[Sca-cooks] OOP - Turkey, again!

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Laura C. Minnick:
>At 11:25 PM 11/24/02 -0600, you wrote:
>
>>But, since I adore Thanksgiving dinner and the leftovers
>>so much, when I get back home I'm going to get all the
>>ingredients and cook my own Thanksgiving dinner. Heh, I'll
>>probably eat it alone since everyone else will be sick of
>>it by that time. But I'll be happy.
>
>Here at Hotel Drachenwald there is a Thanksgiving dinner on Friday, for the
>'chosen family'- basically friends who are tired of their family ;-). BIG
>dinner, many dishes, living room crammed (probably 16-18 this year). By
>Saturday though, I expect that I will be ready for an Advent fast...

That's something of an annual ritual here, too. It's a combination of
two factors: my lady wife's annual ritual of claiming that there was
so much food, she didn't get to try any turkey, which means I have to
cook some in some form or another, and the fact that I have several
friends who actually prefer, qua meal, Thanksgiving leftovers rather
than the meal itself. (Stop cringing, Olwen!) So after bringing most
of Thanksgiving dinner to my Mom's house, leaving all the leftovers
there*, I then get to come home, and manufacture a reasonable
facsimile of Thanksgiving leftovers on/for Sunday.

This is going to be a _very_ bad weekend in re food. Thursday is
pretty self-explanatory, then the Friday almost always includes
dinner out with my brother's family, to be followed by a Hannukah
dinner on Saturday, and then back here on Sunday for
pseudo-Thanksgiving leftovers (which will be fresh, Olwen!).

Adamantius

*P.S.: Can anyone explain to me (and I know we've also had this
discussion here before), maybe I should say, can anyone give me a
compelling argument in support of either A) taking your leftovers
home with you, or B) --to be fair-- not taking your leftovers home
with you? The concept of bringing a casserole (or whatever, but this
being America, it seems to be the standard) to somebody else's home,
and then taking your leftover food home with you, seems so bizarre to
me. I mean, you go to somebody's house, and bring a bottle of wine,
do you say, "Okay, there's still a glass left in the bottle, I'll
just take that back home with me..."? I'm sure there are good
arguments to be made in favor of this practice, ranging from, "I want
to get my casserole dish back quickly," or, "I want to make cleanup
easier for my host/ess," or it may even date from some early funerary
custom in America, and, "I want to take this food of affliction away
from my host/ess, so that they can begin to heal." (Funeral-type
situations being a common occasion for the pot-luck/casserole thing,
it seems.) I always just thought it was weird.