Thanksgiving Remix Is Not For Me

I saw an article in the New York Times this week that listed 101 ways and recipes to get an early start on Thanksgiving.  The pictures were gorgeous, and the recipes sounded very intriguing and tasty, but highly experimental, like Thai Squash Soup with Ginger-Apricot-Prune chutney.  All of the recipes felt cold to me and I imagined them to be something that Joe Fox's girlfriend in You've Got Mail would make (or pay someone to make) if she were in charge of a holiday meal.

To me, the point of Thanksgiving food is to celebrate comfort food at its finest.  Take the foods of your family and heritage, kick them up a notch, and indulge.  Kicking it up in the South tends to mean more butter, more pecans, more marshmallows, and making sure orange juice is in the sweet potato casserole.  Granted, comfort food is different for every person and culture (This really dawned on me one day when watching Giada DeLaurentis cook her favorite easy comfort foods - all of which were completely foreign to me and sounded really difficult - but I'm not Italian.). 

Culture and heritage is the same reason why I likely won't even touch sausage or oyster stuffing, but cornbread chicken and dressing is my favorite food on earth.  This is why Southerner's are completely perplexed by segments on Today show about whether or not to actually cook your stuffing in the turkey.  Like we'd ever do that in the first place (granted - a cajun stuffed chicken is an entirely different matter).  You're supposed to use the official dressing pan that was passed down from your grandmother and basically make washtubs full of dressing.  This is why women in the South have freezers full of cornbread and Sunbeam Thrift Store white bread that they have gathered throughout the year in preparation, and why my Momma is considered a master because she knows the exact perfect proportion of bread to chicken stock and celery to sage.

This said, I am hypocritically baking a Nutella pound cake for tomorrow's dessert.  But, if you ask me, I will say it is merely a chocolate swirl cake - because I want my nephews to actually eat it.