My newest article in the St. Helena Star is about a particularly strange Thanksgiving dinner that took place when I was ten-years old. It goes like this…
Thanksgiving 1975
In 1975 Thanksgiving had many of the same ingredients as today — turkey, football, family drama, cranberry sauce — but it all seemed so much bigger. More necessary, somehow.
Nina, my grandmother, spent days secretly creating two important dishes that she’d developed over the course of her lifetime: stuffing and chocolate-cream pie.
“In my Will I’ve left the recipes to my favorite,” she’d say. It was never clear who she meant, but whoever it was held the power.
Mom would sigh and leave the room, rolling her eyes.
On Thanksgiving Day my brothers and I awoke to the roasted, sweet-savory smell of turkey in the oven mixed with the gag-inducing aroma of “turkey-gut soup,” as my mother insisted on calling the stock she made from the heart, kidney and neck. The greasy mixture simmered on the stove for the entire day until, miraculously, she transformed it into the best gravy that anyone had ever had. Read more >>>
