Cooking Up a Fire Storm

Happy belated Thanksgiving to all my food/American history lovers out there! This year I set out to cook my own Thanksgiving feast with my roommate and brother. I was excited, I was motivated, I was… not at all prepared for the stress that comes with cooking a large meal. Not just a large meal, but a large meal with such high standards attached. I mean for god’s sake this is the meal when the Indians totally forgave the white man for being real jerks and broke bread with them. Peace was accomplished, bygones became bygones, I’m pretty sure this is where the high-five originated. That is A LOT to live up to.

The struggles started in the grocery store. As someone whose grocery shopping is limited to spaghetti, vegetables and almond butter, I was flustered. I felt like I had never been in a grocery store before. When did those things get so confusing? I had so many questions. Many of which I was too embarrassed to ask of a real person. What if my questions were common sense? What if anyone who spent more than 12 dollars at the grocery store at one time could answer them? Does everyone know if active yeast is the same as nutritional yeast? If Lilly’s pure pumpkin is the same as pumpkin puree? The difference between kosher salt and regular salt or where the piecrusts are?

After we left the grocery store my nerves settled and the ease of Thanksgivings past crept into my mind, surely this year would be the same! I envisioned us laughing casually, nibbling on the cheese and crackers we set out and gently waving an oven mitt over a steaming dish to cool it down. Of course all of these visions were in slow motion because isn’t that how we all make memories? These images clouded the reality that would soon hit me.

The afternoon started out so peaceful and smooth, but it was not long before the fast-paced, high-risk activity of making sure every dish received the proper cook time and attention began. I cannot even accurately put into words the transition that occurred in the kitchen. And probably more likely than not, I was the one who instigated this transition from calm and collected to THERE’S NO TIME!!!!!! Gravy was flying, measuring cups went missing, people were crying! (a lot of the recipes called for onions.) My brother and I had a quick, pointless snap at each other over why we didn’t buy a potato masher. Honestly, I was treating each situation/minor hiccup as if a bomb were going to go off if we did not have each dish piping hot and on the table at 6:30.

But… SPOILER ALERT! I panicked for no reason. Dinner was delicious. We laughed, we drank, we cheers-ed to multiple things for which to be thankful, my favorite being that the house didn’t catch on fire when we burned through a pot while boiling potatoes. Oh, did I not mention that? It’s okay it wasn’t a disaster. Unless you call mashed potatoes that smell like burned steel a disaster, then, yes it was a disaster. But it didn’t matter; we had successfully cooked Thanksgiving dinner on our own! Maybe next year we’ll try to cook a turkey. Or maybe we’ll just buy a rotisserie chicken. Because I KNOW where that is in the grocery store.

Here is our wonderful dinner:



Here is the pot we burned through to make that beautiful dinner:

Home for the HOlidays

For some reason, during my last trip home to Colorado, I decided to get really into reminiscing. It might have been the crisp, nostalgic feeling of Colorado fall or the challenge I had made for myself to stop depending solely on the Internet and TV for entertainment (I’ve been feeling dumb lately) but I started looking through a bunch of old stuff in my childhood room. Okay, fine, the Internet was down. You can really learn a lot about yourself by looking through all your old stuff. And the things I learned were shocking.

Shock number one came from when I decided to check the small trap door under the ceiling vent in my room where I had routinely hid a treasure box. I was hoping to find extra cash, an ironic keepsake I once cherished, or at the very least, a funny note from my youth. But instead I found a (ONE) shoelace and the spare key to the very “treasure” box I was holding. Obviously I was disappointed. But that disappointment was quickly replaced by confusion.

What value did I place on shoelaces to warrant hiding them in the ceiling? Had something spectacular happened with this shoelace and it needed to be hidden in memoriam? It couldn’t have been making a game winning shot in a high school basketball game, because if that were the case I might as well have hidden all of my shoelaces (I was an all-star, okay?)

Why would I go through all the trouble of hiding something if I wasn’t even going to bother locking it? Did I really regard the ceiling vent as the end all be all of hiding spots? As if anybody determined enough to check this ceiling vent should be rewarded with an unlocked box. I mean they obviously put in the extra legwork. Either that or they are our electrician. What if banks took on this same mentality? A bank robber, after getting past security, would find all the cash divided into perfect to-go bags and a getaway car idling in the parking lot. Ya know, because they must have worked really hard to get there.

I guess I can only speculate as to what made this lone shoelace worthy of being hidden, but apparently not a lot has changed, because I put the shoelace and keys back in the box and returned it safely to the ceiling vent to relive this anticlimactic discovery in another 15 years.

After putting away my “treasures” I set my sights on my senior yearbook. And this is where I made my second shocking discovery: my family wanted my high school graduating class to remember me as a ho. There is a section in the Cherry Creek High School yearbook where parents of graduating seniors submit a baby picture and note for their child. In these notes parents usually gush about how proud they are and how excited they are to see where the future takes their shining star. My note was just like everyone else’s except for the extra special, “P.S. Oh I remember her…” signed at the bottom. While some families quoted scripture, my family quoted the famous Steve Carell line from “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” that ends with “…she was a ho. Fo sho.”

I know why the quote is there, it was my brother’s attempt to insert one of our favorite jokes and lighten the mood of what I can only assume was the most life altering transition in my parents’ lives (it is really difficult when your favorite child leaves home). I appreciate the connection my brother was making but the unfortunate reality is that our “inside joke” makes me look like a slut. I mean, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” was huge when I was in high school; EVERYONE saw that movie. There was no way to utter the words, “I remember her” without someone following it up with “She was a ho!” It’s a hilarious scene in the movie, it’s a fun line to quote at parties, it’s NOT a great way to be immortalized in your high school yearbook.

The worst part, or best part, depending on your sense of humor, is that yearbooks are all about remembering. My note reads like my parents are predicting the future of what my fellow classmates will say out loud when my name is mentioned at reunions, etc. Or in an alternative scenario, a fellow classmate is also reminiscing while home for vacation and upon flipping through the ol' HS yearbook, stumbles upon my baby picture and note and thinks, “oh, wow. That girl must really have been a ho if her parents will so candidly put that in her yearbook. Who are they fooling? We all know the end of that quote.” Of course this person would be someone that clearly did not know me in high school (which is a high possibility; I had a graduating class of nearly 1,000) because I was anything but a ho in high school and that’s what’s FO SHO.