Modest Goddess

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Thanksgiving is at my house this year -- neutral territory for my father, who finds himself alone this year because his wife is out of town, spending the holiday with her family, where they can all speak Spanish, as he says. One of the best things is that I'll be leaving for work right after dinner, so everyone else will be washing the dishes. (By hand, people -- this is fine china.)

We'll be having the usual -- turkey, potatoes, yams, and some other things. This was the last week of mine and Big Big Man's farm share, and just like the past several weeks, it's got a bewildering array of mysterious and lumpy root vegetables. I suspect some of them may be turnips. My mother and Irish grandmother always dished up mashed turnips at holidays, and went wild over them, but I consider it one of the great blessings of America that when you emigrate here, you no longer have to eat nasty root vegetables like turnips. You can just leave them behind in the old country, where they belong. But although I won't be cooking them up for tomorrow, I'll be eating them anyway, damn it, because they are good for you, and I paid for them.

I browsed for some new recipes to make for the holiday and came across a new take on the classic string bean casserole -- the one where you dump frozen green beans and a can of mushroom soup in a dish, sprinkle fried onions on top and stick it in the oven for half an hour. This recipe was from Cook's Illustrated, the cooking magazine for nerds. They like to take cooking conundrums, like the fact that berries tend to sink to the bottom of a cake batter, and analyze how to fix it like NASA engineers figuring out how to send a probe to Jupiter. Anyway, someone over there decided that the classic string bean casserole was too yucky, mooshy and declasse, so she spent hours trying to "improve" it.

Improve the American classic? Sure, she might get a better taste from her version, which involves buying, cutting up and cooking fresh green beans, making your own mushroom sauce from scratch, and whipping up a fresh breadcrumb topping that doesn't have the "commercial" taste (as she sniffs) of the fried onions. But that's entirely missing the point. We LIKE the processed taste. We LIKE those commercialized fried onions. And we LIKE opening three cans and making an entire dish in a process that takes less than five minutes.

So yes, we'll be having it this year. And we'll like it. It wouldn't be Thanksgiving without a little bit of preservatives.

P.S. My old roomie will be posting live from Italy on her fabulous vacation this week! Check it out at http://jenniferkronstain.typepad.com/dailykronicle/.