Thanksgiving may be my favorite holiday. Families gather. And as they surround the dining table they celebrate and give thanks for all blessings, including the bountiful meal before them.
When my mom was living, she prepared most of the Thanksgiving meal herself. Trying to please everyone, she’d make baseball-sized dumplings and sauerkraut for my German dad, lump-free mashed potatoes for the grandchildren, sweet potatoes with a crunchy topping of melted marshmallows for her daughter-in-law, stuffing for her son-in-law, and lentils for herself and me. My brother wasn’t hard to please. I think he ate everything. And, of course, there was always a huge turkey. I am not kidding when I say there was hardly room on the table for our dinner plates.
Not to be forgotten was the wild rice. In Minnesota, where wild rice is plentiful, most cooks have favorite ways to prepare this “gourmet grain.” It seems my mom could never come up with a recipe that lived up to her expectations. Too dry, too mushy, not enough flavor, too much sage or thyme…just never quite right. Her wild rice challenges may have been due to the fact she had been transplanted in Minnesota from Indiana, where she had never even heard of this aquatic grass seed, the only grain native to the North American continent.
If you peek into the kitchens of most observant Jews you will see a
double sink. Don’t ask me how over 2,000 years Jews took “don’t cook
a calf in its mother’s milk” and created a set of rules that
necessitates at least two sets of dishes, crockpots, and strainers, but
there you have it. Meat and dairy products are kept strictly apart
under Jewish dietary law. To ensure that never the twain shall meet,
usually one side of the sink will be dedicated to dairy dishes and the
other to utensils used for meat. And that’s where you can learn a lot
about how a family likes to eat. 
May 5th is 
Since Thanksgiving is all about so many heavy dishes, such as mashed potatoes, gratin and gravies, it's always nice to have a little bit of
green at the table.
Have you seen the Reddi-Wip commercial that’s been running on television? They’ve timed it to run this time of year when pumpkin pie is being jotted down on the planned menu for many Thanksgiving Day cooks. Every slice of creamy pumpkin pie needs a dollop of topping, right?