By John Fee
The Cordova Beacon
I came in Saturday morning from running errands and found my wife Vickie watching a cooking show on television. The show was all about how to make the perfect Thanksgiving dinner.
It was no surprise to find her watching this, because we also watch shows about hanging wallpaper and pouring concrete patios.
I'm about as likely to find Vickie in the backyard with an improvised smoker/convection oven/grill cooking a large turkey as I am to find her pouring concrete. Actually, I'm more likely to find her pouring concrete.
This is the same person who made me throw away the best barbecue I ever owned -- one that easily allowed adjusting of the grill without causing anything to fall into the flames -- just because the bottom and the legs fell off. Given time from my daily chores, I would have had that thing repaired and working like new.
The cooking show was interesting, and I now know what the best potato masher on the market looks like. But they had one thing completely wrong. They said people should make homemade cranberry sauce, not serve the kind from a can.
It's hard to believe that educated people can be so wrong about what's right in the world. Cranberry sauce is cylindrical. Cranberry sauce has ridges. Yes, cranberry sauce is supposed to look like slices of Jell-o gelatin.
I don't care if you can easily whip up a dish of homemade cranberry sauce in five minutes. In fact, I think they're lying, trying to lure the weak and unsuspecting into their abnormal holiday-cooking cult.
Part of our Thanksgiving tradition includes Vickie making a sweet potato casserole to take for dinner at her parent's home. There are many stages to this tradition, which begin on Wednesday and go through Thanksgiving Day.
The first part of Vickie's cooking tradition, although this occasionally varies, is sending me out to find sweet potatoes on Wednesday night. Several stores and phone calls are normally involved in the process of finding this most elusive of produce during the season of holiday shopping.
The next stage of my wife's cooking tradition involves the peeling of the sweet potatoes. Vickie is often busy with other important duties at this point, and she tends to do bodily harm to herself when left alone with the peeler. So. I usually go ahead and take care of this small part.
After the potatoes are peeled, we get out the food processor to grate them. Being the more mechanically inclined, I take care of assembling the machine, which Vickie stores in pieces.
Since I'm already this far into the process, there's no reason why I shouldn't go ahead and cut the sweet potatoes to fit into the food processor, so I do. And, while I'm at it, I might as well go ahead and do the grating.
At this point, after my preliminary duties are completed, Vickie springs into action. She greases the casserole dishes (she usually makes a couple), puts the grated sweet potatoes into the dishes, sprinkles stuff on top and places them into the oven for the prescribed amount of time.
Sometime after midnight in the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning, Vickie's annual creation emerges from the oven, another much-loved success.
On Thanksgiving Day, we take the casserole to her parent's home, where we look forward to eating too much of the traditional holiday meal. The casserole is always popular and usually just about finished by the end of the day.
I look forward to pretty much all of the dishes on offer and hope for two desserts, the chocolate eclair that my mother-in-law Jean makes, and the lemon icebox pie that my sister-in-law Ashley makes.
We're all hoping Vickie's sister Pam doesn't do that thing with the onions again.