Not violently allergic, but there’s a reason, apparently, why I always get a little sick on Thanksgiving and don’t feel well for a few days—if I eat turkey. They disguise it. I can usually detect it: turkey pastrami and lunch meat to me has a very bad flavor. You can spice up turkey itself so it tastes pretty good—but apparently it and I don’t get along.
So I’m doing lasagne and fixing turkey for Jane. We’ll have stuffing. Stuffing and lasagne just boggles the mind. But hey, if I don’t put turkey gravy on mine, I’ll be fine.
Chicken, I’m fine with, and it doesn’t taste bad. But turkey, not so much, apparently.
Prospective Menu
Roast Duck
Parmesan Mashed Potatos
Pancetta Green Beans
Apple Dumplings
Prospective menu: Jane gets turkey with gravy, I get lasagna, and we’ll probably each have a baked sweet potato. I’m going to get the makings for green bean casserole, with onion crisps, and Jane will get that. She’s not as sensitive to onion if totally crisped like paper, but she’s still going to suffer. I’m not going to share in that one. My reaction is far more violent to far less. It’s a Bren and the dowager’s tea moment.
We’ll have pumpkin pie, storebought—we’ll throw out the part we don’t eat on the day, because…fattening, and we don’t have anybody to give it to. And we’ll probably have some kind of bundt cake or something Jane likes better than the pie.
Not a real formal dinner, but pretty well what we like, and what we can get away with…
If Jane wants a bit of onion for the taste, but her insides don’t really tolerate it, she might benefit from taking some charcoal tablets right after the meal. I don’t tolerate onion, garlic, cayenne pepper and such at all well, but I’ve found that if I eat somewhere else and can’t avoid them, I can take about 8 – 10 tablets of Norit (activated charcoal, I think it’s called, though I don’t know why or what’s activated about it) as soon as possible after the meal, and it helps a lot to mitigate or even completely avoid the usual unpleasantness. It’s as if the charcoal absorbs the irritants, rather like it does in the usual aquarium filters, before they can hit the intestines and irritate them.
It’s easily available without prescriptions, usually recommended as a treatment for diarrhea or poisoning or sometimes against itching, but I’ve found it to be most efficacious for protecting my poor irritable insides.
It’s activated by baking. Charcoal has a very high surface area, and a strong affinity for aDsorbing stuff, even gasses. “D” is a surface effect, “B” is incorporation. Baking drives off everything that can be volatilized. (So repeateth the Chemistry student.)
Curious–Mom’s recipe for lasagne had sauted onions and a bit of garlic in the meat. But if you’re making it yourself…
For the last few years, my youngest surviving brother has hosted us for Thanksgiving Dinner. This year, they’re going to Europe, leaving on Thursday morning, so my parents have made plans to go out to a restaurant for dinner. I don’t blame them, they don’t want to go through the hassle of cooking anything special, and then having the leftovers, the cleanup, etc. to do. I’ve been invited to go with them, and so the three of us will have dinner out. I’m not all that comfortable doing it that way, because the people who work at the restaurant have families, too, and it IS a holiday. But, I don’t want my parents to feel as though I’m ungrateful, even though I am grateful they’ve invited me.
Personally, I could treat Thanksgiving Day as any other day, no special meal, no special activity, and not because I’m not thankful, but because it’s another day I have a roof, food, and relative security. Unfortunately, part of my family (a different brother) has decided to be dysfunctional at this time and so the festive mood that would be prevalent has been somewhat tarnished. “You can pick your friends, but family, that’s in the stars….”
I’m not for requiring retail employees to work on Thanksgiving or other traditional holidays: it’s just not necessary. The merchandise will be there the day after or the day before, and the people LEAST able to get off and shop are the working folk—who would thus have fewer days to shop, eh? In the *stupid!* department. Shooting themselves in the foot.
Restaurants, whose very business is gathering people and feeding them, are in the hospitality business. Most that we frequent have their regulars and know us, so it’s a kind of a different relationship, much more of a feel-good warm-fuzzy than handing somebody a sack of socks or toothpaste. So I’ll patronize those sorts of places on a holiday if they’re open—we did indeed think of going out for a dinner; but we decided we’d be just as comfy tucking in with our favorite foods and playing video games.
My friends here might find this report on cats and dogs drinking interesting. But in defense of dogs, cats are ambush hunters with notoriously little stamina, where as dogs are “coursers”, running their prey to exhaustion. It’s said, “The wolf eats with his feet.” 😉
Re the onions and lasagna—I read labels on all the food I buy. I can tolerate a smidge, if it’s below ‘salt’ on the ingredients list. [They are generally listed in order of amounts.]