Giving Thanks

I'm right smack in the middle of the biggest food holiday of the year. Food retailers start planning for Thanksgiving in July, estimating how many pounds of mashed potatoes and stuffing you will need, how many gallons of gravy to make, and what sort of things you can offer to vegans, and folks who won't eat turkey. The planning is tedious, thinking out the logistics of storage space, and how many refridgerated trucks you will need, and how many pallets of food you can place in the trucks, and how many cartons of stuffing you can fit on a pallet if you stack it to the ceiling. I'm not crazy about the planning, because you sit for hours in meetings and talk about working, instead of actually working. But now, it's nearly 4 am, I just got home from work, having spent the evening until the wee hours of the morning stuffing turkeys.

Pallets of turkeys.

I had to ask a handful of my best staff members to work late tonight. The turkey stuffing is the worst job, you have to unpack the turkeys, wash them, slip herb butter under the skin, season with salt and pepper, then place them in a tin foil pan with carrots, celery and onion (known in the food business as mire poiux) add fresh sage, thyme, and rosemary, wrap them in cellophane, weigh them and price them, and place them in a box. We do this for customers who don't want to wrestle with a 20 pound turkey, they just want to stick it in the oven, wait for 4 hours, and then eat it. When you have to prepare one turkey, it's not so bad, but doing 400 turkeys really makes you wish that more people were vegan, and were going to eat a tasteless squash tart and some green beans for Thanksgiving dinner.

| +Save/Share | |