22 November 2007 No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

For me, Thanksgiving dinner means packing around my grandmother’s table with twenty of my nearest and dearest. This will be the first year I’ve missed the family shindig. I’m holding my own to make up the lack.

I considered going the route of the already prepared turkey or ham: after all, that’s the most intimidating part of getting a Thanksgiving dinner ready. At the grocery store just down the block, the price is $49.99 for an 11-pound turkey. According to my calculations, that equals $4.50 per pound. Now, for an uncooked turkey, the store’s price drops to 99 cents a pound.

This is the clearest demonstration of the disparity between the prices of prepared food versus picking up ingredients I have ever seen. If I had bought that precooked turkey, I would have paid $40 for the following:

• taking the turkey out of the freezer on the night before
• 10 minutes of preparation work before popping it in the oven
• remembering to eventually take it back out of the oven

Alright, maybe I’m overly simplifying things, but, since I don’t make dressing, there really isn’t that much work in roasting a turkey. Certainly not more than I’m willing to do to keep an extra $40 in my own pocket. I’m pretty confident in my own turkey-making abilities, too. I haven’t done it for a couple of years, but five minutes on the phone with my grandmother and I felt like I’d been through a full refresher course.

She even gave me a few other tips: those hot, fresh rolls that my grandfather thinks are made from a secret family recipe? Frozen dough from the supermarket! Apparently she’s been using that little time saver since the 80s, and not a single relative has noticed the difference.

I’m not spending all day in the kitchen whipping up this Thanksgiving feast, though. My grandmother spent two days preparing for all those big family get-togethers, but I flat out don’t have the patience for something like that. Instead, I’m only cooking those things that don’t transport so well, like a hot turkey and drippy gravy.

All in all, I think everyone’s getting off easy, preparation-wise, and expense-wise. Nobody is slaving away in a hot kitchen all day, and no one is worrying about the expense of feeding ten hungry mouths. We’ve managed to make the whole production a good time all around.

Happy Thanksgiving!