I was able to score a turkey on the Friday after Thanksgiving – Grabbing the smallest one at 21 pounds, I rushed around the Fairway, grateful that we wouldn’t be having Salmon! or Three Chickens! For 12-15 people, it seemed like a lot of groceries but I’ve never been good at estimating quantities. I was grateful to get out of there without going into overdraft.

I set to work to quadruple the recipe for the cornbread to make the stuffing. With three young men in their twenties, three men who eat like they’re still in their twenties and the rest of us (and who doesn’t like stuffing) I figured I’d go a little high on the quantity. It’s always a desperate feeling when you’re at the end of the line and see the plates leaving the buffet piled high with stuffing, knowing that your chances of getting even a spoonful are dwindling.

There aren’t enough baking pans or bowls in this house to handle the quantity that started piling up on the counter. Well a bowl doesn’t necessarily have to be a ‘bowl’… almost any pot or receptacle I could scrub clean was fair game. But I was drawing the line at plastic wastebaskets. (For the curious, they were on the other side of the line.)

The cornbread came out gorgeously golden and brown. The rest of the stuffing ingredients cooperated as they always do. I did my calculations. To have dinner by 4PM, the bird would have to be in the oven by 8:20AM. I forced the door of the frige closed on the uncooked stuffing and called it a night.

Bouncing out of bed at 7:20AM, my body and mind were focused and ready for action.

There were the usual Woody-Allen-and-the-lobsters moments as the turkey slipped out of my grasp but the bird made it into a brown paper bag, a roasting pan and into the oven only ten minutes late.

While Frank (age 20) and I shopped for pies and bread, the first call came in: one of our good eaters and his family would not be coming. Someone had a fever. It was a blow but we hurried back to throw ourselves into the final preparations. We’d be three fewer. The stuffing was looking a little out-sized. “How much stuffing did you MAKE?” Uhhh. Multiplying in my head has never been a strong suit: “Thirty-four cups? Or was it fifty-six?”

As the turkey emerged from the oven, the second call came in: two more of the good eaters, in fact two of our BEST eaters, young men in their 20’s would not be coming. NOT COMING!?? Whaaaaa? We’re down to seven?? I hardly dared to glance at the pots upon pots of cooked and uncooked stuffing on the window sills, on the counter, on every possible surface. The stuffing had taken on a menacing quality, like an avalanche.

Dinner was intimate and one of the best Thanksgivings in memory. People talked in pairs and as a group: everyone had a moment to shine. The dinner was delicious. The stuffing was ‘divine’: only problem, we didn’t even make a dent in it. For the clean-up phase, we had to go out for more tupperware.

There are bags of stuffing still uncooked in the freezer (Christmas?) There are buckets of it ready to reheat filling a whole shelf of the frige. Blame it on a childhood of frugal portions of stuffing which skewed my focus about what makes Thanksgiving. I’m actually thinking about skipping the dish at Christmas. Thank goodness for the loving family who came for dinner.