Food for Thought

Giving and gratitude are good. The rest is gravy.

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

- Virginia Woolf

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

- Virginia Woolf

"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food."

- Hippocrates

"People who love to eat are always the best people."

- Julia Child

Many of us will spend time this week reflecting on all the things we are thankful for, and much more time stuffing our faces with food. This doesn’t make us bad people. It just means that whatever we decide to include in our annual orgy of overindulgence - turkey, stuffing, scalloped potatoes, caramelized onions, green beans almondine, pumpkin pie - is far more tangible than a squishy concept like gratitude.

Thanksgiving dinner, after all, is right there in front of us, a cornucopia of visual and aromatic delights, as alluring as Black Friday ads are annoying. Many Thanksgivings ago, I visited my brother’s walkup apartment in north Jersey. Every floor in the building smelled like roast turkey. Maybe somebody was cooking lamb vindaloo in one of the apartments, but I doubt it. It’s remarkable how smells stay with you.

If the first Thanksgiving, observed in Plymouth, Mass. by the Pilgrims and members of the Wampanoag Tribe 403 years ago, was a heartfelt celebration of the harvest, today’s holiday is more a carnival of consumption (and calories), with some Detroit Lions on the side. But again, that is okay. It’s only once a year, and besides, food is important. It’s important to eat, and personally speaking, it’s important to make.

I am not a master chef, and have never been accused of being one, but the kitchen has long been a sanctuary for me. Early in our teenage years, my friend Tom Crawford and I would make Chef Boyardee pizza from a box. We’d walk to a King Kullen supermarket, buy the box for 49 cents and spend Saturday night in the Crawford kitchen, putting it together. We had so much fun doing it that Tom turned it into a career, owning a terrific pizzeria on Long Island for more than 30 years. I didn’t take it that far, but I cooked right through college and developed a particular fondness for preparing Thanksgiving dinner, featuring homemade cranberry sauce, my own sweet potato/carrot concoction and a family recipe that goes back generations and makes the BEST STUFFING YOU WILL EVER EAT. Yeah, it’s immodest to say that, but truth is truth. I’ll stack my stuffing up against anyone’s. Bring it on, Rachael Ray.

Cooking is my happy place. This is especially true when I have to write. Given a choice between staring at a blank computer screen or making something to eat, the kitchen wins every time. Mushroom risotto, turkey quinoa meat loaf, tuna steaks with mango salsa – it doesn’t much matter what I cook, as long as I am not alone with that dreaded screen. A good amount of housework also tends to get done when it’s time to write, but no place beckons me like the kitchen. I have my favorite knives and cutting boards, my go-to cast-iron skillet and Dutch oven. My vegetable chopper is close to my heart, and a lot sharper. I have a whole cabinet full of cookbooks, which I rarely open, preferring to find a recipe online or to come up with something completely original.

Cooking, for me, is about exploration. It is about adding sun-dried tomatoes, basil and pecorino cheese to a pasta recipe, or tweaking a red-lentil curry by doubling up on cumin, which, to use the sports vernacular, is my Most Valuable Spice. Cooking is also about giving, and nourishing the people we love. We have close friends who live a few houses down from us. They have three daughters who are fans of my pecan pie, so on special occasions and sometimes on a whim, I will show up unannounced with one. It’s simple and foolproof to make, straight from Page 521 of my torn and tattered paperback copy of the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. They are always delighted to receive it, but not as delighted as I am to make it. A late therapist friend of mine once told me, “Love goes out. It doesn’t go in.” He packed big wisdom in those seven words.

In recent months, much of my cooking has been done for Cecilia Willi, my mother-in-law. She has late-stage Alzheimer’s and has difficulty swallowing, so soups are the way to go. A couple of times a week, I’ll make a batch of something healthy, packed with vegetables, then puree it in the VitaMix, which can almost magically turn out creamy butternut squash, mushroom, carrot and broccoli soups without using a drop of cream or milk. Cecilia has no idea who makes these soups, and it’s not important that she does. She likes them, and she eats them. As with the pecan pie, I get more out of the deal than she does.

On this Thanksgiving, I am grateful for having the ingredients to cook, and the kitchen to do it in. I’m grateful for self-checkout kiosks at the supermarket, and the person who fixes the scanner after I’ve entered the wrong product code. I’m grateful for TSA precheck, hand sanitizer and my vegetable chopper, as well as drivers who let me change lanes in front of them instead of flipping me off. I’m grateful for the erudition of Heather Cox Richardson, the tenacity of Ron Filipowski and Rick Wilson and the humor of Andy Borowitz. I’m grateful for people who do random kind things and bring positive energy to the world. Most of all, I am grateful for the people I love, and the bounty in my life, and to all the subscribers who help me keep this thing going.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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I am sure you are sick of Black Friday promotions, so I won’t subject you to another. Instead, I give you Stuffing Saturday, available to new paid subscribers. Join us at Coffey Grounds and get the aforementioned FAMILY STUFFING RECIPE, along with my time-tested tips for making it, for free. But hurry. This offer might expire someday. The cost is only $5 a month, or $50 for the year. That buys a lot of cumin.