learned what that little red plastic thingy is in the Turkey (pop-up thermometer) and that your cook time is based on time per pound. Even with this expert advice, my first turkey-cooking experiment resulted in a turkey so overcooked and dry it separated from the bone and was more like turkey-jerky.

The next time I tried to cook a turkey was a couple of years ago (yes it was almost 20 years before I attempted to cook the big bird again). Since thawing a big frozen turkey seems like a salmonella outbreak waiting to happen in my opinion, I purchased a fresh, free-range turkey from the local butcher. Man do those things cook MUCH faster than previously frozen turkeys! My turkey was cooked and ready hours before anything else.

Don't ask my mom to bring the cranberry sauce. From the earliest Thanksgiving I can remember to modern time, my mother purchased canned cranberry sauce to serve for our holiday meal. And she forgets to serve it nearly every time. Usually we find it in the cabinet the next day when we are eating Thanksgiving leftovers, so it eventually winds up on plate with (leftover) turkey and dressing.

Hope you benefit from my "lessons learned." Feel free to share some of the lessons you've learned at Thanksgiving. It might just save a turkey or a pan of dressing for someone . . .