Thank You, Features, for Being There Every Week

The new features for the week of Thanksgiving have arrived hot and toasty like dinner rolls, ready for you to sink your teeth into.  Since I obviously have food on my mind, it makes sense that the top five list will be the best meats to be featured in a Thanksgiving meal.  You had better know what number one is.

5. Lamb – Seasoned and succulent, it makes a better Easter dish, but its more respectable than placing chicken on your table for the holiday feast.

4. Beef – It’s hard to get better than red meat, but it isn’t particularly unique to the festivities.  Its dynamic personality puts it above lamb, however.

3. Pork – The other white meat, preferably in the form of a roast, can do quite nicely and I am particular to any product of the noble swine.

2. Ham – The second best Thanksgiving meat.  It is great for any large dinner any time of year in fact.  But when it comes to the fourth Thursday in November, only one can reign supreme.

1. Turkey – The rest of this list is essentially a collection of secondary meats you could serve alongside your turkey.  In fact, I believe that even if you are vegetarian, if you are hosting Thanksgiving dinner, you are legally required to cook a turkey and then donate it to a local shelter.  So, roast it or fry it, but I encourage you not to stick any smaller birds inside it on this most sacred of food related holidays.  It turns it into an entirely different dish.  Stick with the traditional presentation.

This week’s cool-ass thing you will never own is your own slaughterhouse.  All that talk about meat made my mouth start watering, which in turn got me thinking about having my own nearly inexhaustible source of steak at hand.  Maybe a small scale slaughterhouse out back would fill the need.  But zoning would provide quite a lot of red tape since the odor is sure to offend a few neighbors.  Then of course there’s the massive amounts of cattle entrails and blood to dispose of.

This week’s sign you are a nerd is that you can draw the chemical composition of L-tryptophan, which, of course, looks like this:

But I had to look it up so it doesn’t count.

This week’s nemesis is gravy.  Everyone’s favorite food lubricant greases the old esophagus so that we can shove food down at a faster rate can take something relatively healthy like turkey and instantly make it unhealthy.  Then it can take something already fairly unhealthy like stuffing and make it even less healthy.  It’s the equivalent of pouring on fried breading.  Is it possible that I just made gravy sound even more appetizing?

This week’s lesson learned is to wear the larger belt to Thanksgiving dinner.  You can unbutton that pants and loosen the belt a notch or two without anyone noticing.  But when you need to leave the belt completely unbuckled, you’re just admitting defeat.  You might as well wear sweatpants.

Here is this week’s equation:

The time in days that you will need to spend expanding your stomach in preparation for your Thanksgiving meal (t) can be calculated by taking the volume in milliliters of your expected plateful on Thanksgiving (v, subscript t), multiplying it by the projected number of helpings you plan to take (h), adding the number of desserts you plan to eat (d) and the number of meats included in the dinner (m), then subtracting the volume in milliliters of your average daily meal (v, subscript a) and dividing that product by the rate at which you wish to expand your stomach in milliliters per day (r).

Finally, this week’s Star Wars quote is, “We’re all fine here now, thank you.  How are you?”

I sincerely hope the week at hand reminds you of all that you are thankful for and that loved ones surround you.  I should clarify that.  I hope loved ones surround you and have nothing but good intentions, and may they all be living.  I’d hate to hear of someone being surrounded by zombie versions of their dead relatives and think it was my fault.  Then again, at least the zombie relatives should have a nice Thanksgiving dinner.