Tread lightly on tradition when you host Thanksgiving dinner
Last year, I posted an opinion piece that said food writers hate Thanksgiving because they are pressured to develop new recipes that will largely be ignored. Few consumers break with tradition when the day comes to break the wishbone. They will make green bean casserole and marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes despite all the side-dish variations and innovations presented in magazines and newspapers. My experience has also been that people want Thanksgiving to taste a certain way -- the recipes prepared the way they remember their mothers or grandmothers making them. A woman at church complained last week that her aunt wants to put lemon pepper on the turkey this year because she saw Martha Stewart do it. The changes I have implemented in my holiday meals are, in my opinion, not that radical, but I have met resistance of varying intensities. My mother-in-law distrusts my cooking because, in part, one Thanksgiving I was assigned to bring the green beans . Instead of boiling them within an ...
