"Friendsgiving"

Meredith Ashton

The Perfect Meal Final

21 November 2016

“Friendsgiving”

My favorite day of the year is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. This is when we cook. Or, to be more precise, this is the day that my aunt and grandma arrive at our house early, armed with bagels and coffee, to begin the Thanksgiving preparations. I remember waking up early to the smell of my stepmom already starting on the stuffing. Bleary-eyed, I tie up my hair and stagger downstairs in my pajamas to help roll out the sticky dough for the pumpkin rolls. My dad is there to take pictures of my epic bedhead, which is now destined for Facebook publication. I peel bags of potatoes until my fingers ache and I’m ready to throw myself into the pot with the now-naked vegetables. My grandma stands next to me, dicing celery and onions in her floral collared shirt and pleated khakis, gossiping about the recent scandals in her bridge club (apparently Mary Jane has been taking lots of trips to the casino since her husband got sick). She chops by muscle memory, her eyes roaming everywhere aside from the sharp knife she expertly wields.  

The work is long and strenuous, but it’s worth it to sit down at the table surrounded by my family. My grandma taught me that the hours of peeling and boiling and chopping and beating have a meaning beyond the physical; the mouth-watering mashed potatoes are a way to demonstrate to your loved ones the depth of your affection. Knowing every intimate step in the process of creating a dish and then setting it down on the Thanksgiving table translates to I love you, we are family, and we share what we have been given.

Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday, and Thanksgiving dinner, the Perfect Meal. But when my parents got divorced, it was no longer a time that our entire family could come together at one table. It became a holiday of two dinners, of feeling filled with too much food and not enough connection. I remember driving away from my mom’s cinnamon-scented kitchen to be greeted by dad’s family with a flurry of hugs and “where have you been?” I push mashed potatoes around my plate, already full from the three course “lunch” I’d eaten an hour before and answer the same obligatory college questions I’d just heard from my mom’s family. Thanksgiving became a disjointed day severed in two. Thus, my current quest for the Perfect Meal necessitates a wholeness, a sense of cohesion and belonging that I’ve been lacking since my family’s separation. I want a feeling of togetherness instigated by my own act of love.

My initial premise for my Perfect Meal centered around preparing holiday comfort foods with and for my four housemates (Amelia, Emmy, Jake, & Julia). I wanted to prepare the meal in accordance with a vegetarian diet using mostly gluten-free ingredients (Jake is gluten-free). Julia, the only carnivore in the house, has grown significantly less skeptical of “vegetarian food” throughout the quarter, although she will occasionally venture to the cafeteria in search of “some real food.” My housemates and I selected the dishes from our favorite holiday foods to create a new tradition. “Perfect,” in this context, didn’t require professional culinary execution or presentation. Instead, I desired a cheery meal with my housemates; a way to express my love and gratitude.

The excellent thing about preparing Thanksgiving at home is that the ingredients magically appear in the cabinets. As we were now technically the “adults” of the house, we had to go to the store ourselves. Not that I minded all that much. There’s something very satisfying about crossing items off of a grocery list and seeing the colorful packages accumulate in the cart. Shopping, however, necessitates making at least a thousand choices. I began to question every aspect of my alleged food knowledge. Did I want the rotini or the elbow noodles? The generic Target brand or the name-brand Barilla? The family size or the economy pack? Whole grain or organic? I almost called my mother at least five times before giving in and selecting an inexpensive box with aesthetically-pleasing packaging. Between Target and the Natural Health Center (where I found all my local, organic, and pricey produce), the bill came out to be around $30 for my dish. Paying for things as an “adult” is not nearly as much fun, either.

“Friendsgiving” Menu:

Amelia’s Baked & Seasoned Brussels Sprouts (recipe credit: her mother)

Julia’s Garlic Smashed Potatoes (thanks, Google)

Jake’s Vegan Meatloaf (affectionately called “Eatloaf” by his grandparents)

            Tofu, Beef Substitute, Walnuts, Celery, Onions, & Seasoning

Baked Mac & Cheese (courtesy of my mother)

            Rotini noodles with multi-cheese sauce, baked with cracker crumbs

Emmy’s Chocolate, Caramel, and Candy Drizzled Apples (found on Facebook)

Back in our house kitchen, I was everywhere at once, determined to make up for the fact that we only had one oven by moving extra quickly. The box fan perched atop our fridge whirred incessantly, doing its best to blow cool air over our finicky smoke alarm. I combined the butter and the flour in a saucepan on the stovetop and added the milk in small portions, taking my mom’s direction to “whisk like mad” very literally for fear of burning the capricious sauce. Suddenly, smoke began to arise from the sauce and my nostrils caught the slight whiff of scalded milk. I turned down the heat and all seemed to be temporarily alright. I entered the “it’s all fine” stage of cooking, wherein I accepted that everything was going to go wrong, and it would all still be okay.

I began randomly chucking cheeses into the pot with abandon. Slices of Munster and Swiss and shredded Parmesan and extra sharp cheddar and American singles flew into the pot and melded into a light orange cream with a few turns of my whisk. My mom’s instruction to “throw in whatever cheese you have leftover in the fridge” gave me some peace of mind that I was, in fact, actually cooking and not just mutilating various cheeses. Granted, she also tastes the mixture before making an addition, but honestly it tasted the same to me before and after the second cup of extra sharp cheddar cheese, so I decided to simply go with “what felt right.” I learned that pasta sticks together after you cook it. This is inconvenient. After prying the cooked noodles apart with a spoon in a glass pan, I poured the finished sauce over the top, the cheese flowing out of the pot and onto the pasta in lovely waves of multi-shaded oranges.

“Mer, can you help me?” asked Jake as he rushed out the door, putting on his boots and coat at the same time. I gamely put his Eatloaf into the oven as he rushed off to Acapella practice.

I ceded control of the kitchen to Emmy, Amelia, and Julia, who all needed the counter space to begin preparing their own dishes. It was harder than I expected to step back and let them do the cooking. I loved the collaboration and teamwork and had every bit of faith in their cooking abilities. I just felt very attached to my Perfect Meal. Instead, I turned my attention to the table, delicately arranging the fake burgundy flowers and baby yellow-and-green gourds around my Forest Spruce candle centerpiece (I’ll admit that I felt grown-up purchasing a candle). Jake is not a fan of the gourds, what are apparently “a big hassle” to move off the table every time he wipes it down. Fortunately us girls outvoted him. I considered calling my mom to ask on which side of the plate the napkins are meant to be placed, but then I realized that no one else would actually notice either way.

We served the meal half an hour later than expected, as Amelia’s Brussels sprouts were very uncooperative about roasting. Jake, the only person in the house who can properly work our TV, put Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving on for a background to our meal, a cheerful little throwback. We ate in our comically sparse living room, which, after nearly ten weeks of us living in the house, is still in the theoretical stage of being decorated.

The table itself was so glorious that we grabbed our phones and snapped photos of the piles of mashed potatoes, gleaming glass dish of cracker-crumb-crusted mac and cheese, nicely-browned Eatloaf, leafy-green Brussels sprouts, and precarious stacks of candy-coated apples. For once, the lack of overhead lighting in our family room actually added to the ambiance, with only one small lamp and my candle to illuminate the feast. We took our seats with a sense of hushed reverence for what we had, against all the odds, created. I wanted to say grace, to verbalize the deep affection and regard I held for my housemates who doubled as my family here. I remember saying something mediocre and cliché. My words were dwarfed by the beauty of the meal before us: a shining pillar of what we could make together.

“This is a good way to sustain us for finals,” said Amelia as she took her first bite of mac and cheese. I couldn’t agree more. The Eatloaf was more like an “Eat-blob” in shape, the pasta should have been cooked longer, and the Brussels sprouts were under roasted. My mac and cheese, while a hit with my housemates, just didn’t taste as good as my mom’s.

More importantly, however, the meal in front of us was a beautiful reminder of our individual abilities, our support for one another, and of the homes to which we would be returning shortly. And so, did my Perfect Meal fulfill my childhood desire to celebrate Thanksgiving with one meal and one family? While I succeeded in creating a single meal, the very structure of my menu called for a representation of five unique families. I asked my housemates to bring a dish from their own holiday background, and together we created a new tradition drawn from each of our distinct family cultures. My definition of perfect, therefore, relies on creating wholeness from fragmentation--what I have done, or strived to do, from the very moment of my parent’s separation. Even now in college with my single familial unit, I’ve united my friends through sharing what makes each of us unique.

And so we lingered over our plates, munching through the caramel apple mountain as we watched Pilgrim Charlie Brown’s very racist interactions with Squanto after the Peanuts arrived on the Mayflower. I did all the dishes that night, singing very off-key Christmas carols as I washed the crumbs of my Perfect Meal off of our ceramic blue plates.