N-Oodles of Thanks

Here’s this week’s reflection. I hope it resonates with you and ask that, if you enjoyed, please comment and share on your social media. Heartfelt thanks for all your support!

Keeping the light on for you,

Carol

November heralds the avalanche of holiday cooking that promises to win the love of family. Not that affection is a culinary contest, per se, but it is a commitment to ensuring everyone’s gastronomic satisfaction in the name of tradition. The part I frequently overlook is tradition.

Through many years and countless recipes, I repeatedly try to add more vegetables to the table and expand the “gatherings” repertoire. These forays tend to elicit scrunched faces and high-decibel groans to which I throw my hands up in resignation and fall back on the standard holiday fare. Standard, that is, for an ancestral midwestern farm boy and his offspring: a carb-heavy, coma-inducing meal suitable for large livestock, topped off with pecan pie: a nod to years spent in the Sunshine State. 

One year, I tempted fate by making a contemporary (read “fresh”) version of green bean casserole, sans cream sauce, but with herbs and crunchy topping. Sheer blasphemy. Mixed greens with oranges, bacon, candied almonds, and shallots? Hard NO. Another year I tried to add nuts and apples to “Mom’s Stuffing.” Big mistake. Too much texture. And yet another year I daringly served whole berry cranberry sauce. You can only imagine what happened. 

Inching the family toward haute-r cuisine has required skill, determination, and occasionally fencing with turkey trusses. Though I am growing weary, this year will be no exception.

A few days ago I inquired about the fam’s preferences for Thanksgiving. Hubby piped up, “I’d like chicken and noodles!” 

“Excuse me?” I countered. “Noodles aren’t Thanksgiving food, stuffing is. And potatoes.”

“But I’d like chicken and homemade noodles over mashed potatoes, like my grandmothers made,” he stated, clearly pleased with himself. Given my family’s lack of enthusiasm for turkey, the chicken option seemed  feasible, but he twisted me with the noodle part.

“And stuffing too?” I sourly queried, adding, “Where do the vegetables come in – you know, the green ones?”

“Green bean casserole please – the soup one, NOT some weird one you come across!” my “other half” mandated. “Oh, and my mom’s Waldorf salad,” he finished. 

“Okay, so we have carbs, fat and a dusting of health – do I have this correct?” 

“Yep! It’s Thanksgiving!” Hubster triumphed and quickly walked away. “And we’ll be asleep for days,” I said under my breath, visualizing post-prandial bodies languishing across furniture, fast asleep. All slumber aside, it was the bathroom scale I was most afraid of.

Our daughters were no help. Whatever food preferences Dad had, they gleefully echoed. While I have been able to flex some newfangled culinary muscles at Christmas, harvest time was clearly etched in stone. 

I quietly contemplated the task ahead of me, not having crafted homemade noodles in years. It was always too much starch for someone with estrogen, or a lack thereof, and I tried to avoid them like the floured, salted, egg bombs they were. But even I had to admit they tasted good and were a strong nod to my husband’s past. With the last parent, my father-in-law, passing this year, it seemed right to honor my wedded surname with this simple dinner request. There would be no tinkering with Thanksgiving. Food is love, after all. So, against my healthful intentions, I fetched the recipe and studied.

The instructions, I recalled, were initially handwritten by my husband’s grandmother as I stood beside her. We were newly married and had tarried north so I could meet the rest of the extended family. I was eager to learn how to make some of my husband’s boyhood favorites from the farm. The noodle-making seemed simple enough, with only a few ingredients mixed, rolled out, then rolled up and sliced into strings. Grandma’s “measuring cup” was an olive-green melamine coffee cup from the 1970s. Her aged, arthritic hands deftly mixed, rolled, and cut with the precision of repetition over decades. My hands, however, were not yet as adept. Grandma assured me perfection was not the goal. 

Periodically over the years, when time was a bit more luxurious, I would make noodles to the delight of those around the table. Noodles pair well with either chicken or beef but, regardless of the meat, it all HAD to be served over a bed of mashed spuds. No exceptions. Raised out east and finished down south, I found this all quite strange. Until jobs finally took us to the Midwest where I was properly educated in the full range of satiation by starch. It was all overwhelming, not to mention fattening. 

Tradition trickled back in as I continued to refresh myself with the intricacies of noodle-crafting. My husband spent boyhood summers with his northern farming kin, making him a staunch advocate for filling meals. And at holiday time, noodles, potatoes, and dressing were always part of the menu. In the end, who was I to argue with such an intense family culinary legacy?

So, while a tad unconventional, I’ll be slicing some noodle strings of the past to weave into our holiday fare. They will, after all, pair nicely with a little fowl, precious little green, pillows of spuds, sage dressing, and above all, the love of the past, present, and future. They will prompt oodles of thanks – for the dear woman who taught me to make them, and the family I am blessed to make them for. And for the well-deserved nap afterward.