It's nearly that time of the year again--leaves turning the color of pumpkins and pomegranates, the smell of cinnamon and spiced cider in the air, and unusual meat items.
Yes, you read that correctly. Meat. Along with being a weather weenie, my husband is a meat junkie. When we moved to England for a couple of years, we chose our house based on the fact that it was around the corner from a butcher's shop ("A real, live butcher--right here in the village! Brains, liver, tongue--anything!"). The butcher, by the way, became one of his favorite people, but more about that in a moment.
You see, I grew up with a frozen Butterball at Thanksgiving, a ham at Easter, a ham at Christmas (both of which were those oblong shaped red-wrapped hams that I'm pretty sure are first cousins to balogna), and hamburger or pot roast in between holidays. So, you can imagine my curiosity when last week I saw an E-bay receipt for a 35-pound bottle of peanut oil, only to find out it is for deep-frying a turkey (and anything else that has a surface, apparently). Fine. I'm pretty happy with most things with a greasy, crispy coating. At least it's an actual turkey, unlike the great "turkey loaf fiasco of '98" as I've come to call it.
My grandparents had kindly taken in a woman who, conveniently was a nurse and could help take care of them, and had no other place to live. Since before I can remember, my grandmother had hosted Thanksgiving dinner for all my cousins--turkey, stuffing, yams with apples and marshmallows, candy corn--the whole spread. Well, in an effort to help my grandma, this lady convinced her to simplify, and to cook something simpler. That something turned out to be a loaf of turkey parts, probably mostly meat shaped into a brick. Grandma died a few years ago, but I'm guessing she still hides behind the post of the pearly gates every time Thanksgiving rolls around and we remember that day, it's shock, it's horror, it's gnashing of teeth, and maybe even a little bit of fainting. We can laugh now whenever we tell the story.
We laugh too about the "Turducken." Yeah, that's pretty much what it sounds like--a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken, each with a layer of dressing in-between. Something my husband read about in the Wall Street Journal. "Did you know you can order these, and they'll ship them too your doorstep in dry ice?!" That they will. And there's nothing like dry ice in a pot of water to entertain your kids for the afternoon.
But to entertain my husband, meat is usually part of the picture. There's something about it that helps create memories--like our memories of England. At Christmas when the butcher posted a sign to order your Christmas goose early, you can guess who was first on the list. "It's like having a real Charles Dickens Christmas in England!" I had to admit, an English Christmas goose did sound a bit romantic. Until it came.
"Do you have any cash?" my husband asked when he walked in the door from the butcher. "I didn't actually ask how much the goose would cost--he said I could pay him the rest the next time I went in." About $120 later, we realized our Dickensian Christmas goose wouldn't fit in our tiny British oven. So, as any red-blooded American would do, we barbecued it on the grill. And you know what? That was the tastiest meat I've ever had! And a great memory, too.
So, while the rest of us are planning Halloween costumes and trick-or-treating routes, and maybe getting a jump on our Christmas shopping, my husband is conjuring up his next great meat feast. Let's just hope it doesn't start with "SP" and end with "AM." I'll keep you posted.
No comments:
Post a Comment