We think of Thanksgiving as a standard holiday, with a standard meal, and yet, there’s no standard way of celebrating Thanksgiving. Some like turkey. Some don’t. Some like a roasted turkey. Some like a deep fried turkey. Or an ice cream turkey. Some have a glazed ham or steaks or a pork roast or vegan tofurkey. Stuffing has some ingredients in common, bread, milk, celery, onion and spices. But depending on which part of the country you are in, there might be oysters in there too, or the bread might be corn bread. The one thing universal for those lucky ones among us is the company of loving family and friends, and food on the table in front of us.
I traveled for the holiday, not too far, but in Southern California not too far can mean hours in traffic. It wasn’t that this time, except for the usual slowdown spots where no one understands why the traffic bottlenecks. I traveled with my youngest brother and his young daughter to my other brother and sister-in-law’s home further south in California. My mother flew in from Chicago.
My mother is known for packing her bag with vegetables and fresh herbs from her garden, Tupperware containers of her own frozen bone broth, bottles of olive oil and even hamburger she grinds with my sister at home.
This Thanksgiving, my mother brought some of the lettuce from her garden that grows in cooler temperatures. She buys seeds the previous fall and waits until it starts to get cooler to plant some of her lettuces, the pink-colored variegated varieties and radicchio which grow in cooler weather. My brother has his own lettuce garden growing in some feed bins (typically used for livestock) down the hill in the back. It gets dark early, so he was out there after work harvesting lettuce with his headlamp on.
I brought nothing, just my clothes, an empty stomach and two hands to wash dishes.
Like many things that someone has spent a lifetime working out, cooking Thanksgiving dinner looks easy when my mother does it, like Picasso and painting. Years of preparing turkeys, or in general making gourmet meals out of the most humble ingredients, makes my mother’s timing impeccable. Every dish comes out at the right moment.
I’ve made a few turkeys myself, successful ones, so it’s a wonder why I just sit around and watch while drinking wine.
We had all the usual sides, green bean casserole with mushroom soup and French’s original crispy fried onions, baked sweet potato (no marshmallows or brown sugar), baked butternut squash, mashed potatoes and gravy. I’m the one who asks for the mashed potatoes, and who peels the potatoes, while everyone else claims to be boycotting carbs. Yet when the bowl comes around to me, there are barely enough potatoes to hold a small pool of gravy.
The turkey was an organic bird, ordered from a high-end grocery store, and when it was done, it looked too perfect, a plump, golden, shiny bird, like a fake bird crafted for the cooking section of a department store.
We stuffed ourselves at a table covered in a tablecloth of my mother’s, that we didn’t figure out was the wrong side up until the next night (we still thought it was beautiful), and then ate dessert. The guests brought the desserts, two seasonal tarts, one with hardened chocolate over pumpkin, and the other, homegrown persimmons in a crispy, buttery crust.
I washed a lot of dishes that night.
My brother has a busy life, but he always comes up with some new way for us to occupy ourselves during our holidays together. One Christmas he bought a ham, a French ham, the French version of Italian prosciutto. We had ham on sandwiches, on eggs, on pizza. Or we just slipped it into our mouths after slicing it. Now the French ham is a regular feature at our family gatherings, Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or just because it’s summer. Once he even took a flight up to northern California and flew back the same day just to get the ham.
This time it was a half wheel of Reggiano parmigiano. That is 20 Kg of cheese. It was delivered to the house.
I suppose cutting up a wheel of parmigiano wasn’t a new thing in our family. Our father did it. He would go to a shop, purchase a quarter wheel of cheese, bring it home, grate it, freeze it and sprinkle it on pasta and bread with tomato sauce. My dad’s grated parmigiano would last three to four months, at which point, he’d have to go through the ritual all over again.
“I never understood why Dad didn’t buy more than a quarter wheel. Then I went with him once, and realized a quarter wheel was the most he could carry out of the shop by himself,” my other brother said.
As for the ham, cutting the parmigiano requires an array of specialized sharp tools. Some photos of the tools available were exchanged between mother and son. In the end, my mother showed up with a knife that looks like a prop from the Arabian Nights or Indiana Jones. The additional knives needed my brother purchased, ones that looked like they were first created for medieval torture and then evolved into a more practical purpose after medieval torture was no longer a thing.
After watching a couple videos on YouTube, I felt nervous, like the time I saw a man sitting at a table at an oyster farm in Mendocino, California with his hand wrapped in a fresh wad of white bandage gauze. I had faith in my brother who is a surgeon, who operates on the hearts of babies sometimes born a few weeks before they’re supposed to be born. On the other hand, I could see an abrupt end to his audacious career, killed by a half wheel of parmigiano.
My brother spread out a large piece of plastic on the counter, the thick kind that makes you think someone is up to no good.
Crime scene parmigiano my sister-in-law called it.
The first cut was done since the wheel was a half, not the whole 40 Kg, a potentially lethal weapon if it’s not secured on the shelf over your head. He scored the wheel across the midline on the rind on the bottom with one of the smaller knives, and then wedged three of the knives into the cheese along the putative break line. You stand back and watch as the wheel breaks apart on its own, like stress fractures in the side of a mountain.
After that happens, everyone swoops in for the pieces of cheese that crumble off at the fissure. And you do it all over again until the sections are a size everyone can carry away with themselves.
“Other families sit around and watch football. We cut parmigiano,” my brother said.
You have to wonder if he had thought about what he would do with all that cheese, besides create another impossible to solve mathematical puzzle for his wife in how to store it in her refrigerator.
We didn’t have to think for long. Or when you have that much cheese, you begin to think it goes with everything.
One of the scheduled events for my mother was to make tomato sauce from my brother’s homegrown San Marzano tomatoes collected over the summer. A good old-fashioned Sicilian recipe in a giant pot. If anything is my comfort food, her sauce and meatballs would be it. No one makes sauce and meatballs like my mother. I taunt my niece and nephews (and my brother-in-law) when I’m there having them and they are not. When we sat down to eat the pasta with the sauce the next night (because sauce is better the next day), I remember thinking, I can put as much cheese as I want on my pasta. I buried, yes buried my pasta in freshly grated parmigiano.
Parmigiano appeared everywhere after that. On salads. On bread. In soup. As chunks with honey. And in our gift bags from the weekend.
That’s how our meals went over Thanksgiving, except for the youngest among us, my 4-year old niece. My niece opted for her own menu of blueberry pancakes, fried rice and a lot of strawberry or peppermint ice cream. Her version of fried rice is white rice sauteed in soy sauce with what she calls “red meat” thrown in. The red meat is Spam! I’m not sure I’ve ever eaten Spam, not on purpose anyway, but her father claims it’s not the worst thing for her to eat. The ingredients in Spam are just two, ham and salt, with the salt perhaps the most important ingredient for her. And when it’s not enough salt, you add more soy sauce.
Her menu does include green things, but it’s limited to the occasional cucumber slice and seaweed wraps. She used to inhale fruit, at a worrisome pace, whether toddler or adult. Now she eats fruit, but only in pancakes or ice cream.
Her father never knows what it’s going to be each day, pancakes or fried rice. One day it was pancakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The only thing he is sure of is the ice cream. Every day, there’s going to be ice cream. But she’s at that age where she gets a treat for accomplishing 4-year old goals, like eating a slice of cucumber. Or more often, for just smiling at us. I look at her and know now why we eat ice cream and carbohydrates, whatever form they come in, when we feel a little down or more often bored (like sitting in front of a computer) as adults – our loving dads.
“Someday you’re going to be sorry that you didn’t start eating the meatballs sooner,” I said to her.
“No,” she said. “Never.”
The holiday lingers for a few days for me after I return home. My brother and sister-in-law have orange trees and avocado trees. I have a hard time figuring out the season of their orange trees. I can find a tree with oranges ripe for juicing almost any month of the year. I’ve learned that citrus becomes sweeter the longer it stays on the trees. It’s a game though. I still have to claim my oranges before the birds do. Sometimes I work hard to pick the best ones off the top of the tree, only to find they’ve been hollowed out by a bird.
The navel oranges I can count on to be ripe at Christmas. The juice oranges are sweet, like sugar has been added, while the navel oranges are a little tart. I’ve always loved that little bit of tart of the navel orange. After watching a V8 film from a few decades ago dug out of an elderly aunt’s personal items after she passed, my sister-in-law asked, “Are you eating an orange?”
I was.
So I take home a bag of goodies – cheese, navel oranges, orange juice and avocados. Their two avocado trees were full of fruit, so many that they appeared, while I was standing under the tree, like the objects hanging in the sky of a Magritte painting. Their avocados were an enigma until my sister-in-law figured out you had to leave them on the countertop until they look nearly rotten before you eat them. This might be weeks. My brother said some people leave them on the trees for even a couple of years. I now wonder if there is such a thing as a tree-ripened avocado. My mother traded out her homegrown goodies for some avocados, but with the short interval between the holidays, she might just be bringing them back, ripe in time to eat for Christmas.
Yes, I think in Southern California, we have Thanksgiving every day.
Books…
Norwegian Lessons in Indonesia (2023)
An Accidental Artist: Discovering Creativity through Scuba Diving (2018)
Art for sale at AnemoneWatch on Square
Janice Nigro 
Leave a comment