By Pam (aka Gates) Johnson
Seems like this time of year, it’s all about the food. I spent five days and about three hundred bucks preparing a Thanksgiving dinner for just seven people. If you are brave enough to read this to the end, you will find out the answer to an important Thanksgiving-related question.
First off, I kind of love to cook. It’s my thing. When I got married and moved to Vashon at the ripe old age of 21, I knew nothing about cooking. My dad would never let my sisters and me into the kitchen, not even to wash the dishes. He was a little strange. So, when I arrived here, fresh from a life of leisure and fast food, I had no idea how to feed my new husband. BUT I could read, which I did, and taught myself how to cook.
During my time working for the school district, I would prepare meals for the middle school staff on conference or early release days. The meals morphed into a pretty big deal. Lots of work, but I loved doing it. Felt like the teachers needed a little appreciation for their hard work.
My husband also worked for the school district and would have time off during the summer. We needed some extra cash, so started a business of cutting and baling local hay. In those years, there were a lot of people raising livestock and a lot of big fields that needed cutting.
One memorable summer, we cut hay for Frank Benskin, who lived at the Jesus Barn Farm. Frank wanted to put up loose hay, not baled. We cut the hay, and when it was cured, we brought in a big flatbed trailer to haul it back to the barn.
I was a misplaced city girl, a wannabe farmer. I was put on the trailer with a hay fork. The men forked the hay and threw it up to me. My job was to stomp the hay down, being sure to build up solid sides, and load the trailer. When we got the loaded trailer back to the Jesus Barn, the hay was grabbed by a big hook thing and hoisted into the hay loft and stomped down again. Good times.
But I digress …
We baled hay for people, but also for ourselves. My husband would be out on the tractor all day, then at night would have to get a crew of teenagers to haul the bales back to our farm and stack it in the barn. All this had to be done pretty quickly because the threat of rain at any time could potentially ruin all the bales.
Hungry farm workers needed to eat. And that is where my feeding the hay crew began. Around eleven or midnight, the guys would come into the house, hungry, hot, and tired. Teenage boys eat a lot, especially when they are doing hard physical labor. My meals would be farm-type fare, and lots of it. Nothing fancy. They would sit down, chow down, then go back at it to get the hay in the barn before the rain came.
Nowadays, the hay business is gone, the husband is gone, the kids are gone, but I can’t move past the need to prepare large amounts of food. My family comes to dinner here every Thursday. I haven’t figured out how to cook a reasonable quantity of food for one meal. There always has to be enough for a hungry hay crew.
Why make a three-pound roast when there is a five-pounder for just a few bucks more? Spaghetti? A gallon of sauce and a couple pounds of noodles should be enough, with a green salad and a couple loaves of garlic bread. A big ham requires potato salad and homemade dinner rolls.
You get the picture. My son never goes home empty-handed, unless the dinner wasn’t quite up to par.
I am getting up there in age, but this Thanksgiving 2024, I still made the big meal, fit for a hay crew. There was turkey and stuffing and ham and mashed potatoes and gravy and homemade rolls and corn pudding and cranberries and candied yams and green salad and black-bottom banana cream, pecan, pumpkin, and key lime pies.
I used to make seven kinds of pie every holiday meal, but I am slowing down in my old age. Plus, I made 14 pies for other people, so was a little pied-out. There was plenty of leftovers for everybody to take home their fill. They left me enough to get me through the next couple of days, but not enough to put me into a food coma.
A couple of days later, I asked myself … was it all worth it? The work, the expense, the exhaustion? Well, it darn sure was worth it and I will gladly do it again next year!
