On the menu

If you have been reading here for a while you know I have One True Thanksgiving menu. It consists of the following:

• roasted fresh turkey (I don't fool around with all that thawing / brining / deep-frying business. Buy it fresh and stick it in the oven. Baste.)
• mashed potatoes with All The Butter
• sweet potatoes mashed with Surprise! More Butter, also pineapple tidbits and orange juice and pecans
• cornbread stuffing (veggies sautéed in yet more butter, natch)
• gravy
• Penitential Cranberry Sauce
• some green vegetable
• maybe an autumnal salad but maybe not
• maybe rolls but probably not (if I make bread dough, man, there will be BUTTER in that bread dough)
• pecan pie (moooore butter!)
• pumpkin pie (even more butter!)

We mix it up around here for Christmas and Easter and birthdays. I am not generally rigid about food. But I do exactly one Thanksgiving menu. Three years ago I made a different kind of cranberry sauce and I had to write a whole blog post about it.

I thought it was a quirk of mine, but it has become a shared quirk. The boys are very insistent about keeping the penitential in Penitential Cranberry Sauce. Today I said I was considering a different sweet potato dish, and Joe said, "WHAT?! Noooo!" He thought for a moment. "Maybe you could make two dishes of sweet potatoes."