In this free-for-all-Friday, Trent breaks down his most and least favorite Thanksgiving food.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
It isn’t just any Free for All Friday, it is the post-Thanksgiving Free for All Friday. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Mondays and Wednesdays, we talk apologetics and theology. One Thursday out of the year, we eat Turkey and a whole bunch of sides, and the following Friday, we just recover. That is what you’re doing today. It’s probably what I’m doing today. I’m pre-recording this episode, but I’m imagining the Friday after Thanksgiving, what will I be doing? Probably recovering a bit.
My favorite thing is when people say, “Oh, you want to know why you get so tired on Thanksgiving? It’s because turkey has tryptophan in it and tryptophan makes you sleepy, so that’s why people are always tired on Thanksgiving afternoon.” No, people are probably tired because they ate like 3000 calories of food that’s really stock loaded with carbohydrates. As I go through my list here, you’ll see I love carbs. Isn’t that funny? Who could have guessed something like that?
You’re probably recovering today from being stuffed full of goodness, stuffing and tradition, because not all Thanksgiving food is created equally. It is not all equal. Get that egalitarian nonsense out of here. Some Thanksgiving food is better than other Thanksgiving food. Some Thanksgiving food you eat out of politeness or out of a sense of etiquette, or you eat it out of a sense of tradition because you feel like your plate has to look a certain way.
There’s one thing I can’t stand, by the way, is people who take pictures of their Thanksgiving plates. That’s just the most unappetizing thing. No matter how you feel about the way Thanksgiving food tastes, it doesn’t look very good. It’s not photogenic. Any other time of the year, if there is a holiday and food related to it, you can usually take a picture of it and it looks good. 4th of July, you’ve got hot dogs and burgers. Halloween, you can take pictures of all of your candy. Even at Christmas when you have the Christmas ham and the Christmas dinner out, maybe it’s all the lights in the background. I don’t know what it is, but you can make Christmas dinner look pretty good and decent, but when you put Thanksgiving food on there, it just looks like a mess. You don’t want to look at it too long. You want to eat that pretty quickly.
Today, I’m just going to go through, I’m going to rank the food. Mostly I’m going to rank the sides, because the main dish, it’s usually one of two things. Now, some people will go all out and do something non-traditional. I think that that’s great actually, because the traditional thing is turkey, or maybe you’ll do something like a honey baked ham. I’m really more of a honey baked ham person unless I am attending a Thanksgiving dinner and somebody has put a ton of loving care into that turkey, because it is really hard to get turkey right. It’s usually dry.
Throughout my whole life, the only turkey that I’ve ever really enjoyed is deli-sliced turkey because it isn’t dry, but when you carve yourself into turkey and get the white meat of the turkey, you got to slather that thing with gravy all the way down, saturate that bad boy, because it just does not taste good just straight off. You get to the dark meat, that’s okay, but it still doesn’t have that zest that a honey baked ham has. Now, granted, a honey baked ham is usually covered on the outside with brown fried sugar and stuff like that, so that definitely gives it an edge. But yeah, turkey, I feel like it’s very hard to get it right.
That’s the main dishes. Let’s go through the sides. I’ve divvied them up into three categories, sides I love, sides that are neutral, and sides that I hate. The ranking here, it is not like a top 10 list, no particular order, but when I’m at Thanksgiving, if I can make my way to the front of the line to go through and get the sides … It depends how big of a family you have, right? You can all sit around the table and pass the sides around. Other times, you might have so many people you put the sides out on kind of like a serving table, and it’s sort of like a buffet, like being back at Hometown Buffet. I think those went out of business, and that is really sad, because I have a lot of great memories at Hometown Buffets growing up in life.
But what are the side dishes that I’ll rush to at your impromptu home buffet table? One would be the fried onion on top of the green bean casserole, so not the green bean casserole itself, but when you dip the giant spoon into the green bean casserole, it’s hard. You don’t want to be the bad person who does this, right? You want to just get some green beans and some of the top, but don’t you really just want to get the top, a few green beans and then the white sauce and the fried onions and just get that and have three or four of the little beans inside and go out? You don’t want to do that. You can’t just slice off the fried onions at the top. That’s what we all want, right? But if there happens to be a glob, and it’s unintentional, but you get it, and it’s mostly the fried onions, that is fun.
Next one up are the crescent rolls. You know the ones that you unroll? They’re in the canisters. You pop them and you roll them, and you put them in the … They got a little Pillsbury doughboy on it and you put them in and they come out and they’re so light and fluffy. I could eat probably 87 of them, and then take a nap because of the tryptophan, so fried onion, crescent rolls.
Like I said, it’s a lot of carbs here, and cheese, mac and cheese. You could do the mac and cheese right, if you could do homemade mac and cheese, a little bit of the crumbly crumbly on top of it, that is good. One of my favorite meals actually, growing up as a bachelor, I would get good chicken cooked from the store or get decent chicken, make a bowl, chicken and macaroni. I mean, it would make me tired because that was too many carbs, but when I’m 20, I didn’t really notice the difference. Now I would notice the difference more.
So mac and cheese and mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes and gravy. I mean, potato’s been there our whole lives. Potato has been there for us, whether it’s in french fry form, scalloped form, mashed form, baked potato form. Potato is really like that lovable uncle of yours. Maybe he’s not best for you, but he’s always been there for you, and isn’t that what should really count?
All right, so those are the sides that I love. Next up, I got two in neutral category. I’m neutral on these. I don’t hate them. I don’t particularly love them. They got pluses and minuses. One would be corn on the cob. Corn on the cob, to be honest with you, it’s butter. We love butter. If that corn on the cob did not have butter, how much do you really want it? But don’t you love when you get corn on the cob and you get those little yellow dagger things? As a kid, you’re like, “Ah, look at these things.” You can put them in your knuckles and be Wolverine. You stick it in the cob, and if you have that butter you can keep out that’s already melted, and you just roll the corn of the cob in it, that little cylinder, rolling it back and forth to lather on that butter.
This is just an elaborate spoon for butter at this point, but the crunchiness is good. You feel like a little chipmunk going along, like a little typewriter back and forth, but corn on the cob gets in your teeth. As soon as I’m done with it, even before the meal’s done, I got to run to the bathroom and get the floss out. Trent, too much information. We didn’t need to hear that, but come on, that’s happened to you, right? That’s happened to you. Corn and the cob, it gets really intrusive, but man, to get the nice buttery hit and it’s warm and the satisfaction of getting through it. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it either. It really is truly neutral.
Here’s another one that might get me in trouble that’s on the neutral side, stuffing. I’m neutral towards stuffing. People say, “How dare you? Stuffing is the” … I’ve seen multiple lists that say stuffing is the best part of Thanksgiving. Stuffing? Stuffing is the best part of Thanksgiving? I mean, I get it, if it’s light and fluffy, it’s got the little green celery things in it and the onions. I don’t know. It’s something you don’t have the rest of the year, so it’s like, “Oh, I’m seeing you again. All right. It’s kind of interesting.” But at the same time, it doesn’t really have that much of a taste to it. It’s not something that I’m really yearning for.
I guess I can’t recall when I’ve had classic stuffing, which would be stuffing that you cook it in the turkey. Maybe I’ve had it at a previous dinner I’m going to get reamed over for not remembering, but apparently, I mean, to make it right, it’s cooked inside of the turkey to roast along with it, the bread and all the other stuff. [inaudible 00:07:54] bread. How can you go wrong with bread, right? Once again, in the neutral category, but it’s cooked inside of the turkey while it’s doing that. I guess if I had it done really well, maybe it’ll rise up to lower level of sides that I love. Right now, I don’t hate it, don’t love it. It’s neutral. Don’t get in a fight with me about it.
All right, let’s go to the sides that I hate, the sides that I hate. Oh, man. I’ll put these on sometimes because I’m gluttonous and I want to fill up my plate, but then I usually regret it when I go back later. All righty, cranberries. Why cranberries? I know it’s because Thanksgiving is from New England and cranberries grow out there, but they’re tart. They’re not enjoyable, especially if you’re making cranberries just out of a can. You just open up the can and you dump out this gelatinous dark red blob, and that’s the cranberry side. I always think, “Oh, little berries, that’ll be a nice little treat,” and I take a bite of them. Every year I forget, and then I sink my teeth in and it’s tart and sour. I don’t like it. I don’t see the appeal there.
Next one is ambrosia salad. You look at it and your brain gets full because it looks like a dessert. You’re like, “Oh, Jello and cream cheese, all this other stuff put into it,” and you take a bite into it and it just doesn’t taste very good at all. It’s just weird.
Speaking of ambrosia salad, any salad. I hate any salad. Why are you here taking up my time? Maybe a Caesar salad, but even there, you’ve got just kind of like little wilted lettuce with the little walnuts on top. It’s supposed to make you not feel guilty, like, “Well, at least I had a salad, so I’m being kind of healthy.” No way, bro. If I’m going to go all out, I’m going to go out with style. That salad is taking up room where I could have had at least two or three crescent rolls. What has spinach ever done for me? Nothing. I tried it once. I didn’t get super strength. False advertising, buddy. I don’t like it.
Next one, straight up green beans. Who thought straight up green beans is a good idea? There’s nothing unhealthy like fried onions on top to encourage me to have it. Green beans. Who thought of that stuff?
This one, though, that I hate is going to get me in trouble with a lot of people. This is a personal Trentism. If you declare me a heretic, that is fine. I stand here and I can do no other. Yams, any kind of candied yams, sweet potato casserole. I don’t understand the yam. There is starchy and there is sweet. If I want starchy, I’ll go with a potato. If I want sweet, I’m just going to have that drizzle dressing and the marshmallows you put on the sweet potato, but I feel like sweet potato, what you trying to do, man? You trying to be starchy or you trying to be sweet? Don’t try to mix that together. If you do mix starchy and sweet together, you got to make sure it’s two distinct things, like when you dump your Wendy’s french fry into a frosty, that’s amazing. You got starchy, salty, and sweet all in one bite. It’s wonderful. Yams though, I just don’t get it. They just seem like an inferior potato to me, but I know that some people really enjoy them.
Finally, there’s desserts. I mean, people do all kinds of different desserts out for Thanksgiving, little pies and cakes and stuff like that. Pumpkin pie is still traditional, supposed to reign supreme with maybe an apple or a berry pie runner up. Pumpkin pie is not really a pie, though. A pie has a flaky crust top. It’s technically more of a tart, and honestly, pumpkin pie, it’s not that great. I’m sorry, it is really not that great. The pumpkin pie filling doesn’t taste very good. It’s okay. The only reason people want pumpkin pie is to have a little bit of filling, then put whipped cream on it so you get the crust, tiny bit of the pumpkin pie filling and whipped cream. You basically want a pumpkin whipped cream cracker. That’s what you want. That’s what I want.
I will say, what is better than a pumpkin pie … I’ve gone out to stores and gotten this … is a pumpkin cheesecake. Pumpkin cheesecake rocks my socks. It’s what I want. I want the graham cracker crust. I want some kind of flavorful, pumpkin flavored inner, the whipped cream on it. That’s what I want. We see pumpkin pie and we deep down want pumpkin cheesecake and we eat pumpkin pie because you don’t have pumpkin cheesecake, and other desserts are always nice to have in there, but I really feel like with a pumpkin pie, go with the pumpkin cheesecake. I find it to be superior in that regard.
Apple pie is also good. It’s got that flaky crust on it, but if you can get it hot with a la mode [foreign language 00:12:08]. That is delightful. Did I make you hungry enough to go out for leftovers now? I’m sure you got some leftovers stuffed in the fridge today for you to enjoy.
That’s all, just a fun episode. Maybe you can commiserate with me and enjoy it. Maybe you have a different list. Maybe you have a different idea. I don’t know. If you’re a supporter of trenhornpodcast.com, leave a comment there. Would love to see your favorite foods ranked. Thank you all. I hope you have a very blessed Thanksgiving weekend.
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