Fancy Feasts Come in All Sizes

 Happy Thanksgiving Eve!

Guys, if you've made it this far, 
you're probably safe.

I'm not making turkey this year. Or stuffing. Or mashed potatoes. Or cranberry sauce. In short, not making a traditional turkey dinner at all.

It's just Precocious Daughter and me tomorrow. And we don't want to mess with all that just for the two of us. Well, there's Tacocat, but I don't think he's ever seen a Thanksgiving dinner before, so we'll just toss him a few extra treats and tell him that's it, that's the holiday. 

Don't anybody show him this, though.

Instead we're making a couple of family-favorite dishes together that are delicious, nostalgic, and hard to screw up. And don't create a lot of dirty dishes, which is just extra-thankful. 

But I have a co-worker...I'll call her Edith, because with all affection and kindness, she's kind of a dingbat.

Look it up, children.

Like me, Edith is also planning a quiet Thanksgiving with just her, her spouse, and a pet or two. Unlike me, Edith is going pilgrim-shit crazy over Thanksgiving dinner.

Candied whole cranberries. Roasted sweet potato medallions. Probably something made with phyllo dough. Hoo-boy, nothing jacks up your effort-to-results ratio like making shit out of phyllo dough.

Don't get me wrong, I love phyllo and phyllo-centric dishes. But if I'm going there, I need there to be a house full of people to congratulate me on the lighter-than-air delicacies I've created. PDaughter is totally worth the effort, but her GenZ default enthusiastic reaction of two head bobs and a "Yeah, nice" does not provide my USRDA of validation.

I slaved over sheets of premade frozen phyllo
and all I get is a goddamn thumbs up emoji?

Also on Edith's Thanksgiving Day menu: A salad that has more than three ingredients, rolls that didn't emerge from a cardboard tube that was smacked against the kitchen counter, and an appetizer involving foreign cheese and artisanal shaved prosciutto. And I'll bet her stuffing has sausage and hand-scraped thyme in it.

No hate to any of this food. It all sounds pretty delicious to me. (Except for stuffing with sausage in it - why does that mess seem to have gone viral this year and how can we stop it in 2025 and/or perpetuity?) Yet in almost exactly the same way that I wouldn't hire Timothée Chalamet to scour my bathtub in a g-string and not livestream it to all my friends, I can't be arsed to put all this work into a feast that only two people will ever see.  Never mind the fact that my refrigerator wouldn't hold a fraction of the leftovers generated by this meal. If I can't shovel it into Rubbermaid containers and send it home with six different people, it's going to get fed to the neighborhood raccoons. 

And I don't even mean throwing it in the dumpster for the trash pandas to raid - I'm talking about heaping paper plates with food and sailing them, Frisbee-style, off my balcony to their little waiting paws.

Ermahgerd, charcooteries!

So, while I wish Edith all the best and an enjoyable high-end Thanksgiving meal, PDaughter and I will be happily eating peasant food and treating Tacocat to a can of Fancy Feast turkey-flavored slop in gravy. I think we'll all be happy.

And to all my Drunkards I wish a happy, healthy Thanksgiving that is just the right size and shape to hold your gratitude. Internet hugs and sweet little raccoon kisses.