Of course there is. It's a blamp.
Apparently the line “there’s a little lightbulb in your blender” is a great parody of the lyric “make a little birdhouse in your soul.” The only reason I even know this “Birdhouse in Your Soul” song at all is because Meg used to sing it. I also think she even used it once as evidence that “not to put too fine a point on it” was an actual expression. Using the fact that a phrase is used in a They Might Be Giants song as proof that it is a common expression strikes me as the equivalent of using a word’s appearance in a Dr. Seuss book to suggest that it is an actual word. But I digress. The point is (not to put too fine a point on it) that Thanksgiving was amazing.
The reason that my Thanksgiving story begins with an anecdote about the blamp (blender + lamp, for all of you who are not either already into your third glass of cheap red wine or operating on less than three hours of sleep) is because Becca said that my next blog post should be called “There’s a Lightbulb in the Blender.” And for some reason it seems to explain our Thanksgiving. It was truly a twentysomething’s Thanksgiving of four New Englanders transplanted to the West Coast, involving a group food preparation effort fueled by a very cheap Pinot Noir (I found it to be very watery but Alden disagreed. He didn't think it was watery, just lacking flavor. I’ll spare you the details of the ensuing debate about whether or not a liquid lacking flavor is necessarily watery.) Becca had just finished an overnight shift at the hospital, and for some reason cooking brings out my natural insanity/ADHD tendencies. So this was hilarious, the blender light in our kitchen. And it was only 1 p.m.
The preparations had started the night before when Alden and I joined everyone and their mother* at the Safeway to buy Thanksgiving. Some things that we bought that were particularly fun to carry on the mile walk home included the eighteen bottles of Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve, the 10-pound sack of potatoes, and the turkey-sized foil roasting pan. Fortunately I had already bought the 15 lb. turkey on Monday when, in a rare burst of forethought, I realized that I only had three days until Thanksgiving and it would take me that long to safely defrost a frozen turkey. (I knew this because I had googled “how to cook a turkey” that morning.) Although I ended up buying a fresh one, I was still impressed that I planned ahead. I could easily see myself waiting until the night before Thanksgiving only to have them be all sold out of turkeys and then thinking, “Right, obviously that was dumb.”
I was initially a little overwhelmed by the idea of roasting a turkey. It seemed completely likely that I’d screw it up—after all, every holiday sitcom episode involves a burnt turkey or some other horrible mangling of the turkey preparation process, like on Friends when Joey gets it stuck on his head. But the more I looked into it, it seemed that it was a time consuming process, but pretty straightforward. No one mentioned that before throwing it in the oven at 325° for 4 to 4 ½ hours and basting it every half hour, I’d have to reach in and pull out various turkey organs from the various turkey orifices. I easily found the neck and some other part that Alden identified as the heart even though it looked more like a brain to me. But I couldn’t find the bag of giblets. I read the directions aloud again and Alden’s like, “Oh, the neck cavity!” Apparently I was rooting around in the “ass cavity.” (The cavity that contained the dismembered neck was not, in fact, the neck cavity.) I found the giblets in what was actually the more disturbing of the two holes, what with the loose hanging flap of excess neck skin I had to peel away just to find it.
When all was said and done we had managed to cook an entire turkey, stuffed with stuffing, as well as gravy, corn, sweet potato casserole with an entire bag of marshmallows on top, twice-baked sweet potatoes with pineapple and maple syrup, salad with avocado and pomegranate, turnips, mashed potatoes, two pumpkin pies and an apple pie. Becca made all the dishes that included tropical fruits; she also made me baste the turkey in orange juice. She made the turnips & mashed potatoes as well, and these did not involve fruit, tropical or otherwise, but the amount of cayenne she used definitely evoked the cuisine of a much warmer climate.
We ate. It was good. We had an overly long debate about emoticons and when the winky face should be interpreted as flirty vs. sarcastic (Well, what do you think? ;-) Then we played through the entire box of Taboo while the pies re-baked themselves in the warming drawer.
-------------------------------------------------------
*Not everyone’s mother was physically in the store; some were just available via cell phone to answer questions like, “Where would I find Gravy Master?” This was the call that Alden made. I called my mom later that night when we finished peeling the apples and I figured I should check on how to actually make them into pie. Becca’s call to her parents was to determine whether or not you cooked the turkey with the thermometer in it or just stuck it in after to get a reading—apparently you can do both—and what type of spices to season the turkey with, because obviously there needs to be as much spice as possible on everything.
