Here I was, writing about the series finale of “Atlanta,” thinking I’d take my time with an homage to the most bizarre, ingenious, beautiful, hilarious show ever made.
And then it was Thanksgiving.
“Atlanta” ended on November 10. I don’t know what happened to those two weeks. They evaporated.
Thanksgiving arrived, and I thought, “Oh, I’ll write a little post-Thanksgiving piece.”
I’m never ready for that post-Thanksgiving whiplash. December starts the second Thanksgiving ends.
It’s time to buy gifts. Now.
No, like, now, now. No, don’t wait. Black Friday. Sales. Deals. Go go GO. nodontwait. nononono thedealsaretoogood. dontwaitdontwaitdontwait iiiit’s CYBER MONDAY nownownow, aaand… I missed it.
It all happens too quick for me to capitalize on any of it.
The thought of Thanksgiving evaporates quicker than the two weeks that preceded it.
You want to get the right gift. You take your time. You find the right gift. The right gift won’t arrive until February.
So you get the right gift, but you find another “right” gift. It’s not quite right. You do the math to make sure you’re not over-gifting to one person and hanging someone else out to dry. You get more gifts. You think you’ve got enough gifts. You get more to be safe.
The gift you’re most worried about sometimes turns out to be the most exciting. I got my mom some upscale, felt coasters this Christmas. She was ecstatic. Of course she was. They’re nice felt coasters!
The whole month is a rush to relax. Everyone’s hauling ass to get work done. At the same time, you try to carve out time to make sure you hang out with friends before the mass holiday exodus.
I started writing this piece in the first week of December. I updated it a week later. Now, it’s Christmas. And I barely got this off on Christmas.
It’s been far too long since the last edition, so there’s a lot of nothing to get to. Let’s get to it.
Christmas vs. Hanukkah/Chanukah/Hhchchchhannukchkahaha
I feel like I should have some Christmas takes, but being anti-Christmas is just edginess for the sake of being edgy.
Unless you’re in the service industry and have to work, who truly hates Christmas?
The only thing that annoys me is how inescapable Christmas music is and how early it arrives. Have the decency to wait until December arrives, you degenerates.
That said, I’ll never complain about the standards, especially if it’s Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin. The holiday itself is outstanding.
I mean, Jewish people only added gifts to our holiday because we saw how much fun everyone else were having on Christmas and called a branding audible.
We grew up celebrating Hanukkah, which, when you’re a kid, seems nice. The candles can be annoying when you want to get to the gifts, but getting to the light them feels like an honor.
Most importantly, you get to come at the Christian kids with, “Well, we actually get eight days of presents.”
And if you were one of the Jewish kids in my town who lived in a McMansion with parents who ran some sort of lawn-care or pest control business they’d eventually pass off to you, their worm-brained, likely-covered-in-Gushers child? Well yeah, maybe you get eight nights of outstanding presents.
But the reality is, out of the eight nights of Hanukkah, the majority are duds, at least from a kid’s perspective.
One night is absolutely going to be socks (more on them later).
Another is a “family gift,” which is sometimes fantastic, like the year the Wii dropped; but sometimes it’s just a TV your parents wanted for their room and are re-branding as “for family movie nights.”
There’s almost certainly a pajamas night and another for upscale clothes your mom thinks are cute and will make you wear for picture day. There’s a green Lacoste polo that haunts me to this day.
Some nights, you might not even do gifts, especially as you get older.
But that’s the thing about Judaism I’ve always loved. It fully prepares you for the disappointments of life.
No one is thrilled to go to temple. But everyone goes.
Every single time I had to go to Hebrew school on Sundays, or Wednesdays… or Tuesdays and Thursdays (the schedule was ever-evolving and all sorts of fucked up), I’d plead to whoever the hell “Adonai” was to let me skip temple.
We had an ongoing carpool, which meant begging whoever’s parents were in charge to let us please, for once, skip it.
It never worked.
You go. You hate it. But you bond with other Jewish kids and learn to kvetch together, commiserating over how lame Hebrew school is.
Eventually, you escape temple via a Bar or Bat Mitzvah and give a puberty-voice-crack-riddled speech about what it’s like to be a “man.” You’re 13. You spend your party inhaling helium from balloons and shaking the hands of people who met you as a baby and expect you to do something with them re-introducing that information.
That’s most of being Jewish; interacting uncomfortably with people you half know, nodding your head until you’re allowed to leave.
It’s that and getting together to eat and complain about nominal, mostly grocery store-related inconveniences.
The adults, at least in the half-assed variant of reform Judaism, show up to temple almost exclusively for the post-service snacks and schmoozing.
There was one time we went to temple, got there, and my youngest sister threw up on my dad and middle sister. They all got to go home. My mom and I stuck around.
I’ve never been more upset to not be covered in vomit.
The point is that Judaism — not that there’s any real core belief in the reform variety besides the “one God” thing — is all about appreciating the bigger picture.
The fact that a lot of nights of Hanukkah are duds makes you appreciate the big gift night, when you get the thing you’ve been waiting for most of the year.
It’s the thing you can brag about when you go back to school while all the Christian kids — depending on where Hanukkah falls on the ridiculous Jewish calendar — have to wait days or weeks for their gifts.
My sisters and I got the best of it, too. We had a grandma who was Mormon, so she’d always have a Christmas tree and little get-together at her place and double dip on gifts.
We’ve always celebrated Christmas — Jesus factor aside — and usually take a trip somewhere cold.
It’s only Christmas if it’s cold
(I wrote this part on the way back from Seattle after an excellent weekend about a week and a half ago)
I’ve never had a bad time in Seattle. There’s an endearing drear to the city in the non-summer months that is consistently refreshing on short trips. It feels like actual winter, that fourth season that is conspicuously nonexistent in California.
It even snowed with those sort of picturesque, light flurries while I was there.
I mean, look at this house. The ground was frosted over outside. The cold air snaps at your ears on the way by. The lights just feel more significant when you’re huddled in coats and have to fight freezing temps to appreciate them.
Christmas should be cold. Everyone should be inside, huddled up in blankets and various sweaters, drinking a weird, seasonal cocktail that only works for the occasion.
Or any cocktail. Just make sure you’re drinking.
I opted for these espresso martinis on Christmas.
My sister was not a fan. I drank hers and felt out of my fucking mind for a couple hours.
Christmas Day should arrive with a way-too-bright morning from the white of the snow outside. You should have to try on five pairs of pants, three long-sleeve shirts, one pair of oversized gloves. You get to reject exactly one clothing item and pretend that the pants that don’t fit you are “actually perfect.”
You will forget about them for three years, discover a perfect use for them, then remember, oh yeah, they don’t fit. They’ll find their way to an oversized IKEA bag in the garage that is theoretically destined for Goodwill. It’s yet to be seen if they’ll ever make it there.
You will also get socks.
Socks on Christmas/Hanukkah are the truest barometer of age.
Like the transition from Thanksgiving to Christmonth, you’ll never be ready for the day you go from despising socks as a gift to thinking, “Fuck yes, socks. I needed socks. Thank you, Mom. I can use these, for like, walking.”
I got socks this year. I loved them. Where would we be as a society without socks? Exactly.
This Christmas, my mom, sister and I all went down to our favorite park at the edge of the Presidio.
It was as cold as you could possibly imagine for 50-ish degree weather. There were some sort of cyclical, aggressive tides and an accompanying 15 mile per hour wind coming off the Bay which smacks you in the face.
We walked around for a while, but bailed on the beach in part because of the wind, and in part because my dog is a legitimately deranged being who lunges and barks at other dogs in attempts to play (for the most part).
We came back and crashed. My sister had some pastrami and fell asleep immediately. I finished a long-overdue book and took one of those sweaty naps where you wake up confused, still wearing pants. My mom did roughly the same.
The rest of our night included the stereotypical ordering of Chinese food, as you are required to do as a Jew on Christmas. We drank and played Sequence, until we thought it was 9 or 10. It was 6. Time for bed.
Why Thanksgiving and Christmas are the best
(This was the Thanksgiving portion, which I think mostly applies to Christmas)
There are three ingredients for a good party: too much food, too much alcohol, and people you enjoy being around (or who you are at least entertained by).
Sometimes you only need one person you really enjoy being around, and a handful of folks you can bear for a few hours.
A great Thanksgiving has all of those qualities. A poor Thanksgiving generally has enough food and alcohol to deal with the most unpredictable element: people.
If there’s not enough food, you need to abandon your family and/or friends. Anyone who doesn’t have enough food on a food-oriented holiday isn’t someone worth spending time with.
It might be worse if there’s not enough alcohol. It’s a fine line of having too much or too little. As long as you don’t have any violent family members, I’d err on the side of drunkenness.
I know some people don’t get along with their family. Families are messy. That’s what Friendsgiving is for. It’s all the best parts of Thanksgiving without the familial drama. It’s usually drunkerer-er too. And you don’t have to take a secret walk to get high. SantaCon is the Christmas equivalent, and decidedly sloppier.
When I think of holidays or events that I don’t enjoy, there is usually a unifying quality. They lack enough drinking, eating, or people I don’t enjoy.
The happiest moments in my life are around people I love, laughing hysterically at something objectively stupid at the end of a long day of drinking and eating.
If you go to a Thanksgiving or a Friendsgiving where the food is shit, but the company is good, you should take the cooking into your own hands next time. There’s some advice for that at the end of this.
The cold slope
Every year concludes with what feels like a descent down a steep hill. If you’ve ever hiked in Los Angeles, where the ground erodes with each step, you know what I’m talking about.
You try to trod carefully, precisely, but your momentum picks up. There’s a point when you realize you’re not that far from the bottom and break out into an awkward, bumbling, downhill sprint.
The last month and a half of the year feels like that. It’s not innately negative, just out of our control.
Everything’s plodding along at a pace you’re accustomed to. Then Thanksgiving sneaks up on you and… well, shit. It’s Christmas.
Recipes
This would probably have been more useful before Thanksgiving or Christmas. But green beans and mashed potatoes are good year-round.
Green beans
It’s more about technique than the ingredients. But the ingredients you’ll need:
Green beans (french beans/haricots verts are my preference)
Lemon
Sea salt
Black pepper
Garlic
Shallots
Olive Oil
Butter
Start by preparing the green beans. Rinse them off wild cold water in a strainer so they can dry out a bit. If they’re haricots verts, you can snap the ends off by hand if there’s a reasonable amount. For the Thanksgiving quantity I went with, it made more sense to line them up and slice the ends off with a chef’s knife.
Set them aside so they’re mostly dry by the time you add them to the pan. You can use a smaller pan for the first part if you want, but you’ll want a large one by the time the green beans go in, so if it’s a decent-quality, large pan, just stick with that one.
Continue by thinly slicing the garlic. Think of the scene from Goodfellas when they’re in jail and Paulie slices the garlic with a razor.
You don’t need to get them literally translucent or be that painstaking, but take as much time as you need to ensure they’re borderline paper thin and roughly the same width.
You won’t get me to give you an exact quantity. It depends on the green beans and how much you like garlic. I like garlic quite a bit, but I usually use about twice to three times as much shallots as garlic, in part because the shallots shrink down substantially in the pan.
For the shallots, I cut them similarly to an an onion. I usually take a chef’s knife and slide it down the back of a shallots to open it up and peel it apart if there are two inside. You might have to repeat that one more time.
One word of warning: shallots are exponentially more agitative to the eyes than onions. My cousin theorized that it’s because they have less layers and are more compact, but I need a quasi-scientific explanation to be satisfied.
If you’re cutting a substantial quantity of them, use goggles if they’re available. You’ll look ridiculous, but it’s worth it. I’ve never had an issue with onions, but shallots are brutal to the eyes.
With the shallots, I cut long lengths towards the root, then thinly dice them. It usually comes out pretty uniform, but keep an eye out for the last slice; you might have to chop that individually.
From there, take a cold pan and add a healthy dose of olive oil. Put the shallots and garlic in while it’s cold or warming up, just not hot. You want to make sure they heat up slowly, so keep the pan on medium low or low depending on how aggressive your burner is.
You don’t want to put any color in them at this point, just to cook them down and get them translucent.
I don’t time any of this, but it’ll probably take 5-to-10 minutes to get them where you want them. Stir them semi-frequently with a wooden spoon or flat rubber spatula.
At this point, remove the shallots and garlic into a small container, like a mini ramekin or a small dish you’d use for dipping bread into olive oil. If you have a small rice strainer, strain through that, pressing on the shallot/garlic mixture, then add the olive oil back into the pan.
If you don’t have a small strainer, just take the spoon or spatula and press against the garlic and shallots while tilting the container to release the oil back into the pan.
Make sure to keep them close by.
Add another healthy dose of olive oil, then turn the heat to medium high or high. I like the oil a little below its smoke point. You want an aggressive crackle when the green beans hit the pan.
Wait for the temp to get up to where it needs to be, then add the beans. You’ll probably need to do it in batches unless you’re cooking for one or two people and portioned an appropriate quantity of green beans. Seems insane to me, but to each their own.
From here, just add a healthy bit of lemon juice on top of the beans, and a fair bit of salt and pepper. If you want a kick to them, red pepper flakes don’t hurt.
You’ll want some smaller sized kitchen tongs for this. Keep the beans moving, adding more salt, pepper and lemon juice as you see fit.
It’ll depend how many beans are in the pan, but you really just want them to get a little bit of color. They should only need five-ish minutes in the pan (that number could be off if the pan doesn’t start hot enough or if there are a lot of green beans).
Right at the end, add the shallot and garlic mixture back into the pan and add a small bit of butter. Roughly a tablespoon, but can be less or more depending on what you’re looking for. I’ve never measured it.
Mix that all together in the pan for about 30 seconds and coat the beans in the mixture. Remove from the pan and serve. To recap:
Lightly sauté garlic and shallots
Remove, but release oil back into pan
Add more oil, get pan very hot
Add green beans, season with lemon, salt, pepper, optional red pepper, cook for five-ish minutes
Add garlic, shallots, bit of butter for about 30 seconds
Remove and serve
Mashed potatoes
I’m running out of time here because I spent far too much of it on the green beans.
I’ll keep it relatively short for the mashed potatoes. I used both Russet and Yukon Gold, which seemed to work out well, about 1/3 of the former, 2/3 of the latter.
Peel and quarter them, then let them boil from cold in salted water. Throw some lightly crushed, whole garlic in there, too. It’ll get worked in later.
The key after they boil (done when they pierce well with a fork) is to put them back in the pot with the heat on and let them dry out. I needed a couple pots to do this, but it prevented them from becoming gummy.
The other step I used, at the recommendation of my Irish roommate — fun fact, potatoes got their start in America, not Ireland — was to use a ricer or a food mill.
You put the potatoes through (use the widest setting) and never have to mash them.
At that point, it’s all vibes. Butter, milk/heavy cream, maybe some cream cheese, salt and pepper. Feel it out.
But keep adding butter. If the taste is off, add more butter. When you think you’ve added enough butter, collect yourself, admonish yourself for your hubris, and then add more butter.
As long as you don’t over-salt and over-mix (which is hard to do with the food mill/ricer method), you’ll be fine. Just make sure to go wild on the butter.
Merry Christmas, folks.
Should have known to call you for the mashed potato recipe ahead of Christmas, wound up on Foodnetwork.com.