All right, campers, I’m in for the Home-Ec 101 contest on Thanksgiving horror stories.
It’s a scary tale of birds, artichoke dip, our family tradition of a wonderful shrimp dip.
My mother was a great cook. She could pretty much cook anything and reminds me a bit of Claudia and Laura Creekmore as she was always trying new things but she loved her traditional dishes taught to her by the elder women here in Hooterville. She could cook better than anyone and she wasn’t afraid to try new things. It was all of the good when my mom was in the kitchen, I assure you.
One year probably around 1990, she had spent three days making dressing, a turkey and all the little dips that my family loves that have been in my family for generations. We are dip eaters from way back and the table had all the little delicacies that my family loves that everyone else would probably look at horror in.
Homer and I helped as we did each year. I think I opened the package that had the rolls in it although I wasn’t allowed near the stove.
Yeah, I got mad skillz.
She also had a dog, who, in a wild fit of imagination, she named Girl. Now, Girl was a medium to largish sized dog, black in color and reminds me of Smiley’s dog Nellie except not as poodley and sans cone (which Nellie likes, if you didn’t know). She was saved from the Animal Shelter in Nashville that used to be in West Meade in Nashville. This dog loved my mother with all of her being and had little to do with the rest of us. (True story, after my mother died, the dog died within just a few months from grief.)
Girl was my mom’s dog.
In the family home, there is a small counter where my mother painstakingly had set up the dressing, turkey, and the variety of dips that we are just nuts about and we all went into the living room (I think we were watching football) with dinner on the horizon.
Then, we heard a noise and a crash. As we ran into the kitchen, dip was lying in the floor, a turkey was torn, half eaten and our beloved dips were being eaten off the floor quicker than Britney Spears running over another member of the Paparazzi’s feet.
Girl had cleared the spread within a matter of seconds.
There would be no roast beast this Thanksgiving day.
After the fury at the dog subsided, it got funny. Really funny. And we laughed until we cried and then laughed some more.
We may have run to the Kwikee Mart to get chicken that day, I can’t remember.
The moral of the story is, we had each other, Girl wasn’t massacred for her canine eating indiscretion and everyone chortled about it for years.
I don’t know if this has to do with food-poisoning on Thanksgiving but, we all have our own odd journeys. I wonder if they will let me open the rolls again this year.
Ahh, memories.
