Buy Yourself some Nice Jewelry Instead

Thanksgiving dinner is over.

My Texas trash recipe is excellent. Much better than last year. If you can find it in the post I wrote yesterday, you might as well save it, because it works.

Most Texas trash recipes are underseasoned, and they don’t contain nearly enough peanuts. My recipe has lots of Worcestershire sauce and other stuff. I used a cup of cocktail peanuts per family-size bag of cheddar Chex Mix, and I could have used three and gotten away with it.

My turkey came out great, as always. I think using Aidell’s andouille in the stuffing was not the best choice. Plain old Hillshire Farms beef sausage would have been better. Still, I have never had stuffing anywhere that compares to mine, so I guess it’s okay.

Here’s the big bombshell: everyone agreed that my Honeybaked ham clone blew the real thing away. Not even close. That’s a wrap for Honeybaked. I will never buy one of their hams again.

The recipe I posted works. Just be careful not to burn the crust when you torch it. You want it to harden but not blacken. You’re welcome.

You may not believe my recipe is better, but it is, and it costs 20% as much as the real thing. You may think people all over America wouldn’t be paying Honeybaked prices if they could do better at a small fraction of the price, with a few minutes’ work, but it’s a fact. Here’s something else that’s weird: the Smithfield ham I started with is better, regardless of crust or seasoning, than the meat inside the Honeybaked crust. It’s not as dry, and it’s more tender. You would think Honeybaked would at least try to provide the best meat available.

Spiral-sliced ham crusted with sugar, cloves, and spices is now cheap. You just have to be willing to work for 10 minutes instead of spending 30 minutes buying a ham at a store.

My guests were friends I made at Trinity Church. Their youngest is my goddaughter Gabby. She is really something. Totally fearless. A real firecracker. Runs up to people and grabs them. The thought of rejection is not part of her programming. They have four other kids, and they’re all a pleasure to be around.

We went through a lot at Trinity. We were treated badly by the pastors, of course. When my friends’ son was very young, he got burned while in the care of Trinity’s nursery staff. The burn was on his face, and it was large. The leadership clammed up and refused to talk to my friends. There was no admission of fault, and there was no offer of help.

Of course, when my friends took the boy to the ER, they were treated with suspicion. There were insinuations that they had burned him. It would have been nice if someone at Trinity had had a spine and a heart and could have backed them up.

They left the church. Later on, another child was burned in the nursery. That’s how Trinity is. Nothing changes. Everyone lives with blinders and a muzzle on. The leaders feel that if they pretend everything is fine long enough, eventually the people they hurt will go away and not sue them or otherwise inconvenience them.

My friend was an armorbearer at Trinity, as I was. He remembers spectacularly shabby behavior the Wilkerson family displayed toward me. For example, I put in a long day working for nothing, and then I made the mistake of driving home with Rich Wilkerson’s car keys. I lived 20 minutes away, and that’s in optimal traffic. Instead of showing a little class and gratitude and offering to send someone, like one of his two oldest sons, who did not have real jobs, for the keys, Wilkerson insisted I bring them back the same day.

You would think a grown man would have at least one copy of the key to his main vehicle.

Today we joked about Trinity. I said I wondered who had cooked Thanksgiving dinner for the Wilkersons. We had a good laugh about that. My friend speculated it was some black family still under the Wilkerson spell.

We left Trinity at about the same time, and we ended up in a church run by a man who was an active pedophile. One day that pastor came to church with a Christmas ornament he had bought for my friends’ second-oldest daughter, who would have been maybe eight. My friends thought it was a creepy thing for a middle-aged man to do. When the mother of the pastor’s victim blew the lid off things, my friends were glad they had left the church before anything happened to their daughter.

Being abused by the same preachers can really help people bond.

We cooperated today. I provided the turkey and a couple of pies, and my friends brought sides and soft drinks, plus two unexpected pies. This is how normal Christians do it. They don’t manipulate other people into cooking their food and then stroll in after someone else does all the work.

We had a lot of fun, even though my friends’ rescue dog, Pumpkin, pooped on my carpet. I can pretty much count on Pumpkin leaving me a present on every visit. I have a fair amount of equipment for taking care of a dementia patient, so I was well prepared for any type of spill.

Their eldest daughter stayed in the kitchen most of the afternoon, working on her studies. She had a scholarship to one of Florida’s best private colleges, but she had to turn it down because they don’t offer a pharmacy program. She wants to do the 6-year program at FAMU. Her mother complained that all she did was study. What a terrible problem for a parent to have!

She’s a tremendous young lady. Really restores my faith in young people.

The boy who was burned will be starting baseball next year. His dad had him out in my hard today with a tee-ball set.

When we were done eating, my friends and their kids did most of the clean-up work. The reward for the kids was pie, plus being allowed to shoot coconut-flavored Reddi-wip directly into their mouths.

The conclusion today was that if I’m still here next year, we will do it again, and they will spend the night. Everyone was paralyzed after dinner. They did not want to climb in the car and drive home.

I made them take most of the leftovers. It’s not safe for me to be around that stuff. They made the mistake of leaving an entire pecan pie. I will probably throw it out. That will hurt.

I’m expecting my aunt and cousin for Christmas. We somehow ended up outside the circle of relatives who were invited to family get-togethers, so we will gather here and have better food and weather than everyone else.

I hope your Thanksgiving has gone well. I have to go downstairs now and talk to a couple of birds.