Gift Guides, Bread Bowls, and Food on Tour

Consumerism 🤝 Thanksgiving

I love writing gift guides because it speaks to my love language (giving gifts) while not necessarily requiring me to actually buy anything (which taps my other love language, being frugal), and this season, I’ve been a busy little gift guide elf, writing and updating dozens of guides for home cooks, entertaining enthusiasts, and caregivers. Here’s my latest batch of giftable treasures for Eater, The Kitchn, and Cubby.

• I got a new coffee table, and now I care about coasters - Eater

• The 33 Best Gift Ideas for People Who Really Love (Like, *Really* Love) Cheese - The Kitchn

• The 52 Best Kitchen Gifts Every Home Cook Will Fall in Love WIth - The Kitchn

• 38 Coffee Gifts for People Who Always Want a Second Cup - The Kitchn

• The 34 Best Food Gifts for Everyone Who Loves to Eat (So, All of Us?) - The Kitchn

• The Best Gifts for Kids Who Love to Read - Cubby

Classics owner, Carole Hopkins, with an unknown customer and David Crosby, provided by Classics

I love pondering the minutiae of Tour Life, and this essay from Reya Hart, Grateful Dead drummer, Mickey Hart’s daughter, was a fascinating insight into the daily realities of life on the road. Hart describes how she mapped the country by the kind of food she could expect to find at each venue and the feeling of loneliness that descends when tour is over and she’s forced to make her own food choices.

It was a cool insight into an element of tour I’d always wondered about, and it made me think of this story about Classics Sandwiches & Subs here in Richmond. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Classics provided catering for just about every major musical act to come through the city. They served Silver Queen corn to Alan Jackson and Krispy Kreme Donuts to Geddy Lee. Now that bands often travel with their own private chefs, this kind of catering is mostly a thing of the past, but luckily, Classics is still holding down their corner of Williamsburg Road, making subs the way they always have for a slightly less famous crowd.

Our biggest cooking holiday of the year is less than a week away, and sure, I have a healthy amount of ambivalence around the holiday itself, especially the way it’s (still, bafflingly) taught in public school. But for me, Thanksgiving isn’t about celebrating the colonization of America, the fabled collaboration between natives and settlers, or anything of the sort. For me, Thanksgiving is the anniversary of that time Dad & Ginger took me to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and Kelsey Grammer was there. Why Kelsey Grammer excited me as an 11-year-old is unclear. All I can say is, it was a big time for Frasier, and that’s the detail that stuck with me all these years later.

Now, every year, Mr. Ganz sets up a tv in the kitchen so I can watch the parade and dog show twice in a row, shushing the kids when I, inevitably, start crying as soon as the first Broadway number starts up. It’s all a jumble of misplaced wistfulness and conspicuous consumerism, but I just love it, and I’ve made peace with that.

Knorr’s Vegetable Dip, pictured here with vegetables, but in reality, eaten with the bread from the inside of the bread bowl and, when that’s gone, crackers.

I like to keep the meal pretty tradish for Thanksgiving. This isn’t the time for creativity. Every year, I make Knorr’s Vegetable Dip, which I eat out of a bread bowl while I’m cooking. There’s a roast turkey, obviously, though Seth is the only one who really loves it. I like to spatchcock mine so that I get the maximum amount of crispy skin. The stuffing is Stove Top, but everything else is homemade, and it is my great joy and comfort to spend the entire day in the kitchen cooking the big spread (and getting so full of dip that I don’t want any of the actual meal).

I love this sweet Instagram-filtered pic of Thanksgiving 2015 ☺️ Don’t let the homemade stuffing fool you, there was Stove Top too.

There will be a bunch of cheese and crackers, a pickle plate, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potato casserole, corn soufflé, broccoli casserole, devilled eggs — a request from the kids who aren’t huge fans of Thanksgiving food (at least not until their nostalgia gene kicks in two decades from now), a big salad of bitter greens with figs and blue cheese, and something my family calls Blueberry Surprise that involves grape Jell-O and blueberry pie filling. At some point close to the meal itself (which is, inexplicably, served at 4:00), I’ll panic and decide I absolutely need to have one more green veg and go scouring my fridge for something suitable, a real feat of cognitive dissonance (Paging Dr. Crane!) given just how much food there is already.

Dessert takes on an importance for Thanksgiving that, for my family at least, it lacks the other 364 days of the year. We’ll need at least one pie, preferably pumpkin for Mr. Ganz, and a couple of different bar options—lemon squares for our friend Jason and pecan bars for me. I guess eating at 4:00 makes sense because it opens us up to eat a pile of leftovers again around 7:00, and it’s somehow even more enjoyable than the first plate was.

Now it’s your turn! I want to know the one dish that absolutely makes Thanksgiving for you. Is it the turkey (It’s never the turkey.)? The stuffing? Do you also have a weird Jell-O-based ‘salad?‘ Tell me!

Wishing a happy Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Day to all who observe!

xox,

SG