It happens every Thanksgiving. After planning your dinner for
weeks, you go down to the kitchen before anyone wakes up, line up
the family recipes along the counter, pull the supplies out of the
refrigerator, and realize that you’re missing an important key
ingredient.
It happens every Thanksgiving. After planning your dinner for weeks, you go down to the kitchen before anyone wakes up, line up the family recipes along the counter, pull the supplies out of the refrigerator, and realize that you’re missing an important key ingredient.
Naturally, I don’t mean something obvious like, say, the turkey. Only an idiot would forget that. I mean the OTHER key ingredients. Ones like marjoram and dried rosemary or any other of the other bazillion things that cooking-challenged people, like me, successfully avoid buying at any other time of the year.
And it’s not like you can just jump in the car and drive to the store. Oh, noooo. Even if your store of choice is open on a national holiday, chances are that people more organized than you have already depleted the city’s entire supply of evaporated milk.
So that leaves you with two choices. You can 1) borrow from you neighbors or 2) fake it.
Obviously, the first choice is the easiest. Unless, of course, you’re like me and already in hock to almost everyone. At last count I owed my neighbor across the street an onion and pruning sheers; the one on the left two sticks of butter and a hot dog bun; and the one on the right four cups of corn starch, a garden hose and a box of bouillon cubes (chicken flavor). All in all, I’ve pretty much cleaned out my block and am now working my way around the corner and down the next street.
That said, it’s not too surprising that each Thanksgiving I have to resort to choice number two. And, really, faking it isn’t as hard as you’d think. In fact, there are quite a few dishes that come out just fine with a few substitutions. Take, for instance, what I call my Mushroom Risotto Stuffing Surprise. Last year, I discovered that if you’re out of brown rice, you can use a cup of Rice Krispies, the grated Parmesan can be substituted with mozzarella string cheese, and the vegetable stock can be swapped with a mixture of grape Kool-Aid and apple juice.
Hey, if you think that’s bad, at least it’s better than the time I made the turkey buffet casserole with ground animal crackers instead of bread crumbs. Or the time I had to use red jellybeans leftover from Easter in my cranberry orange relish.
In my defense, it’s not just me who fakes it. Once, I asked my friend Julie for her special Toasted Pecan Rosemary stuffing recipe and she said: Mix three cups of pecans, or chunky peanut butter, with two cups of croutons, or macaroni. Add either a half-cup of heavy cream, or two cups of Cool Whip. Then sprinkle with either grated parmesan or mozzarella cheese sticks. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes if you used the croutons, peanut butter and cheese sticks. Or bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes if you used the mozzarella, macaroni and Cool Whip, and 40 minutes if you used the croutons, pecans and grated parmesan.
I can’t tell you how much better this made me feel.
However, I haven’t made it through all these years of Thanksgiving dinners without learning a thing or two about faking it. The most important being that you should never, ever replace the marshmallows in the sweet potato casserole with chocolate chips.
Oh sure, there’s always the chance that maybe next Thanksgiving I’ll get lucky and come down to the kitchen, reach into my cupboard and find the exact amount of ground ginger and evaporated milk and diced nutmeg that I need.
Then again, there’s always the chance I’ll see Elvis in the small appliance section at Kmart, too.
Hey, stranger things have happened.
