Only America would have a holiday the point of which is gluttony...

...followed by an orgy of consumerism. Is there anything more American than that?

Because Mr. Brilliant has no family and I have none living close by, Thanksgiving is a quiet affair here at Casa la Brilliant. When Mr. B's father was alive, I once did a big Thanksgiving dinner for the three of us, with fresh fruit, handmade ravioli with vodka sauce (neither of them handmade by me), turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, and something for dessert that I don't remember. Then we started just going out to eat on Thanksgiving.

I grew up with the doctrine that eating out on Thanksgiving is depressing, so my mother made a turkey every year, or else we went to the home of one of her friends. But in recent years, I've discovered the pleasure of letting someone you don't know do the cooking. The last few years we've gone to the Thanksgiving Brunch at the Short Hills Hilton. This is pricey, but they do a lovely buffet spread (which Mr. B. likes for its variety) with unlimited champagne or mimosas. If you're a big eater, you can start at the omelet station for eggs, bacon, and sausage and then move on to trips for appetizers and hot food. If you're more like me and always find today to be a minefield, you case the joint first looking for what's OK to eat and then take a little of the things that looks good and also look like they won't have you in the cardiac ward of St. Barnabas on the way home. They do some lovely salads, and have great smoked whitefish, and then I tend to lean towards things like ale-braised shortribs and orichiette with broccoli rabe and sausage and maple-glazed carrots. After 56 Thanksgivings and the advent of Trader Joe's sliced turkey and frozen mashed potato discs making it possible for even non-cooks like Mr. B. to prepare a turkey dinner any night of the week, the whole "traditional" Thanksgiving dinner seems kind of ho-hum.

For me, the worst part of Thanksgiving is the pitying looks that colleagues give you when you say that it's just going to be dinner for two on Thanksgiving. It makes me understand in a far lesser degree what my colleague who recently underwent treatmet for breast cancer described as "That Look". If I had family close by, I'd be there for Thanksgiving. But I don't, and Mr. B. doesn't, and sucking down unlimited champagne and eating pears poached in port wine with goat cheese is a pretty damn pleasant alternative. It's my one concession to consumerism over the Thanksgiving weekend, since I have zero intention of going anywhere near a store this weekend, unless it's to Trader Joe's to buy that big tray of sliced turkey breast and stuffing just so we can say we have turkey leftovers to eat while we watch the increasingly bad New York football teams play.

This year in Blogtopia (™ Skippy), we are highly amused at Pat Robertson's bafflement about whether mac and cheese is "a black thing":



I realize that Thanksgiving is supposed to be about the Potatoes Mashed and Sweet, but for my money, if you're going to eat a high-fat, high-glycemic index food on Thanksgiving, which is all about comfort food, why NOT macaroni and cheese?

I realize that to admit a fondness for macaroni and cheese at my advanced age is akin to confessing to still liking Smarties (which I do) when you are above the age of ten, but we all have guilty pleasures, and that one is mine. And I'm not alone.

You can pretend you aren't making comfort food by coming up with recipes like Rustic Fried Sage and Chicken Apple Sausage Mac n Cheese with Autumn Chutney, and Wild Mushroom and Grana Padano Macaroni and Cheese, but we know the truth.

I mean seriously. Grana Padano mac 'n' cheese? "Autumn chutney"?

I've made passable mac 'n' cheese using cheddar, but it can be difficult to get the sauce consistency just right. Cheddar mac can be a bit grainy. Ken Johnson of Amarillo Grilling says his secret is French butter, though I suspect that the four kinds of cheese he uses for his amazing rendition of this dish has something to do with it, because his macaroni and cheese leaves no pools of separated grease on your plate, but is just forkfuls of rich, creamy, cheesy, crunchy heaven.

Here are some other recipes that look worth trying if you're inclined towards an early death because there won't be any Social Security by the time you hit age 66:

Are you going to argue with Paula Deen's Creamy Macaroni and Cheese? I'm not.

Likewise for Smack Yo' Mama Macaroni and Cheese.

Soul Food Macaroni and Chees uses the entire cheese counter at Fairway, but it does have Velveeta in it, so i'll forgive that something called Soul Food Macaroni and Cheese is on a web site called Epicurious.

If you like a little heat with your mac, try this recipe from Lynne's Country Kitchen (even if "Lynne's Country Kitchen" sounds like it should be featured in the next Blues Brothers movie: Blues Brothers 2012: Whatever DID Happen To Jonny Lang Anyway?).

Admit it. You now want macaroni and cheese today.

Have a great day, everyone. And go the fuck to sleep tonight. The tchotchkes will still be in the stores tomorrow.

Who says you have to make that big hormone-laden bird anyway?

Thanksgiving may be the holiday that most often causes people to plunge into holiday-related depression. No other holiday, not even Christmas, comes with as much Rockwellian baggage as Thanksgiving. It's the day when we think everyone but us is going to sit down to a perfectly-decorated table and eat a delicious meal of golden-brown turkey that oozes juices as it's carved, glistening cranberry sauce, fluffy stuffing studded with bits of sausage/raisins/whatever, mashed potatoes that taste like potatoes instead of something you'd use to putty dents in your car, and apples or pumpkin custard nestled in crusts that flake with a fork -- even on the bottom. We think everyone but us is going to sit around that table, without a cross word spoken, beaming at a few dozen loved ones -- grandparents, parents, children, cousins, siblings, nieces, nephews -- and thank God that they all had the opportunity to be together on that day.

There are people for whom today is going to be like this. They are the lucky ones. For others, it's a day when they pray that their wingnut brother-in-law doesn't insist on bringing up Iraq at the dinner table, or that Grandma doesn't say anything about their weight, or that cousin Brenda's vegan boyfriend doesn't go into one of his meat is murder rants about the turkey, or that Uncle Carl doesn't fall off the wagon again and drink a sixpack of beer while watching the football game. For many women (and it's still mostly the women who do the cooking) it's a day off spent trying to coordinate all the pieces of this dinner that gets demolished in twenty minutes, leaving nothing but leftovers that everyone will be sick of in another day and a mountain of dishes and dirty pots and pans.

My thoughts are with this latter group today.

Because I absolutely refuse to travel on Thanksgiving weekend, this is a holiday that's usually spent quietly at Chez Brilliant. In previous years we've gone to a local restaurant, but after last year, when a size-zero waitress made a snarky comment at me because I dared to have a couple of cookies for dessert, I really didn't want to go back there. I toyed with the idea of making a turkey breast, but frankly, at this point in my life, I mostly identify turkey as deli meat, best served on a whole wheat baguette with a spread of brie and a schmear of honey mustard and maybe a bit of tomato. I don't much care for mashed potatoes, and once you get that "wet bread" idea in your head, the idea of stuffing seems pretty nauseating too. I do, however, love sweet potatoes, but I like them baked, served plain or perhaps with just the tiniest bit of butter. Mr. B's idea of sweet potatoes is those sad little creatures out of a can that are then dressed up with marshmallows until they are unrecognizable as anything but a particularly unpalatable breed of candy. I have vowed to do something with roasting the yams I bought this week with olive oil and herbs to show him how fabulous a little tuber this really is.

But if you're not going to go out, or to where someone else does the cooking, and you don't want to do the bird, what do you do? This is where I ask Mr. Brilliant what he'd like to have, and this year the answer was "Indian food." But alas, Twins India Palace in Orangeburg, NY is closed, so it was back to cooking. Plan B? Spinach lasagne with garlic bread.

Just on the off chance that you can't face the Big Bird today, or if you want to add a pasta course to guarantee turkey leftovers, here's what's cooking at Chez Brilliant today. It's a sort-of less fattening version of conventional lasagne, and uses a white sauce instead of a tomato-based sauce. I made this recipe up, so feel free to adjust seasonings and everything else at will:

SPINACH LASAGNE

• 2-3 bags frozen chopped spinach
  
• 1 onion, chopped
  
• 1 Tbs. or so olive oil
  
• As many garlic cloves as you like, minced (I like to make it really garlicky)
  
• 2 16-oz. containers ricotta cheese (the fat free works just fine)
  
• 8 oz. shredded mozzarella
  
• 2 eggs
  
• oregano and/or basil to taste
  
• freshly-ground pepper to taste
  
• 4 Tbs. butter
  
• 4 Tbs. Wondra flour
  
• 2 cups milk (1% or skim is fine)
  
• 1 box lasagne noodles (I use the Ronzoni Healthy Harvest or whole wheat noodles)
  

Prepare spinach: Thaw spinach and sqeeze out excess moisture. Heat olive oil in saute pan and add garlic and onion, cook till onion is translucent. Add spinach and saute about 1 minute. Set aside.

Prepare cheese layer: In a bowl, combine ricotta, half the mozzarella, eggs, basil, oregano, salt/pepper to taste. Set aside.

Make white sauce: In a saucepan, melt butter. Add flour and stir. Add milk. Slowly bring to a boil, reduce heat immediately and stir till thickened. Add salt/pepper to taste.

Cook pasta till just al dente. Drain, rinse with cool water.

Spray a lasagne pan with oil spray. Spread a thin layer of sauce in the pan. Layer noodles, spinach, cheese 2-3 times, stopping with noodles. Spread a thin layer of sauce on top if you have any left, top with remaining mozzarella.

Cover with foil and bake at 350 degrees about 40 minutes. remove foil and bake another 15 minutes or so till mozzarella is of desired consistency.

And so today we will eat this repast and be thankful for reduced-fat cheeses and high-fiber pasta and for not having to work ourselves to death today. And I will be thankful for being still employed, and for still having my health (and insurance) and a roof over my head. I'll be thankful for not having answered the siren song of home equity loans and not being in debt up to my eyeballs. I'll be thankful that at least for now there is someone running for president who isn't completely loathsome. I'll be thankful for Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and Paul Reickhoff Jon Soltz and the Wilsons and Naomis Klein and Wolf and Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert and the many, many others who do yeoman work trying, however vainly, to save this country. I'll be thankful that there are no family members I'm not speaking to. I'll be thankful for my friends, both meat world and virtual, and you readers who for some strange and wondrous reason known only to yourselves, give me the blessing of your eyeballs every day.

Have a happy, wonderful, and safe day, everyone.