Day #267: Happy Thanksgiving...with Dinner Rolls

 We are feeding 5 people for Thanksgiving this year. The four of us, and then Lord willing and the creek don't rise we will bring some food to my dad. That's 5.

I made three pies yesterday.

Do 5 people need 3 pies? In fact, they do not, but how do you decide which pie to cut? I mean...eliminate? Let's examine the options.

1) Apple pie. Josh's favorite. Josh is doing the rest of the cooking, Josh gets the pie he wants. Apple pie stays.

2) Peanut butter pie. Ridiculously easy to make, freezes well, has chocolate. Peanut butter pie stays.

3) Pumpkin pie. Which no one here really likes but me. But honestly...is it really Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie? Plus we are going to try to meet my BFF for a socially distanced picnic/hike/whatever later in the weekend and she is the only one in her family who likes pumpkin pie. Pumpkin pie stays.

I also made dinner rolls. I don't always make dinner rolls but when I did the shopping I made sure I had yeast just in case. I'm so glad we made the dinner rolls. They are delicious (yes, we did break into them for breakfast, thanks for asking) and the house smelled amazing. 

My mom always made dinner rolls at Thanksgiving. Her dinner roll recipe is made from what I now know (Thanks, Great British Baking Show!) is an enriched dough. But what I really remember about dinner rolls is what they taught me about being thankful.

So this Thanksgiving isn't really all that different from ones I had growing up. We never spent Thanksgiving with extended family. It was my mom, my dad, my sister, and me. We did a festive meal with all the Thanksgiving fixings but it never occurred to me that other people had epically huge Thanksgivings with cousins and extended family.

Both of my grandmothers died before I was 2, which I think had a huge impact on my view of extended family. I think for better or worse it's grandmothers who pull families together and once that generation is gone it's normal to splinter off more. You're still family, you're just older and in a new phase of your life so you don't get together as much and often have other family to be with. Because my grandmothers both died so young, this splintering happened early on. My mother also had strained relationships with her siblings and her father had also died young, this added to it.

Occasionally, we'd have an extra family member for Thanksgiving. My aunt lived near us when I was small and she was single so sometimes she'd be there. My grandpa came from time to time but not usually...he lived in Montana and that was a long trip to make on his own. So most Thanksgivings it was just us. And it was nice. My mom made all the things she'd never ordinarily make. Like the dinner rolls.

My mom was our Girl Scout leader for most of my childhood and the Girl Scout troop had a tradition of sponsoring a family for Thanksgiving. We'd raise money to buy the turkey and the sides and then we would get together in small groups and bake the things that you bake, like the pies....and the dinner rolls.

I don't think you'd be able to do that now. Food given away or served in schools or soup kitchens these days all has to be prepackaged. But this was the 1980s and we could donate home-baked pies and dinner rolls, so we did. And every year there was at least one Girl Scout who had never in her life seen home baked pies or dinner rolls.

Now, I want to be clear: people do what they do and no one's holiday looks the same. If your holiday tradition is Costco pie, you do you, I'm not here to judge. Some people hate baking. I hate gardening. If my choice is to grow my own produce or buy some grown by someone else, I will choose buy 100% of the time. So if it's not your thing I get it.

But I like to bake, and I like passing on the recipes and the traditions. And I like that fact that alongside teaching giving at Thanksgiving my mom also could teach baking and could teach kids who may not know it that they do have a choice and that if you want to bake your own bread/pies/dinner rolls, you do have an option.

So yesterday I did with James what she always did with me. When the time came to knead, I ripped off a James-sized portion that he got to knead with me and put in his own bowl to rise and when the time came to shape the rolls for the second rise he got to shape his own and put them in his own James-sized bread tin. And today at dinner he will get to butter and eat his very own rolls. 

When we were kneading, I told him my mom used to say kneading was the act of pushing extra love into the dough. I don't think that's a direct quote...I don't remember exactly what she said but she was less cheesy than I was...but it's the gist.

There have been a lot of Thanksgivings that have gone by since Mom died. I've had big giant ones with all kinds of family since that was my stepmother's tradition (she also put sour cream in the mashed potatoes, seriously, WTF.) There's been lots of food and lots of blending of traditions and recipes. There've been store bought pies and years when I tried to make rolls and failed EPICALLY. 

But yesterday, I made the rolls, they turned out well, and nothing else on that table will taste as delicious to me (although I've been smelling my husband's grandfather's recipe for sausage dressing all day, seriously, YUM.) And for Thanksgiving 2020 I'm calling that a grand success.

Media consumption: I gave up on that Last of the Blacksmiths book. I'm finishing the Vanderbeekers and hoping to find someone to watch Miracle on 34th Street with me...always love that one at Thanksgiving.

Today I'm grateful for recipes passed on, for baking, for my mom, for cuddly sweatpants, for my husband the master holiday chef, for so much to be Thankful for.