The Preamble to the Meal

So this year I got to help host Thanksgiving. Mostly because I think CA has had a lot of other things on her mind and it gave me something to fill the infinite amount of hours in my day. Believe me I was excited to have a project to work on! My head was filled with To Do lists from cleaning our radiators to buying out the local grocery store and undertaking the task of creating all new side dishes for the meal.

And I'm just going to say this in my defense up front, because it's my blog and I can, originally when we were planning the meal at least 10 people were going to be eating. So obviously it would have been necessary to have 4 different kinds of vegetables and 2 kinds of potatoes.

CA & I head out to the "big" Econo Foods, armed with my list & a diet root beer I'm ready to go! And as I start piling the fresh produce into our cart this sneaky anxiety starts to creep over me... we are NOT going to have enough room. I order CA to grab another cart & we're off! We seriously could have been in a comerical the way we were flying around the store, filing things into the baskets and yelling at each other across the isles. Okay maybe that's a little dramatic but it was pretty close.

Our refrigerator had gone from bare to bursting at the seems when we arrived home and unloaded the 40 bags. Sorry environmentalists, they were the paper kind. (Side note: we do reuse them to pick up the dog poop though... that counts as recycling)

It was also good because all of this food preparation give my grandma something to worry about in her free time. She kept wondering around the kitchen commenting about how much food we were actually making and who was going to eat it all. Although I've attended many meals prepared from her kitchen which left the family with an abundance of leftovers. But I will say in her defense (see I'm an equal opportunity defender...) that only 7 people came over to our house for dinner. But really I was just following in my mother's footsteps because she started the whole thing with buying a 24 lb turkey.

But really who can deny that the best part of a huge meal is the left overs? I mean you have to have something to show for all your hard work, because typically the main event only lasts about 20 mins and then the whole thing is over. Well I guess the dessert does make a little encore appearance later in the evening.

The moral of the story was learning that there is a lot more that goes into hosting a holiday than what might appear on the surface. And that really I'm doomed to be an over preparer of food after following in my grandmother's and mother's footsteps!