I’m writing this on thanksgiving. I’m stuck in my chair. My cat has pretty much decided he wants to eat a lot today. When he doesn’t get his way, he goes everywhere else for a while.
Photo by Alison Marras on Unsplash
Then he comes back and sits on my lap, putting all of his body weight – only about 12 or 13 pounds – into holding me down. There’s a big difference between when he’s resting in my lap, and when he’s trying to punish me.
You’d never think that 13 pounds would pin you down. But Burmese I guess are known for being big, heavy cats. Yes, you’ve got your 23 pound Maine Coon. But I guarantee your 23 pound Maine Coon does not way as much as a 13 pound Burmese.
Every Burmese owner is nodding right now. And grunting in agony over the heavy load of a Burmese crushing their thigh bones.
In 59 minutes, I have to push my cat off of me, so I can go prep up the turkey. Let’s get this out of the way…
Ignore turkey cooking directions. a 13 pound turkey (ironically, weighing much less than a 13 pound Burmese) supposedly only takes 3 1/2 hours to cook.
Hah hah hah hah!
No.
Have you EVER had a turkey take precisely the amount of time to cook that the directions say it does?
I’m now factoring in an extra 90 minutes to any cooking time I see, because let me tell you, my turkey is still pasty and gobbling at 3 hours into cooking.
I’m surprised there aren’t widely publicized statistics of people starving to death on Thanksgiving over the incredibly long delay in waiting for your bird to finish its cooking.
This is a time to celebrate tradition, a slice of American life, Thanksgiving, where my mother would head downstairs at 5:30 in the morning, full of resentment over all of us wanting to eat this massive feast of yams, dead bird, some bread and raisin concoction jammed inside the body of the bird, and of course, cinnamon candies boiled in water and added to apple sauce. “Mom, where’s the marshmallows?”
I’m calling the rules committee on this – you just can’t take a dead bird and stick it in oil. No. That’s a Chanukah thing, not thanksgiving! The bird gets butter smeared on its corpse, and jammed into an oven wrapped in foil like a tasty culinary mummy of some kind. If you cheat on this, I guarantee you haven’t kept Thanksgiving, and you’re going to need to repeat it 30 days later so you can get it right.
Barbeque turkey… okay, it’s a neat idea. But this is thanksgiving. You smear the thing with butter, salt, pepper, and that,s it, because that’s how the Pilgrims did it, as advised in their Ye Olde Better Homes and Gardens Cookbooke! Save the Barbeque Turkey for the Superbowl or something.
And it’s called stuffing. not dressing. See the thanksgiving rule book. I’m calling foul on most of you!
Or maybe it’s fowl.
I’m delirious with hunger now, because my cat has me pinned in my chair.
Sigh.
