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Another 'Thanks' To Give Today

Today is Thanksgiving, and I'd be willing to bet that there is someone in your kitchen right now baking, roasting, boiling, or mashing something -- maybe all at the same time! Because this is a day for serious cooking and serious eating.

Most holidays have lots of rituals, but Thanksgiving is pretty much all about the food.

The Thanksgiving meal is mostly rich comfort food: the turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn casserole, creamed onions, sweet potatoes, and green beans with cream-of-mushroom soup and those dried onions you only find at Thanksgiving. Some cooks relish the old family recipes, while others riff on the familiar dishes with new recipes.

They say a Thanksgiving dinner takes 18 hours to make, and I believe it. It's definitely not a meal to be thrown together at the last minute. There are high expectations, with endless advice articles in the weeks before. The experienced cook takes a running start to decide what's on the menu, and then comes a shopping list and cooking schedule. It's a juggling act of time, refrigerator space and oven temperatures.

But the ultimate cooking challenge of the day is to get all the food onto the table at the same time. Hot and delicious. Dish after dish after dish. And even though this may look natural -- even preordained -- it only happens because the cook has done an enormous amount of planning.

So when you give thanks for your blessings today, be sure to take a minute to thank the cook who made dinner.

I'm Deborah Booth, and that's my perspective.

I'm Deborah Booth, and later on Perspectives, it's time to praise the true heroes of Thanksgiving.

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