The Great Thanksgiving Mashed Potato Catastrophe of 2002

The year my side dish disaster reminded us to be thankful for all we had

Our Thanksgiving dinners are informal. We don’t do cloth napkins and elaborate centerpieces. It’s pumpkin-themed napkins and matching paper plates with plastic turkey tablecloths from one of the big box retailers for us. Fewer dishes to wash, you know.

You won’t find those little white booties on our turkey or a glazed ham with the crisscrosses and cloves you see at fancy gatherings. We rarely go without a ham, though, because someone always complains that they don’t like turkey, so with the clockwork precision of a Tokyo train schedule, we bake a turkey, a ham, and the accompanying 14 side dishes in a single oven on Thanksgiving morning.

This particular morning in 2002 started like any other, but with perfect weather, which meant sunny and no snow in the forecast. For the upper Midwest, that’s ideal.

We gathered at my grandma’s house as usual. The crowd was more than a dozen of us: my parents, siblings with their families, and some extended family making the trek to join us.

My primary task for our early afternoon dinner was to prepare the mashed potatoes. Let me tell you, my family loves their mashed potatoes. We peel, we boil, we steam, and we add butter, lots and lots of butter. We throw caution to the wind that day and savor those carbs.

All morning, my mom and grandma scrambled around the kitchen. They were in command as the co-executive chefs. This wasn’t their first rodeo.

I, on the other hand, in my 20s, was merely an assistant in the kitchen hierarchy. I did whatever jobs I was delegated. I was akin to what my grandmother boasted was her first job during the tail end of the Great Depression, “salad person.” Yes, she explained her only task was making salads for rich people.

This Thanksgiving was going to be my chance to step up and shine.

But first, I had to get the canned cranberry sauce onto the plate and into the fridge.

“I don’t like that. It looks a-sgusting.” My 4-year-old niece announces as the cranberry sauce jiggles out of the can and plops onto the serving plate. She crinkles her nose.

“Well, you don’t have to eat it. Why don’t you go watch the parade on TV with everyone else?” I say, hoping she’d rather watch Barney or whatever monstrous balloon was sailing through Manhattan this year than do the play-by-play for my cooking.

“Um,” she thought about it for a few seconds and shook her head no, “I wanna watch you.”

I snarl.

She wouldn’t budge. She stays kneeling on the chair next to me, offering cooking tips from the wealth of culinary knowledge she’d acquired as a now second-year preschooler.

But I will not be deterred by this mini Julia Child. This is my favorite holiday, the day I’ve waited for all year.

I move on to the list of side dishes. I’m stirring, adding a teaspoon of this and a pinch of that. All is going well.

“The potatoes are done.” My mom yells across the room, which she doesn’t need to do because we’re hardly eight feet apart in the tiny kitchen.

We had boiled massive quantities of potatoes in the giant aluminum pot my grandparents use for canning vegetables each summer. The potatoes are drained and steaming, ready to become the most heavenly accompaniment to our dinner.

This is it. Let’s rock and roll.

I pour the milk from the glass Pyrex measuring cup into the pot. A bit of salt and pepper and many sticks of butter follow.

With my grandma’s ancient electric hand mixer revved and ready, I began to mix the potatoes.

I ignore the dirty looks from the freeloaders in the living room waiting for dinner because the motor is drowning out the TV.

I stop the mixer but see lumps, so I keep going, confident I’ll have perfect mashed potatoes soon.

I continue to mix.

I check again. It still doesn’t look right. It must need more power. I hit the high-speed button and keep mixing.

It should get fluffier. Right? My confidence is weakening, but I mix on.

I’m sure you can see where this is headed.

Then it hits me. It’s not getting fluffier. It’s only getting thicker. The workhorse of a mixer I’m using is feeling the resistance.

I stop mixing.

“No, no, no.”

I think at this point, I felt my soul leave my body. But it was too late. These spuds were beyond help. I ruined Thanksgiving dinner for everyone, and now they’ll all hate me.

Today, I might have been able to save them — and my pride. But this was 2002, and I couldn’t do a quick Google search on my tiny Nokia phone for “How to save gluey mashed potatoes” and pull up 20,000 web pages.

The reality was that we now had two choices. We could try to eat them, or we could skip them altogether and use them to retile my grandmother’s kitchen backsplash. That was their consistency.

There was no time to start over.

As my grandfather always used to say. “We’ll make do.”

And we did. We nibbled. We mixed the mashed potatoes with other foods on our plates. We pretended they weren’t so bad. But in truth, they were terrible.

Instead, we focused on the array of other side dishes: stuffing, mac and cheese, green bean casserole, and half a dozen others. The once prominent mashed potatoes were relegated to a tablespoon or two when they’d typically be plated in ladlefuls.

As bad as it was, it didn’t ruin Thanksgiving because Thanksgiving is ultimately not about the food. I mean, a slice of homemade pumpkin pie with whipped cream is that good that it should be about the food. But it’s really about family, friends, even the strangers who come to dinner.

It’s about slowing down for a day, enjoying the food, whatever the quality, and reflecting on the good things you have in your life. It’s about remembering the ones who are no longer with us and the little ones who are now cooking alongside us.

I don’t regret my holiday disaster. Because of it, I remember the day in even greater detail than usual. I remember the people, the smell of the kitchen, the frantic cooking, the clank of the kitchen storm door as new guests arrived, the greetings, the smiles, and the laughter.

As it turned out, my 4-year-old niece would later go off to the university to earn a degree in food science. She clearly knows her way around the kitchen better than I do and probably did back then, too. Maybe I should have listened more.