I got your horse right here

Well, the results from last week’s Thanksgiving extravaganza are in. The winner, by a nose, was: Juan surreptitiously washes all the dishes when we're not looking.

Very exciting stuff. Other highlights:

• We burned the crap outta some leeks.
• Dan and I got to eat some actual, authentic NASA space food. I believe it was rice pudding. We declined to reconstitute it, so it was more like that weird Italian nougat candy called Torrone.
• Pomegranate martinis were consumed.

All in all, it was a fun, RELAXING weekend. That’s right, I said RELAXING. Although I missed Dr. Who, dammit.

Details, details

So the five of you who read regularly will notice that I upgraded the blog a little. New features, from most to least important, are:

1. The monkey is actually contemplating a taco now, rather than a mirror. For someone who spends a massive amount of time working in Photoshop, you think it would've occurred to me to fix this before now.
2. I've engaged in a bit of shameless self-promotion in the list of links.
3. I upgraded the template. Please understand, I hold no illusions that having the latest in web features is important to a blog that mainly talks about dogs and my obsession with British TV. Mainly I did this because I am sick of the folks at blogger constantly exhorting me to upgrade. So here you are - a new template, thanks to peer pressure. Yay peer pressure.

Anyway, keep checking in the upcoming days for fun, exciting accounts of Thanksgiving weekend at the Monkey Eats a Taco household, featuring special guests Marty Cohen and her husband, Juan. For those of you who fancy a flutter, here are the odds on the upcoming festivities:

• Roger the dog knocks over grandma: 4/5
• I freak out about the cooking but everything turns out okay: 6/3
• Dan makes it the whole weekend without breaking a dish: 12/1
• Maddy the other dog hornks in the middle of the night, waking everyone up: 9/2
• We run out of gin: 8/5
• Juan surreptitiously washes all the dishes when we're not looking: 7/2

Good God, the excitement is killing me.

Traditio-o-on! Tradition!

Like every other American, I follow some sacrosanct Thanksgiving customs every year. These are highly personal and based on family tradition. I’d like to take a moment to share the madness with you, faithful reader.

Being Thanksgiving and all, most of our customs revolve around food. We have a pretty normal lineup for the actual meal – turkey, stuffing, gravy, peas, etc. And dessert is pretty tame too –apple pie and pumpkin pie.

No, the craziness begins before the actual meal. I’m talking white-trash hors-d’oeuvres. In the Mance family, coming from a, er, rustic background as we do, these little nibbles are a throwback to the days where our forefathers lived through the depression by eating crap and pretending it was good. This tradition was carried into today by our family’s strong desire to remember out past. Also, we will eat almost anything, we Mances.

Absolutely essential in my house are the following:

1. A small olive tray, half full of regular green olives with pimentos, half full of those disgusting little pickles they call gherkins. Each year, my dad and I dutifully bite into a gherkin, to see if maybe this is the year we will finally see what mom likes about them. We always fail to see their charm and throw the other half away. Mom then proceeds to eat two of them, and the rest stay in the tray where they dry out over the course of the afternoon. The tradition is to keep the remainder in a jar in the fridge, untouched, until next Thanksgiving, when it is thrown out and replaced by a new jar. And the cycle begins anew.
2. A small bowl of mixed nuts (extra salty, please!)
3. A plate of stuffed dried dates. These are stuffed with cream cheese or peanut butter, and then sprinkled with confectioners sugar. They are about as attractive and tasty as they sound.
4. A plate of stuffed celery. These are stuffed with an appetizing combination of liverwurst, cream cheese (or mayo), and a tiny bit of mustard. I can hear you gagging already. I love them, and look forward to the liverwurst all year long. Who needs paté?
5. Finally, before we actually sit down to the turkey, everyone gets a small glass full of V-8. As dictated by tradition, we liberally dose the V-8 with pepper and salt, despite the fact that the juice is in fact, 96% salt to begin with.

Yes, we’ve occasionally added other foods – cheese & crackers are usually included, sometimes a little crudite and dip, but the real workhorses of pre-meal snacking are always the same.

It helps that we usually eat early too – no one can hold out until 6 p.m. by eating liverwurst on celery or sticky gummy dates. Also, eating these kind of gross appetizers gives us something to be thankful for: the ability to not eat them the other 364 days of the year.

Enter the dragon

Now that Halloween is over, I can begin my second-favorite* fall activity: planning for Thanksgiving dinner. I usually begin this on November 1. So you can look forward to several more turkey-themed posts in the weeks to come. Yay for you, huh?

Anyway, I love to cook. Love it, love it, L-O-V-E it. I’m a totally obnoxious foodie, I admit it.

Dan, on the other hand, has a love-hate relationship with my cooking. He loves to eat it, obviously, but he hates being around when I cook. I think he watched too many commercials for Nestle Morsels growing up, because he seems to have this idea that “cooking” is a fun, relaxed activity that the whole family can join in. You know, mom and the kids gathered around, kids dumping the flour into the bowl (oops! spilled some!), kids licking the bowl behind mom’s back, and mom triumphantly pulling out a pan of perfectly-baked, symmetrical cookies, all while a soft-rock jingle exhorts you not to eat all the morsels or your cookies will be bald.

Whereas in my life, I spent $40 on fancy groceries and I’m doing three recipes at once and the dogs are under my feet and I just ran out of paper towels and the timer on the stove and the microwave goes off at the same time and I have exactly ten seconds to deglaze the pan before the garlic starts to burn. (I realize, by the way, that more organized cooks don’t contend with these issues. I’m just telling you how I roll.)

Anyway, not being familiar with this scenario, Dan used to ask if I needed any help while I was cooking, sometimes by giving me a supportive, “I-love-that-you-cook-but-you-don’t-have-to” hug or otherwise hovering over me. Or, he would saunter into the (very tiny) kitchen and start rooting around in the freezer for ice cubes for his vodka tonic, and would get involved with repairing the ice dispenser in the process. Sometimes he would casually start doing some of the dishes in the sink. (Why not? Saves doing them later!) I think we all agree that these are fine, upstanding activities for any husband. Except when I’m cooking, of course.

That would be when I would calmly and quietly point out to Dan that, no, I don’t need help, and that he had better get the f*ck out of my way this instant. Apparently, as I would say this, my eyes would begin to glow red, and the rest of the room would drop away to a landscape of agony, with spurting flames and rocky landscapes under a crimson sky. I’m led to believe my voice would be overlain with the moaning of a thousand anguished souls, and ragged, webbed wings would sprout from my back.

Now, when he senses that I am beginning to cook, he hunkers down behind the largest available furniture and quickly yells “I’m here if you need me!” before darting off to watch the Simpsons. But who can blame him, really.

So, expect thrilling posts detailing the many recipes I pore over, the recipes I ultimately choose, the recipes I have to then abandon because everyone only wants the same old thing, and my famous white-trash hors-d’ouvres over the next few weeks.

*My first-favorite activity is planning for Christmas dinner, which begins the day after Thanksgiving. Natch.