Dinner is over

The meal has been eaten. The men are watching football, Mom & SIL are napping, the little kids are in the swimming pool and I am blogging while watching them play. 

Mom made dinner. Mom always makes dinner & no help is wanted.  I try. I offer to make stuffing or a sweet potato side but Mom is on it & wants no assistance.  SIL is allowed to make kibbeh, which is served as an appetizer & is not something that was ever served in our house before SIL joined the family. We are long settled descendants of Irish, German and English ancestors who by & large came here before 1820. We do not make kibbeh, though many of us eat it.  Perhaps next year I will attempt to offer a curry of some sort.

Dinner was as usual, a large roasted turkey (unbrined, Mom doesn't hold with that brining nonsense) stuffed with Pepperidge Farm stuffing (Mom doesn't hold with that 'stuffing is evil' nonsense), mashed potatoes, Kulski noodles, gravy from a jar & some homemade cranberry sauce.  Not a green veg in sight, not even a salad.  Normally there are some canned green beans or broccoli in a bag but I think this year she gave up the fight on that. The green stuff was only eaten out of a vague sense of obligation, the bite required by manners. Occasionally some sweet potatoes with brown sugar & marshmallows appears, but we had them with ham on Tuesday.  This is the Thanksgiving meal I have eaten for 40 years.  While a part of me would love to convince her to try brining a turkey or to let me make some cornbread & sage stuffing or baked zucchini casserole, I know it really wouldn't be 'right'. It wouldn't be Thanksgiving. When it is my kitchen and my meal, then I'll do those things.  Someday, in the future, when I have more than DH & I to feed (the boys eat so little they barely count as half a serving combined) & it's worth the effort to make all that food, I will have a brined turkey with cornbread stuffing, a smoked salmon appetizer, shredded brussel sprouts with bacon, savory sweet potato casserole and whatever else comes to mind.  Or maybe my kids will look back when they are 40 & say "Ah Thanksgiving....No one could make reservations the way our mom did."