A Brief Photo Essay: Thanksgiving.

This year is our first ever Thanksgiving on Cape Cod.  We've done Easter, Memorial Day, Labor Day, New Years, and several in-between days at Chatham over the years, but never a Thanksgiving.  Our lucky day!

Here's what it looked like:

The Place-tags, courtesy of Jennifer'ose.

The Serving Buffet: In Action.

My Portion.  Firsts and Seconds on One Plate.

The Company.  Blake slept through the whole dinner.

Happy Thanksgiving! Gourmet.

The other day I was reading about the word gourmet, because it seemed kind of interesting how many foreign food terms are used in regular English.  And I don't mean French fries, spaghetti, or pizza. Ha!  I meant words like hors d'oeuvres, crudite, and the like.  Yes, Julia Child taught us that there is an art to masterful French cooking.  We tend to have a general concept in America of high food and low food.  If I had to generalize, the high food requires a fork and comes in very small portions, and the low food might focus on flavor via fats and include buffet style serving.

A few hundred years ago, gourmet indicated decadent luxury, and was frowned upon as a violation of the Deadly Sin of gluttony.  By 1984, the term foodie was coined, which referred to a fan of food.

Apparently (from Wikipedia), a gourmet food movement picked up in the 1980s after a long-standing division between elitism and populist tastes, and has accelerated through the 2000s due to rising incomes, globalization, and health/nutrition craze.  With the growth in food awareness, we have seen many new cooking shows, channels, and fads.  In some cases, the high-brow version has become very commonplace (gourmet coffee for example).  With this trend, there have been attempts to spiff up low food, and give gourmet flair to your everyday dish.  You can find thousands of "foodie blogs" these days, also.

So now, the question is this:  Does the gourmet (original gluttony connotation or otherwise) apply to Thanksgiving?  I know very few people who will be eating conservative portions or their normal menu this weekend.

Thanksgiving dinner has some pretty weird foods.  Consider it.  Turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, squash.  Pumpkin Pie.  This is about what our menu looked like, too, though add a couple of varieties of jello salad, heavenly sweet potatoes, and butternut squash to go with it!  And Grammy Mitchell always provides about 6 varieties of pie!

from Wikipedia.

Some of these foods are only eaten once per year, but are delicious.  Not that they are decadent, but because they are traditional, perhaps.  And we don't go for dainty portions.  I had two plates worth.

The long table of loved ones.

Papa working on the bird.

Jen did the centerpieces and place-cards this year.  Didn't she do great?

Yes, that is an edible pilgrim hat, a juicy apple votive, and a cranberry/floral/mason floaty thing.

Let the games begin!

Kimball's

We took my grandparents to Kimball's tonight. It was their first time. And if you're remotely familiar with Kimball's (and their obscenely huge portion sizes), you know that a first-time visit is always memorable.

This time was no different.

My grandparents do not disappoint. Ever.

EXHIBIT A:

This is Papa's banana split. We can't decide if there are 6 or 8 very large scoops of ice cream on there...but whatever it was, it required two bowls for stability and that piece of paper to keep the dripping to a minimum. (Oh, and that heaping thing behind Papa's banana split? My grandmother's SIZE SMALL dish of ice cream).


EXHIBIT B:

Yeah, so this is after he'd been working on it for a bit. Seriously. That thing could have fed all five of us with leftovers for tomorrow.

EXHIBIT C:

Then, after a good 20 minutes of sitting and shivering and eating and chatting (it was in the high-50's tonight), we decided to head back to their hotel where it's warm. That container you see there? It's a 1-QUART container. And the LEFTOVERS nearly came to the top.


EXHIBIT D:

I like to call this one "Ding! Round Two!" Papa got Ian a spoon so they could share the remaining ice cream....but the way we presented it to Ian was thusly: "Ian, do you want to help Papa finish his ice cream?" So he did. But not how we thought he would.