For Thanksgiving, Robert and I went to a local cafeteria that was having a Thanksgiving day special - roast turkey with dressing and gravy, 2 vegetables, bread, a dessert and iced tea or coffee. I was hopeful that since cafeterias tend to cater to older people that the servings would be of a reasonable size.
We decided to get an early start, and got there about 10:45 a.m. There was already a line, but it only took about 15 minutes to get through. I got the turkey/dressing, steamed broccoli, mashed potatoes, a yeast roll, and pumpkin pie. (Robert got a yam souffle instead of potatoes and cornbread instead of a roll.) Putting all the different plates and bowls of food onto our table, I felt somewhat overwhelmed, but actually, it wasn't that much food. The vegetables came in dishes that held perhaps 1/2 cup, and the turkey wrapped around dressing thing wasn't very big. (The roll, however, was good-sized - about 1.5 times as big as a normal roll that comes 10 to a package or whatever - and very fresh and tasty in that soft, refined flour kind of way that I basically never experience.) It was interesting that the many different plates provided a sense of abundance while in reality, it was much less than I would normally eat at Thanksgiving.
It turned out to be even less than that because the pumpkin pie was ... I don't even know. It wasn't particularly spiced, and the texture was weird. I ate two small bites before I started to seriously investigate it. When I dug around and found something that looked like a piece of onion but surely had to be candied fruit, I gave up. I had a second glass of iced tea for dessert instead. The lack of good pie was only the tiniest bit disappointing, and I have decided to get my pumpkin fix by making pumpkin-apple muffins to eat for breakfast all next week.
By the time we left the restaurant, the line was well out the door. Driving home, we passed the Golden Corral, which had a sign announcing their Thanksgiving buffet, which I think is almost the exact opposite of what I would want to do for Thanksgiving. (At that place, I could skip the entirety of the normal food and go directly to the dessert counter to make a layered oatmeal or chocolate chip cookie / vanilla ice cream / chocolate chips dessert. Repeat until full. Dangerous.)
After lunch, we went to the historic park next to my apartment that has a wildlife preserve and did some birding. It was a gorgeous day, cool and mostly clear, and we saw quite a few birds, due in part to the fact that most of the trees have lost their leaves so the birds can't hide easily. We didn't see a huge number of different species (23, I think) but a good number of individual birds. I got close, long looks at a belted kingfisher, so I was very satisfied. The quality of the light was a bit odd - the white on the kingfisher and on the faces of the ruddy ducks we saw glowed brilliantly.
I admit that today, I would not be adverse to being in the position to eat turkey sandwiches for a couple of days, but overall, I really did like the decision to eat at a restaurant. Two people is just not enough to justify the effort of cooking a full Thanksgiving meal, and I am glad not to have the rest of a pumpkin pie or other delicious dessert calling my name all weekend now that Robert is flying back to Austin this afternoon.
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2 comments:
I also like having Thanksgiving at a restaurant (or anywhere but my house), but I prefer the kind that gives you too much so I can have leftovers the next day.
The only problem with not doing your own dinner is that other people are unlikely to get it "right." If I'm a guest, I bring a dessert. At a restaurant I don't mind the bad dessert--I don't mind having a whole pumpkin pie and whipped cream at home.
But there needs to be turkey, dressing, and gravy. The turkey cannot be raw. The dressing cannot be full of icky things like too much fruit or raw celery and should have actual bread and sage in it and not just be an unidentifiable mush. The gravy has to be warm and also not full of icky ingredients. And there has to be enough gravy and dressing to make the turkey taste good.
(Yesterday: Place 1 had not enough dressing and it was kind of a mush. Place 2 had no gravy, but the turkey was delicious enough that it was okay. The dressing had too much sausage and not enough bread. It turns out I do like sausage in my dressing, but there should be significantly more bread than sausage!)
While I like the leftover idea in theory, in practice I would end up eating more if more of it were available.
This dinner would have passed the sufficient quantity of gravy test, but I think perhaps it failed the unidentifiable mush dressing test. (It was obviously a cornbread dressing, however.)
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