Your story of "no gravy" saddened me. A great deal. But it also made me think of an idea for a topic...
...what are the worst Thanksgiving meal blunders/disasters any of you have ever had? Could be poorly cooked whatever, could be relatives that just refuse to eat good food...
For me, it was the first year my i s c & a aggie gf (now wife) dragged me away from Thanksgiving Dinner with my own family. We'd spent several years going to my folks' house for Tday dinner, and she really appreciated it because her family was a little bit non-traditional and never really had a tradition of a large Tday meal, certainly not one with turkey and dressing and gravy and all the other stuff. They occasionally got the family together for the evening meal, including aunts and uncles and cousins and whatnot, and it was typically enchiladas and other Tex-Mex stuff for dinner. Which was great and I was always glad to do it, just like she appreciated my family's "authentic Tday turkey dinner."
So anyway, this is the first year we're not doing lunch with my family, because my Aggie inlaws (who I really do just adore) had decided they wanted to do traditional Tday turkey dinner (at lunchtime of course) for the first time ever. Now, this by itself would not have been a big deal. But my i s c & a aggie wife's brother had recently begun dating a woman from Connecticut. Yes, down here we call those folk "yankees." And for some reason, my wonderful and AMAZING cook FIL had decided to ask the family to bring dishes which resulted in allowing this new yankee girlfriend to take on what is basically the most important and time-consuming part of the entire meal-- the dressing.
So to clarify for those who don't know it, down here in Texico and much of the South, the traditional dressing is cornbread dressing and is NOT stuffing and it doesn't go inside the turkey. It's a multi-day process that starts with straight up cornbread, which is baked and cooled and crumbled and then put into another dish and baked along with eggs and diced onion and celery and various herbs and spiced, separate in a casserole dish.
But my BIL's girlfriend from yankee-land somehow adopted responsibility for the dressing, and she made and brought Stovetop stuffing. I don't mean it was LIKE Stovetop stuffing, it was literally Stovetop stuffing prepared out of a box in a few minutes right in front of us.
Now I'm pretty easy-going and was able to roll with the punches, but my lovely i s c & a aggie bride was livid. She was pissed that her family had co-opted the holiday meal in the first place, she was pissed that her dad had delegated arguably the most important part of the meal, and she was pissed that it was Stovetop freaking stuffing she was expected to eat.
She did not eat it.
Instead she gave her dad the evil eye for most of the afternoon, and then told me we had to swing by MY family's house on the way home, to see if any of my mom's cornbread dressing was still around.
Fortunately, it was, and Thanksgiving was SAVED!!!!
So, anyone else have some Tday trauma to discuss??
