Thanksgiving at Patrick's House

Well, the first leg of the Holiday Triathlon - Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year - 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 Lion's 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 like to just 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 thirty 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