"Can it get crisp, please?"
I've intensely pleaded this sentence to so many full pans of Jean's Famous Homemade Stuffing while cooking for and hosting the Colonizer's Genocide Holiday Feast For Wayward Adults and Some People Who Also Have Family Here. Over the past few years, I've been using Miyoko's Plant Milk Butter as a vegan-friendly replacement for the dish. It works just as well as the butter we know, to give that stuffing all the richness and crusty topped layer of goodness it needs, and to be honest - it's better. Getting that stuffing to have a perfectly crispy top as the apartment fills with the scent of sage, thyme, and seasonal goodness smells (I will not divulge my secret recipe) is paramount. I could have the stuffing for dinner, every night of the year - maybe I'd rotate different sides and have absolutely no turkey. It's been years since I stressed myself out by having to roast a turkey for that "holiday." Turkey is the Kanye of Thanksgiving.
From the time you encounter it in the store. It's heavy; it demands so much attention. How're you gonna fit it in the fridge? Great, now everything else has to come out of the refrigerator so TURKEY can fit? Fuck - can it go in the bathtub to thaw? Well, now you have a turkey in your bathtub that you forgot you put in there last night, and you have to remove it so you can take a shower. Then (maybe) you have to brine that turkey - more attention, more attention. And what about the day of cooking? You could spatchcock it to lessen the height it would take up in the oven, so the dishes that people actually love could get done. But the cooking temps are all different, and now everything has to revolve around this fucking turkey and its narcissistic needs. But in reality, turkey has never been the true star of that day. It's just the biggest thing. Turkey could never be Mac and Cheese. Mac and Cheese would never be anti-semitic. Greens would never call the mother of its children a whore. Fuck turkey and as always, fuck Kanye.