Yesterday, I cooked Thanksgiving dinner with my son, daughter-in-law, daughter-in-law-to-be, and daughter, with a slight assist from my granddaughter-to-be (a five-year-old who’s a whiz at snapping green beans in half). Not too many cooks, but we had to take numbers to get all the side dishes into the oven alongside the turkey. All in all, it took us about eight hours (that flew by) to get dinner on the table. Our menu: organic turkey with gravy; rigatoni with cherry tomatoes; butternut squash with red onions; mashed potatoes; green beans with garlic; stuffing with mushrooms, vegetarian sausage, onions and pine nuts; and cranberry sauce with orange juice. Home-made pumpkin pie with pecan crumble on top for dessert. A mixed vegetarian and meat meal. And one of the best Thanksgivings ever—having the whole bunch at the house, most of us crammed together in the kitchen. The only items that didn’t make it to the table were the sweet potato latkes in honor of Hanukkah. Not for want of trying. (Want of frying?) We prepared the onions and sweet potatoes—on my twenty-year-old, never-been-used, Sunbeam Oskar food processor. A present from my husband two decades ago that I somehow decided I was afraid to use. So it’s been stowed away on a high shelf, untouched, a monument to neurosis. But now I have a daughter-in-law who kindly did not mock me, but assembled the thing and prepared to grate eight sweet potatoes. That’s a lot of shredded sweet potatoes. Never mind the messy details of our failure to produce latkes. What mattered was that I had all my sons and darling girls around me. And that Oskar worked after all those years. Go Sunbeam.
