Give Me Stove Top Stuffing or Give Me Death!

There needs to be public service Stove Top on the side of the road on Thanksgiving night for people surviving through someone else’s unfounded belief in Pinterest.

There isn’t much cooking out of a box that happens these days. Maybe, if you’re a parent, the kids eat Annie’s Mac and Cheese, and that’s about it. But the meals I’ve eaten out of a box are legion—prepared with simmering milk, boiling water, or steaming noodles put back inside the pan. 

The boxes offered the dry ingredients—some kind of pasta or rice, and typically a packet of flavor sand—and the person making the stuff supplied the protein. Maybe it was shredded chunks of chicken, but typically it was ground beef. Thinking about this kind of meal preparation now, it seems somehow uniquely medieval and British like the flavor profile had been set to bland and depressing. (Which is almost the equivalent of grinding Morrissey down into a fine powder and swirling his essence into pasta.)

If someone is pressed for time now, they might order a meal delivery service with “fresh” ingredients. Technically, the food does arrive in a box, and, yes, there probably is a flavor packet, but something has always seemed off to me about FedEx delivering a slab of meat or soggy tofu in a cardboard box and leaving it there. 

Box meals like your Hamburger Helpers and Rice-O-Ronis of the world come ready made for single dads, so I ate a lot of them. I don’t know what single moms feed their kids because mine owned her own business and ate at restaurants every night.

Let me clarify because this sounds insanely luxurious. While my parents had a general “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times” division of two households; my mother ate at DINERS. Different diners, every night. In the ‘90s and early aughts. As someone who thinks about “what’s for dinner?” every second of every single day until I sit down to dinner and then start thinking, “What’s for dinner tomorrow?”, my mother spending whatever she had to in order to free her mind from the agony of meal prep is such a fuck you to the patriarchy, I am forever striving for the same. 

A friend of mine once told me—and I think it’s true—that no matter how poor you are, there is at least one luxury your family or yourself will find the money to maintain. My father always bought name brand products; your Oreos, Cheerios, Tide, Comet. He did not mess with bottom-shelf, store-bought. My mother, on the other hand, found the money to pay others for the work she did as a wife and mother for almost two decades, unpaid. 

Mine: an accountant. This makes me seem smart. But, my good people, I have an enamel pin collection. Obviously I need all the help I can get.

During the lead up to Thanksgiving, cranberry sauce and how to eat it has become the candy corn of Thanksgiving. People either want it canned and jellied, plopped onto a plate, and chilled with visible rings like a tree stump. Or, they want it homemade and fancy with actual cranberries, and I guess, infused with other kinds of spices and fruits.

I have no skin in this game, fight amongst yourselves.

Here’s what I do know about Thanksgiving: Give me Stove Top stuffing or give me death!

Maybe you’re southern, so let me rephrase. 

Give me Stove Top dressing or give me death!

I do not want any fresh substitutes with sage and chunks of sausage or crumbles of bacon that is a “re-imagining” of your nana’s homemade dish from the Depression. I want the boxed stuff and I want it to taste like science. I want to FEEL the math equation hit every raised taste bud on my tongue. 

I start off my Thanksgiving blessing by saying, “I would like to thank chemistry.” Nana’s Everything But The Turkey side dish does not hold a candle to the people who actually paid attention to the periodic table in high school and then liked it so much they thought, “beakers and microscopes, but with food!”

In case you are wondering how many people come to my Thanksgiving with this kind of attitude? Two. It is two. And they tolerate me because one married me and the other one had no choice in the matter because I gave birth to her. It’s cool, after we eat, we watch Pauly Shore in Son in Law, and this year we’re adding My Blue Heaven as pre-dinner viewing. I adore our small, but mighty, Stove Top or Gimme Death Thanksgiving with Pauly. 

I just cannot abide by a Stove Top remix when the original is so good. All you have to do is add a chunk of butter to boiling water and then stir in the stale bread crumbs packet, and that’s it. Why make Thanksgiving harder on yourself when you can delight in the notes of single dad desperation, and say, “I’ll have seconds.” 

My father loves Stove Top. This is why I am like this. After the divorce and bouncing around to the homes of aunts, girlfriends, whoever would have us; he gave up and started cooking Thanksgiving dinner himself. It was small, some of it was from a box, and it was shockingly pretty good. My father is a disaster of a human in so many ways, but Thanksgiving he can pull off. When he’s in the kitchen, Dad is almost bearable, but with a lot of taste-testing anxiety. My sister calls his frenzied state of the culinary arts, “Martha mode.” And that’s who he becomes in the kitchen: a dungarees clad, flannel-wearing, would never pass up a boxed side because it rounds out a meal, Martha Stewart-type. 

When our daughter was young, I decided to skip out on my father’s Thanksgiving meal full of overflowing and oven-safe glass dishes of Stove Top and head to someone else’s table. 

Mistake. YUGE mistake. 

There it was, sitting like a fresh turd on the table top, a casserole dish full of homemade stuffing with slices of sausage that might as well have been hot dog chunks for the toddler room at a daycare with—I guess they were spices—but they looked like tree branches from the backyard. The dish looked like someone had swiped their palm across a chaotic countertop into an oven-safe 9 x 13 and then set it to 350 degrees. 

I have never been more depressed about a side dish in my life. 

I felt like a sad beach ball with a tiny hole, slowly folding in on itself as it loses air. Here I was being slowly murdered by mediocre stuffing. And, dear readers, the dish was cold. 

I know I shouldn’t be such a whiny bitch about free food, but this is who I am. Everyone is always going on about “live your truth.” Well here is mine. I will judge a Thanksgiving spread if it doesn’t include a science experiment. 

I nibbled and then got the hell out of there. 

And started hitting the phones. Who did I know, was there anyone, EN-EEEEE-WAN, with leftover Stove Top? 

I have heard that when someone runs a marathon, there are people on the sidelines holding cups of water, and runners just stick their hands out, and get a cup of hydration. 

There needs to be public service Stove Top on the side of the road on Thanksgiving night for people surviving through someone else’s unfounded belief in Pinterest. 

So I called my dad.

“Tell me you have leftover Stove Top,” I said. 

“Who wants to know?”, he said because every question is answered with a question. It’s the Henry way. 

“You don’t even know what I’ve been through tonight. They had the real stuff. Do you have Stove Top or what?”

“I’ve got some. Come on over,” he said; sparing me the embarrassment of replying, “Who’s the desperate one now?”

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🙌 Holiday Book Exchange is ON!

You responded with an outstanding and affirmative, HELL YES! So the book exchange is on. I am going to send a dedicated email for sign ups after the holiday. This is so exciting, thank you to everyone who took the poll and wants to participate. Let’s do this! 

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🍗 CURRENTLY

Happy Thanksgiving, I am taking a break from writing Currently this week. If you have a minute over the holiday, I published a piece about the recent election over at Black Girl in Maine. Go read Gen Z Voted to Save Themselves—Good For Them.

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