The Trouble with Thanksgiving Dinner

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. The Christmas decorations have come out of hiding and my favorite jeans are a little tighter. I love turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and pumpkin pie. I love eating Thanksgiving dinner, but I don’t like making it. We dodged the bullet this year by going to relatives, so I only had to make a casserole and some dessert. My main problem with cooking a complete Thanksgiving dinner is timing. My dilemma is that I can’t seem to get the meal on the table without something being cold. I can understand now why almost everything on the Thanksgiving table is steamed, mashed, or canned. Since I like to cook in general, I reject the tradition that both the white potatoes and sweet potatoes must be mashed. I like baking sliced sweet potatoes in a brown sugar glaze with pecans. However, I can’t bake it because the turkey goes in the oven. If I take the turkey out and then bake the sweet potatoes, the turkey is the cold entrée. If I make the mashed potatoes too early, they are cold. If I forget to warm the rolls because I am making the gravy or mashing the potatoes, well, you get the point. The vegetables are almost always cold regardless of when I cook them. I can handle Christmas dinner. Ham is small so it can usually be baked along-side the scalloped potatoes. A few years ago I even discovered an excellent scalloped potato recipe for the slow cooker. Since I have two slow cookers, I can put the ham in the big one and the potatoes in the smaller one, which leaves the oven free for other side dishes. That means everything can come out at the same time and it will all be hot.  In order to boycott the cooking of Thanksgiving dinner we either have to go to someone else’s house, which was what we did this year, or go out. As I mentioned earlier, I do love eating Thanksgiving dinner. A few years ago we discovered the Thanksgiving dinner at The Pier in Harbor Springs. It was perfect. I didn’t have to clean my house and for about the cost of making dinner myself, we had the entire spread including leftovers. If it were up to me we’d do that every year. The problem with that is that if it’s my turn to host Thanksgiving for friends or extended family, they’ll be expecting a meal comparable to what they provide for us without having to pay for it.  I’m not saying I’ll never cook Thanksgiving dinner again. I can’t expect to be rescued by my relatives or the Pier chefs forever.  When our turn comes again, I can pull together a delicious Thanksgiving spread with all the fixin’s.  I’m just not promising anything fancy and I’m definitely not guaranteeing that it will all be hot.