When you spend much of your adult life traveling as I do, Thanksgiving memories are a depressing collage of airports, late-night diners and pitiful, little Cornish game hens, eaten alone.
There was my first Thanksgiving away from home at 22: a damp souvlaki from a sidewalk stand in Athens’ deserted, rainy Syntagma Square. There were the pretzels I devoured like a ravaged chipmunk at a press conference for the Great Alaska Shootout basketball tournament in Anchorage. And how I would love to forget the group of Italian friends my girlfriend and I nearly poisoned with an ill-fated attempt at cooking Thanksgiving dinner in Rome.
But I do have some fond Thanksgiving memories and, unlike with Cornish hens, these memories provided leftovers. I worked in Las Vegas from 1980 to 1990. There is no better time to be in Vegas than when you’re in your 20s and single with few expenses other than the emergency bail money. Las Vegas is packed with single people, and that’s not only huge on weekends or at 3 a.m. in your favorite bar that never closes.
It’s also huge on Thanksgiving.
We had a tradition at the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Every Thanksgiving, all the single guys on the staff would gather at the apartment of Joe Hawk, a terrific sportswriter and the Review-Journal’s current sports editor. We had one rule: Everyone had to bring one item to prepare.
Keep in mind that organizing a dozen or so guys for a Thanksgiving potluck is akin to running with the bulls of Pamplona. It’s chaos, everyone’s frantically running around, but if you survive, the feast afterward is pretty good.
All of our cooking skills were about one step above Microwave 101. When you can get prime rib at dawn for $4.99 or all you can eat at the $1.99 Botulism Buffet, there’s no incentive for learning to become a saucier.
Hawk provided the turkey. Someone else brought his dog-eared, gravy-stained stuffing recipe his mom sent him. Another made green beans. And the guy who drew the short Desert Inn swizzle stick was assigned the gravy. I lucked out. I always brought the salad.
So from about noon until 8 p.m., 12 men pumped with much more testosterone than cooking acumen, ran shuttles between the kitchen and living room. For eight hours we’d drink beer, gossip about management, drink beer, cook and drink more beer while watching some team beat the mortal sin out of the Detroit Lions.
And every year the same thing happened. Sitting in the living room, we’d inevitably hear the guy who drew the short stick wail something like, “$@$#@! This tastes like $@$#@*!”
Yes, again, someone blew the gravy. We’d have to delay dinner while he ran to the store and pick up the awful powdered version, which always came in handy later for patching holes in Hawk’s walls from flying beer bottle caps.
But the feast was fine and not just because the eating habits of bachelors in their 20s isn’t much different than grizzlies at Yellowstone. We solved the world’s problems, and we created a few more.
And none of us had to withstand one stupid joke about Cornish game hens.
Staff writer John Henderson covers sports and writes about the food he eats on the road: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
