The first time I ever cooked a real meal for myself (not, say, eating a bowl of cereal or making a sandwich) was when I lived in New York in my early 20s and therefore in my very first apartment. Despite how small that apartment was, things were brilliantly laid out and so effectively it wasn’t small at all. It still remains one of my favorite places I ever lived.
The man who was leasing the apartment (I had it as a sublease from him) had his own small advertising company and he wanted to expand to the Philadelphia market, so he temporarily moved there but maintained the lease on the New York apartment because it was rent controlled and therefore the rent would not go up until the lease was broken. He was planning on coming back to the apartment to live once he was all set up in Philadelphia. So I was able to get it for a “steal”, since I only had to pay him $10.00 more a month than he was paying for it. I was quite happy with our arrangement.
He was a gourmet cook and had the kitchen fully stocked with every kind of kitchen item you would ever want, plus several very good cookbooks. Since I am drawn to every book I see, I looked through his cookbooks with numerous delicious-looking recipes and very clear cooking instructions. Since Thanksgiving was coming just around the corner, I decided as my very first major cooked meal to cook a complete Thanksgiving dinner for myself. I was still new to New York, so the only person I knew at all was Jeannie Theresi (now a woman with TWO PhDs), who had been one of a gang of ten friends and partiers at Berkeley of which I was one of them. At the time I was in New York, she was at the time was getting her masters degree at Columbia. She was going to be somewhere else on Thanksgiving, therefore, my personally made Thanksgiving feast would be for only me.
On Thanksgiving day, I walked the three and half blocks to Central Park West to watch in person the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade with all the big blown-up balloon floats, etc., very exciting and spectacular. Previously, I had seen that only on TV and now I was there watching it for real! I really learned watching the parade outside that wintery morning just how cold cold be! I had always naively thought that cold wouldn’t so bad, you just had to bundle up, but no, this Californian learned that morning that one cannot really bundle up their feet! My feet went from feeling they would shatter like ice to being numb, so walking back home was a real chore (how did the parade marchers manage to do it?). Thank goodness my apartment had a working radiator, I was finally able to thaw out. And then got to work on making my personal Thanksgiving dinner, with the turkey and all the various favorite dishes and wine and pie and ice-cream, the whole thing. I had been impressed that Pathmark, my nearby grocery store, was selling small turkeys, somewhat larger than chickens. I had only been aware of huge turkeys, such as we always had on Thanksgiving at home, and at other people’s houses if we had Thanksgiving somewhere else that year. Having a small one was exactly what I wanted!
That dinner was a delicious success, with all the various dishes being ready at the same time, and from then on, I continued to cook for myself the whole time I lived in New York. The grocery store, Pathmark, was only a block away, so it was easy enough to walk there almost every day.
Ever since then, I have more or less copied that tradition…not every year, and not every place I lived, but I always liked it when I did it and this year, I decided I would do it again after having not done it here in this apartment, thanks to every year going up to my sister's house at Clear Lake for family gatherings after our parents had both died (otherwise, our mother had the lock on Thanksgiving and Christmas unless we lived very far away, and even then we showed up when we could). My sister doesn’t have that family gathering anymore (she had done it so well so many times that she deserves the vacations from it), so this year I figured I would cook my Thanksgiving dinner again. I decided the menu and made a shopping list of all the required ingredients I needed to buy. This menu was: a small turkey with mushroom and wild rice dressing, turkey giblet gravy, buttered lima beans, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, champagne, pumpkin pie, and vanilla ice cream. Pretty basic, but very good. I worried about getting a small turkey, I had never noticed that they had those at VONS, my current grocery store here in California.
Previously shopping at VONS, I happened to notice that they had a meat freezer that had in it some tiny turkeys (smaller than I would have wanted for Thanksgiving)…but looking at them closely, I saw that they were just frozen turkey breasts. Well, that might be nice for normal dinners…I wasn’t thinking Thanksgiving at this point.
There is a checker at VONS I don’t like. He is a young man, very full of himself and actually rather nasty, and while for a while I attempted to tolerate him since he always seems to have a less-full line (maybe other shoppers don’t like him either). So that day I bought the frozen turkey breast. I happened to choose his line and he began ringing up my purchases. When he got to the turkey breast, he spun it around for a while on the counter and then looked at me and asked, "What is its price?" I said, “ Hum?” He said, “It doesn’t have a price on it, how much does it cost?” I said, “I don’t know, don’t you know?” He said, kind of sharply, “It isn’t marked.” Well, I’m thinking that is his problem. He looked at me like I was a buffoon because I didn’t know the price of the turkey breast. But I don’t know price of ANYTHING, I’m not like those women cutting the coupons from the thousand pages of newspaper that are stuffed in our mailboxes, surely the cost of this frozen chicken breast isn’t anything I would be balking at, “Oh that is too expensive". So we had a kind of eye to eye standoff during which I realized that he wasn’t going to find somebody to go check the price. Finally he said, “Is $10.50 okay? If you find out it is different, bring your receipt and I will give you a refund.” Totally inappropriate, because the only way that would really work would mean me putting all my groceries in the trunk of the car and then going back into the store to look at the frozen turkeys in that freezer. And I realized that each one would be different anyway as they are priced by their weight (which I think VONS SHOULD have programmed into their system; after all, they weigh all the produce, don’t they?). So I just agreed to that having no idea how valid that pride was, just so I could get out of there. But I didn't like the feeling of being cheated, maybe. I just didn't know.
And the frozen turkey breast, which I cooked in my crockpot after one day of attempting to defrost it in the refrigerator, wasn’t all that satisfactory. It was so dry I could hardly swallow it, and with it being only a turkey breast, it’s “dryness quotient” was at the max. I vowed to never get one of those again.
I ended up having some friends inviting me to join them in going out for Thanksgiving dinner this Thanksgiving, which we did last year and I really enjoyed it. So naturally I accepted that offer.
However, I still was mentally interested in that home-made Thanksgiving dinner for myself. And if you wonder why I don’t ask my friends over for my feast, I certainly would, but the apartment is (still) not fit for social events, too much stuff all over the place that have no place to go (start by thinking of over a thousand books that are in boxes everywhere, and in my home library, which is one of the bedrooms, I installed eleven large bookshelves that have books overflowing from them, as well), so no people are invited to come into my apartment, there’s hardly even a place to sit.
Thanksgiving was definitely going to be celebrated out with my friends, but I am still going to cook for myself my full-on planned Thanksgiving dinner for myself, maybe a few days later.
I had to go to VANS today to buy some food anyway, and I saw that the store was packed and jammed with Thanksgiving dinner shoppers, so I got hooked into getting all the Thanksgiving stuff today. I saw to my delight two whole shelf units devoted to all things Thanksgiving cooking—stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, various vegetables, pumpkin pie mix etc., most of it for the “easy” cooking and canned goods variety. Mostly I cook things more from scratch, but I didn’t find cranberries, so I got canned cranberry sauce, and I settled on buying pumpkin in a can and a pre-made pie crust this time…but I will be making my own ice cream. Everything else, the peas, mashed potatoes, wild rice and mushroom stuffing, and giblet gravy will be easily made. I also bought some splits of champagne.
I was worried that VONS wouldn’t have a small turkey and for sure I wasn’t going to succumb to the too dry turkey breast. Fortunately in the meat section they had a long row of immense turkeys, but I managed to find a smallish (10 pound) one in there, hooray, so I added that to my shopping cart. Now I was totally happy, I had all that I needed.
I got in one of the long lines, almost every shopping cart was filled with Thanksgiving shopping. The checker this time is a man I don’t quite know what to make of. Spanish is his native language and with English he is minimally functional. He’s kind of too loud when he talks, which maybe is an attempt to be more understood since his English is so bad, I don’t know. You certainly can’t joke with him, I already learned that from previous experiences; he hasn’t the slightest idea what you are talking about so it can’t be funny.
The checker began efficiently checking each item and then stopping for a while to bag some of the groceries. It was so busy, and yet there were no baggers helping any of the checkers.
And then, uh oh, he got to the turkey, which was the last item, and he said, “How much is the price?” Not that again! I said, “What, there is no price on there, there should be a price.” But there wasn’t, so again, I was being demanded to tell him how much this turkey cost. I said, “How do I know? There are turkeys over there that go from this size up to gargantuan, every price is different, don’t you charge by the weight? What does your scale say?”
He answer with something like, “The scale no havva price”, and I kind of shrugged my shoulders, and when he asked for yet another time how much the turkey cost, I had to say to him that that was VONS’ job, not mine, I hadn’t the slightest idea what this turkey cost or what any turkey cost and I had no frame of reference of what they should cost. All of this was happening as all these other very crowded shopping baskets were piling up behind me. I kept wondering why he didn’t quickly ask for somebody to run over to the freezer and figure out the price. They always do that for some can of peas or whatever that for some reason has a missing price, why won’t they go do this for this turkey?
The guy says, “Let’s just make it ten and a half dollars, is that okay?” That price again? Is that the “price default” when a checker is too lazy to call for someone to go for a price check? By then no number meant a thing to me. As I said before, each turkey has a different price, and there they went from my turkey’s size all the way up to about four times that, I am not a horse trader or a bargainer (going to Tijuana to hassle over a leather case or a guitar is not my idea of fun).
Finally he realized that nobody was going to move until he got somebody to go run a price check, so finally he did that and this woman seemed to take forever to obtain that information. So meanwhile, the checker looks at the crowded line of people and he apologizes to them all (very loudly), but it felt like the apology he was making was meant to be he was apologizing to them because of me holding all of them up.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, he scanned the line of people and he saw a woman holding up a few things from the deli, (why don’t these people ever use the express line?), like two burritos and a drink or something, so he said to her, “You are on your lunch time, right,” and she said, “Yes, I am,” and glanced at me again to make his point, and then looked back at her and said “You shouldn’t have to be late back to work, just go through.” Oh, now I see, I am responsible even for this woman being late going back from lunch. She didn’t quite understand what he was indicating, but he motioned for her to come on through the line and go, to heck with even charging her, just take her food and go for free.
Finally the checking woman comes back with the turkey, hands it to the chccker and he looked at the price sticker she had put on it. I said to him, “How much is it, anyway,” but he wouldn’t answer. So I bent down to look at the price sticker, and he actually ripped it off and threw it away in the wastebasket. I asked him again how much it cost, and he continued to ignore me. I didn’t know what the actual cost was until I got home and looked at the receipt: $19.98, basically $20.00. So he had been giving me a deal (maybe) if I had taken his suggested price that was about half what it was supposed to be, like he was being generous, like he was being generous to the women he let just take the food out without paying for it, but I don’t think that I should have taken his offer of cheating VONS, especially since I really had no frame of reference as to what the price should be (assuming that even the $19.98 is even valid). I think this man turned against me because I didn’t trust him, that I saw him as a guy possibly overcharging me instead of cutting the rate in half. Well, looking at it another way, he is a dishonest man…it doesn’t make him any less dishonest if the cheating was in my favor. All he really had to do was get somebody to check the price at the very beginning, instead of attempt to get some number out of me. Now the way it stands, I have added him to that other guy whose line I won’t go into anymore. Too many more checkers like that whose line I have to avoid, I won’t be going into VONS any more.
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