Thanksgiving gathering

Great Thanksgiving food, and wonderful family gatherings. This fruit dish my brother Eric set out captures the spirit of the food, laden with layers of flavor, calories and family history. My brothers and I spent the days before Thanksgiving e-mailing our last-minute recollections about the Thanksgiving foods from our childhood, and then dividing up who would make what. The fruit plate above was an accurate recreation of our grandmother Irene's Thanksgiving centerpiece (and we then remembered our mother saying, "Don't pick at the grapes, you'll make them look like a skeleton!").

Eric prepared the turkey masterfully, despite the usual struggle over getting the dark meat cooked without the white meat drying out. (I have since seen the suggestion described in this link.)

The Hochheimer clan gathered for a photograph before dinner. (None of us are named Hochheimer anymore; we are descendants and cousins and in-laws. I recently heard a musing about what constitutes life and death; one view proposed was that we have a form of life as long as someone still speaks your name. By this measure, my grandparents (Larry and Irene Hochheimer) are alive and well!)

I made sticky buns using the same recipe our mother used (from the now-closed Woodbine Cottage in Sunapee, New Hampshire. Thank you David for your late-night help!). I also made my cousin Lynn's cranberry-strawberry jello mold (came out great) and my first-ever pecan pie (filling was tasty, crust was tough).

There was a sweet moment when everyone swarmed around the kitchen island of Eric's renovated house, and we all hungrily spooned and speared, oohed and ahhed, and then made our way to seats with full plates. The rest of the night saw us going from table to kitchen, back to another seat to eat and chat with other relatives. It was great Thanksgiving in which the food was a medium with which we both looked back and created forward, remembered and made new memories. Certainly a gathering to be thankful for! (And perhaps next year I will write about the next day’s gathering with Amy’s family, and how a very smelly cheese has become a Thanksgiving staple …)