You'll Never Know Good Food....

Julia Child said: "You'll never know good food unless you taste all food." Or something to that effect.

Which is a polite way of saying eat what you make in the kitchen, no matter how it turns out. And in certain cases, you might be pleasantly surprised.

I recently made Thanksgiving dinner for six. It turned out very well. The menu was as follows:

Roast Turkey
Cornbread, sausage and mission fig stuffing
Fresh cranberry sauce with red grapes
Sweet and Golden Yukon mashed potato blend
Brussels sprouts roasted with pancetta ham, garlic and reggiano parmigiano
Rice pudding with rum raisin mascarpone cheese

My mother-in-law brought orange jello salad, under protest. I asked for it as an homage to my Polish Catholic childhood. In it, no holiday meal was complete without several types of jello salad; to wit: lime jello with shredded carrots floating like mosquitos in amber, or orange jello with canned mandarin orange slices and marshmallow bits.

There were other jell-o salads from my tender years, but I can't remember specific types, only a lightly chilled cinematic pastiche of whipped pastel colors, flung with gelatinous chunks of brilliant, jewel-tone greens, reds, yellows and oranges. Purple and blue were nowhere to be found.

You know, I pore laboriously over Charlie Trotter's cookbooks. Vow to slavishly cook my way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Mentally envision, the way athletes do before competition, the successful execution of a recipe in my kitchen.

However, the menu and recipes for this Thanksgiving, belong to a second-tier celebrity chef hired to write a menu for InStyle magazine. He was possessed of a face friendly to a camera, and seemed to enjoy, in his still-photo representation, cooking dishes in a large loft kitchen with the meticulous abandon brought on only by a full selection of carefully product-positioned designer cookware he did not select or pay for himself.

I give thanks for his menu, but mostly for my mother-in-law's orange fluff. Without the orange fluff, it would have been just a decent meal.