BRIAN BLANSETT
Staff column
This weekend, Kindra cooked a turkey.
The plan was for us to eat our fill, then she’d turn the rest of the bird into lunches for the week.
Sliced turkey with blue potatoes for us. Turkey wraps for the kiddoes’ school lunches.
The wafting smell of the turkey filled the kitchen and time-shifted me to Thanksgiving, so I asked: “Could we have some dressing, too?”
Kindra immediately agreed, but there was a lengthy discussion on exactly what makes good dressing.
I posited that a good dressing is dry and has a lot of sage. I admit it is theoretically possible to have too much sage in dressing but I have never personally experienced it.
“If you find a recipe you like, I’ll make it,” she said.
So, I found one that used a pan of cornbread, some spices and chicken broth along with celery and onion.
I wandered through the kitchen later and - woah! - that was some seriously aromatic dressing in the oven. It was a knee-buckling moment.
“That - really - smells good,” I said. It was then that I discovered she had octupled the amount of sage in the recipe.
The result was one of the best pans of dressing ever seen on planet Earth.
I commented that the sage was perfect, prompting her to pull off a small wedge of leftover cornbread, douse it with ground sage and offer it to me a test.
It tasted good. So good that I believe you could make a competitive dressing with nothing but cornbread, sage and chicken broth.
Most of the dressing went into my lunch (dinner, if you are from Fitzhugh) and I am enjoying it thoroughly as I write this column on Monday.
It got me to thinking about tastes, though, and how much they differ from person to person.
My dad, I recall, liked his dressing high on the sage scale and dry. So, maybe I inherited his taste.
I usually sprinkle sage and cumin on my scrambled eggs, which I admit is a bit out of the mainstream, but hey. It tastes good to me.
Years ago, Dad told me about a friend of his who ate raw hamburger meat. One day, they were at a hamburger place in Ada and the friend ordered a hamburger basket.
“With raw meat,” he said. “You don’t want it cooked any at all?” asked the waitress, incredulously.
“I don’t even want you to warm it up.” So, that’s how they served it. And how he ate it.
Dad was able to finish his own hamburger by not watching the friend eat his, but the memory was a haunting one.
That’s pretty much how liver and onions is for me.
My mother used to love chicken livers. She loved all kinds of liver, actually, but especially chicken livers.
The taste and smell of cooked chicken livers make me ill, but I used to use them for catfish bait when I was a kid.
I’d buy a couple of packs and put them in the freezer for upcoming fishing trips only to discover that Mom had discovered it and fried it for her lunch.
It was irritating, but at least she cooked it when I wasn’t in the house.
Mom also liked garlic, but I seemed to have inherited some residual vampire DNA from the other side of the family. Garlic, even in the small amounts found on your typical pizza, makes me ill.
After a while, Mom quit cooking with garlic. I am glad for that, but equally glad she didn’t quit cooking with sage.