Welcome to my contrary world!

It’s that time again: here come the holidays with the usual recipe deluge. Have you ever wondered how many recipes exist on Earth this minute? And more are created every day. Have you tried one tenth of one percent of the recipes in your file right now? Of course you haven’t. And yet someone out there is creating more recipes as I speak. But I do read recipes, even if I never cook them. For example, The Washington Post has its usual Wednesday cooking section with the most complicated recipe for turkey I have ever seen. It looks delicious, all right, but this recipe has four (really, four!) different components, four sub-recipes, as it were. For those of you who are among the fortunate fewer and fewer who have a paper copy of the Post, the recipe I’m describing is in section E on page six. Before you start actually following this four-pronged recipe, you must bone the turkey. For those of you who don’t cook, bone really means debone. You don’t have to put bones in the turkey, you have to take them out, immersing yourself up to the elbows in cold bloody turkey innards. If you are brave enough (or foolish enough) to try this recipe, good luck to you. You’ll need it. I am a big fan of do-ahead recipes. In the same issue is a recipe for James Beard’s sweet potato rolls. These rolls, the recipe says, can be made ahead and frozen. On turkey day, you pop them in the oven for five minutes. I might attempt sweet potato rolls. Initially, they are quite a bit of work, but by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, I will have forgotten the work part, and thus can enjoy the eating part. I have no idea what I’m going to put on the table on the big day. I get tired just thinking about it. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.