A Thanksgiving meal custom-made for Oscar the Grouch

This post will virtually ensure that no one will ever accept a dinner invitation to the Mosiman's EVER but serves as a sad but honest reflection of my culinary abilities. Having stayed up from 1 am to 6 am to provide commentary for Sydney to accompany her premiere viewing of  "Gone With the Wind," I got off to a little bit of a late start this morning causing Brad to experience some alarm about the welfare of his bird. The last thing I had heard before stumbling into bed was the declaration that "tomorrow was another day" but then woke up two hours later to realize that that statement was a total lie. Inherently understanding that, if he wanted to enjoy his Thanksgiving dinner before 8 pm, Brad was busy prepping the bird for its preliminary big show. Unwilling to relinquish my starring role in the kitchen, I did the only thing I could think of:  I immediately began rummaging through the garbage. Beat that for clever cooking tips, "Taste of Home!" While Brad watched, sickly transfixed, I dug out an old, soft apple, washed it, cut it in half and then fearlessly stuffed it into the turkey's torso. Later, as praises rang out about the moistness of the meat, Brad would turn white while I nodded knowingly.

Who knew that the garbage would replace the fridge as the go-to place for gathering the necessary ingredients in order to make the Thanksgiving meal memorable? Sydney was given the job of cutting up green onions for multiple purposes (to jazz up my tasty box of "Stove Top," to adorn my mandarin orange green salad and to add some taste and texture to my fancy smashed 'tatoes.) but her output was alarmingly low.  A subsequent investigation revealed that Syd was only cutting the white ends rather than reaching up well into the slender green stalks. Again, I ignored my husband as he cringed while I reached into the well-stocked depths of our garbage receptacle to retrieve our bounty of usable slender green stalks and, as a result, saved Thanksgiving. Clutching the stems in my determined fist, I raised my hand heavenward to cry out, "As God as my witness, I will never go hungry so long as there is an overflowing garbage in my house!" 

Our Thanksgiving bounty (sorry, I was trying to find a pun using a "Hefty" product but could only get close with a paper towel item) was appreciated and enjoyed. The table was cleared. Left-overs were packed up and stored away in a climate-controlled refrigerator. Plates were scraped into the garbage and, just to be safe, Brad bagged it up immediately and took it down to the garage. It was a meal with biblical origins. Let us consider, for a moment, a loose interpretation of the original Ecclesiastes 12:7 "and the dust returneth to the earth as it was" to the Mosiman version that states that the food returneth to the garbage as it was."  Just as Prissy didn't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies, Amy Mosiman doesn't know nothin' 'bout bakin' no turkey but what I do have is a particular set of skills; skills that I have acquired over a lifetime of extracting usable items from garbage cans...wait, I'm not sure how I morphed from quoting from a pivotal scene in "Gone With the Wind" to quoting Liam Neeson from "Taken"...it must be the rush of tryptophan.