Turkey Day Depression
I used to love Thanksgiving, when I was young and full of energy. My mom would set out a snack table with nuts, chips, crackers, onion dip, salsa, and guacamole. She'd make the guacamole herself and it was amazing. I would sometimes fill myself up completely on the snackbar, only to have some of the most delicious food stack in front of me for dinner. My mom would make mashed potatos (that were delicious), turkey (that was soft and flavorful), creamed corn, rolls (that were sometimes perfect and sometimes slighlty burnt), a vege-tray (with olives, cherry tomatoes, celery, and some other things I can't recall now), eggnog, and all that jazz. I would then eat until I was so sick that I'd go throw up.It was great.
And the thing is, my mother loved to cook. She loved it even more than she loved her job, her truck, her sewing, her friends, her pets, her garden, or well anything. My mom hated it when me and my brothers moved out, because she went from cooking for us nightly to cooking for us once a week. When that happened, she'd endevour to make each meal special. One week she cooked fajitas, something she had never done. Another time, she made french onion soup, and served it in special little bowls. She'd get puzzled when we'd compliment her food and then request that she make her wonderful beef stew or pot-roast sometime. She wanted to cook, and to try new things, whereas we just wanted something to eat while we socialized with our parents.
Anyways, my mom died last year, and for the first time ever we were kind of stuck as far as thanksgiving. My dad wanted to just skip it, grab some turkey dinners from the grocery store and just do that. Instead, Jaia and I pushed for having a homemade turkey dinner. After some pressuring, we got our way.
Now, I won't lie to you, the turkey was not great, the mashed potatoes weren't that great, and the rolls came to us frozen from the grocery store. We didn't have a single damn thing that shone as being wonderful or delicious. But at least we tried. We sat around eating our slightly-dry turkey, talking about my mom and how much she loved all this. We told stories that we remembered of her and in our own way, turned thanksgiving into a happy memory. We all missed my mom, but at least we were honoring her memory...
Well, a year passed, and Thanksgiving came again. This time, Jaia went to Michigan to visit her family, and my older brother decided that the turkey was too much of a hassle so we were just going to cook a ham. I decided that I would try to make guacamole and the onion dip, and my dad made mashed potatos.
I screwed up on the guacamole. I don't know how or where, but it didn't come out right. The onion dip comes from a baggy that gets mixed with sour cream, so I made that right easily. But the guacamole was too much lime and not enough...something. It was lacking the right flavor.
My dad's mashed potatos were delicious, though he makes them in a completely different way than my mom did.
As for the ham...well, this was the first year in my life that we had a ham instead of turkey.
I never want to eat ham again.
