This Thanksgiving Day Is All About the Roots
Today, I woke up extra early to make my roasted root vegetables. It’s the dish I’m known for and the one that gets requested for every group family dinner. So, as I move to slice and dice each butternut squash, each brussels sprout, each carrot and parsnip, I am struck by the fact that this dish is taking up just one shelf in the oven.
It is a cacophony of colors, but it is the only dish I am making this year. Still, the smells fill the house.
In a normal year, my roasted roots would be the last dish to fill the oven before I place that 22 pound turkey in to roast for the crowd that will soon fill my house. I would have already roasted my sweet potatoes simmered in butter and tart apples. I would have already stored in some back recess of my way-too-small fridge the stuffing blended with corn bread and carrots and onions and those secret ingredients I would never share, and blanched the green beans sauteed in almonds.
The table would have been set with the nicer dishes — not the everyday dishes bought in the last move from Bed Bath & Beyond, but those flowered dishes my mother-in-law bought me more than 32 years ago before I married her son. So too would I bring out the silverware; not the everyday forks and knives that get thrown scattershot across the daily dinner table — but the silverware that gleam with polish — also a gift from my in-laws who are no longer with us. I spread out the greens and yellows of my tablecloths and the placemats — the burnt oranges and reds and yellows of an autumn day in New Hampshire — the purchase of which my husband has questioned every year.
My husband would be dusting off the two additional long card tables, the ones brought up with grunts and groans from the unfinished basement just once or twice a year to seat the multiple generations that would gather around my table — the seniors, the middle-agers, and the “kids.”
The fridge would be packed full on this day. And what remained to fill the house would be the smells of a slow roasting turkey — the one I would have studied to prepare in every cookbook and magazine that spans my kitchen shelf.
But this year, as I cut the oranges, whites, and greens of the veggies contained in a single chafing dish, I am struck by how little I have left to do. I have been assigned this one dish — my famous blend of roasted roots — to bring to another table.
After nearly 25 years, the day’s work — the list-making, the shopping, the day-by-day planning of cutting and dicing and strategic penultimate cooking to be done before the placement of the turkey — all of the effort that pours into making this one meal for the people I love — all of this has been passed along to another generation. My niece and her husband and their beautiful two young boys have taken up the gauntlet. Undoubtedly, as I type these words, their house will be filled instead with the chaos that was once mine — the multiple trips to the grocery store in the waning countdown to the family meal for the ingredients that have gone missing just minutes before I can put the finishing touches on that final dish. Most assuredly, their house will be filled with the smells we are missing — that once-a-year waft of a turkey’s roasting.
This year, we will be missing some people — some to the unspeakable loss of a cruel and random virus, others to the urge to travel and find new lives and adventure, and still others to the shot in the arm they have chosen not to get. I am saddened by the thought of those who will not be with us.
But this year, too, I will be looking forward to the smells that will greet me in another family home. It will be smaller than past years — just like the one dish I have awakened just 120 minutes before the journey we are about to take.
But so too will I be upholding a small tradition. I will be bringing my roasted roots, the oranges, greens and yellows of it, the sweet and the tart cranberries of it, the cacophony of flavors mixed together in just one baking dish. Because at the end of this day, it is all about the mix of traditions and love — and yes, it is sometimes sweet, often messy, and chockfull of secrets and secret ingredients. On this Thanksgiving, rest assured, I will be missing some of the people I most love, who are near and dear to me, but so too will I be celebrating this time to look around to find gratitude in those who are with me.
The roasted root vegetables that grace this year’s table may be missing something — maybe it will lack some tart or sweetness. But I will lay it out just the same. Because at the root of it all, all that is contained in this one dish will be about making another memory and good intentions — about melding something together with love to prepare for those who will come together to to celebrate this messy shared feast we do just once a year. After all, at the root of it, isn’t this what this day is about?
Happy Thanksgiving!
