Thanksgiving 2010: Phasing

Last night, Michael and I locked off the menu. Whew! I think that people don't quite realize what an effort it is to think of ways to serve the same set of ingredients that we haven't tried before, but at any rate, we've managed it. (Full disclosure: I am going to be repeating a dessert that was served in a past year, but it's too delicious not to have it again. Plus, it won't be the only dessert.)

That, then, marks the end of the menu-planning phase of Thanksgiving 2010, and as I've been suggesting, it wasn't trivial. We started thinking about it sometime back in August, when the winter food magazines were out in Australia, and have been tossing around ideas on and off ever since then. We got really serious about the planning about last week, and have been spending significant time since then looking through cookbooks, magazines, and websites to refine our courses. In the final analysis, we have five main courses that will all be individually plated, plus an amuse-bouche, plus dessert and cheese. The recipes we're using come from eight different cookbooks. A quick glance at the combined ingredients list yields a whopping sixty tablespoons of butter. We're going to need a bigger boat.

We're also going to need to move on to the next steps of the process, or the next phases of the operation, if you will: making a shopping list, making a shopping and cooking schedule, doing the shopping, and executing the schedule. Oh, and actually eating the damn thing, although it might surprise you to know that that's the farthest thing from my mind right now.

If this sounds more like a military invasion than a meal, I think that's quite apt. The logistics are somewhat staggering, and anything that involves buying that much butter at a pop deserves a more dramatic moniker than merely "cooking." Can we make "Thanksgiving" into a verb for this purpose? "Thanksgiving-ing"? Whatever it is, it's really its own thing, a multi-month affair that, in its penultimate phase, consumes our lives for a solid week (longer, if you count the time it will take to wash the glassware).

But guess what? I love it. I've been belaboring the amount of labor that it takes only to make precisely that point. It's so different from what I do in the rest of my life, and so all-consuming and dramatically extravagant that it just makes me happy, from top to bottom. And even if it means running around to half a dozen different stores to do the shopping, even if it means spending three solid days in the kitchen, even if means insisting in very strong terms to my mother and mother-in-law that no, there's really nothing that they can do to help so they should just just sit down and enjoy themselves for once, it's all worth it. How could it fail to be? When all is said and done, we get to eat!