My Thanksgiving Plate 2008

For those of you desperate to see my Thanksgiving plate, here she is in all her glory. We were at a fancy buffet in Boca Raton and most parties agreed that as fancy as a Thanksgiving buffet might be, it's still not quite as good as a home-cooked meal--it just doesn't taste like Thanksgiving.

That said: I enjoyed the Brussels sprouts and the cornbread stuffing and sweet potatoes mashed with lots of butter and served in a tiny pumpkin. The turkey was a bit dry but that was saved by copious amounts of cranberry sauce, my favorite Thanksgiving condiment (I'm not a huge fan of gravy.)

Thoughts turned to Regina Schrambling's funny Slate column about Thanksgiving when it became clear that all the Thanksgiving classics on the buffet--the butternut squash soup, the stuffing, the turkey, the mashed sweet potatoes--were the only dishes people wanted; the less conventional stuff (a wild mushroom casserole with Parmesan, for example) went untouched. It's a good Thanksgiving lesson: give the people what they want.

And thus ends all Thanksgiving coverage on the blog for 2008. Hope yours was a happy day stuffed with stuffing and not too much indigestion. I bet those of you who read lots of food blogs are glad that Thanksgiving's over--what a relief to stop talking turkey. Onward and upward, as they say: comforting cold weather food awaits.