When my mother made the decision to die, we couldn't talk her out of it. We tried. But after nearly a month in the ICU at the local hospital, she'd had enough. Literally, the only thing keeping her alive was an IV that fed her medication to keep her blood pressure up. She'd been on and off a ventilator. They wouldn't let her eat. They wouldn't let her have any water. She'd been alone for the majority of that time due to a new round of draconian COVID rules, even though the pandemic was long behind us.
All she wanted to do was come home, but when they told her she'd have to go back on the ventilator for a while, she was done. She was reluctant, hopeful even that maybe the medical team had made a mistake and that she could live without that medication or try some other procedure and return home to her regularly scheduled life, but in the end, she was done. I'd more or less kept that woman alive through years of illness, but it was out of my hands now.
"Who's going to make the dressing at Thanksgiving?" I asked, not really sure what else to say, and falling back on my favorite go-to defense mechanisms: humor and sarcasm. Plus, I must add that my mother's dressing was legendary. Every year, various family members tried to emulate it. None of them ever succeeded.
She shrugged. The Thanksgiving dressing was no longer of her concern. She was coming to various realizations about the moment. She had otherworldly issues to contend with.
That was in August. The first Thanksgiving after that was a bit of a blur, but the next November, I'll admit that I was feeling sorry for myself. I didn't have any plans for the holiday, not that I necessarily wanted any, but I knew everyone was out celebrating with their families, and I was missing a big piece of mine.
After a while, an idea hit me. I decided to buck up, end my little pity party, and have my very own Thanksgiving all by myself. I'd cook a turkey, green beans, corn, mac and cheese, sweet potatoes —even try to do my mom's dressing. My dad could join if he wanted, and if not, I didn't care. It didn't matter that I'm not the best cook, and that it can take me hours just to cook a regular meal on a random Wednesday night. I was going to have the best damn solo Thanksgiving one has ever witnessed with all my favorite foods from my childhood holidays when everyone was still alive and together. I'd just have leftovers for days.
Unfortunately, reality hit just after I made those plans. Work got busy. I got the flu. My dog got sick and had to go to the vet. My oven broke. My dad admitted that there were certain things he wasn't going to eat, and making a whole pot of it just for myself felt silly after a while. The universe seemed firmly against this idea. And with each passing day, my menu dwindled until I'd finally settled on a turkey breast, mac and cheese, a salad... and that dressing.
Here's a little secret: The year before my mom died, she taught me how to make that dressing. Sort of. There's no written recipe or anything. It's just a Sheila Anderson work of art. But she made me watch her pour the ingredients in — a little of this here, a little of that there, and who needs a measuring cup? I swore to myself I'd never share that with anyone, and I magically showed up at some family event one day with a pan of it, shocking everyone. It felt like the ultimate power move. But for now, it was just for me.
I made sure I had all the ingredients, at least the ones I could buy at Publix. As it turns out, I was missing the main one. The cornbread base. When she was teaching me how to make the dressing, she never actually taught me how to make the cornbread to go in it. I'd experimented with making cornbread before, but it never quite came out the way hers did. That was the secret ingredient. On top of that, it occurred to me that I'd never actually made mac and cheese either, unless you count the kind that comes from a box.
And that's when Miss Brown saved Thanksgiving.
Miss Brown is Kardea Brown, Food Network cooking show host, restaurateur, cookbook author, and all-around amazing person (well, in my head she is, we're besties, but she doesn't know that). Born in Charleston of Gullah descent, Kardea — I'm gonna call her that since she just got married and isn't "Miss Brown" anymore — is someone whom we bonded over in the year before my mom's death. My mom was a big Food Network and cooking show person. I could take it or leave it, but Kardea's show was the exception. My mom would record "Delicious Miss Brown," and we'd watch it together every week.
We were fans from day one. Not only did her food always look and sound amazing, but it was also the kind of stuff my mom cooked, and it was the kind of stuff she taught me how to cook (or tried) — it was all so wonderfully and purely Southern with that Gullah twist. Kardea's star has risen enormously since those early days when I'd bring my mom home from dialysis, and we'd sit and watch. My mom would be so proud of her.
Anyway, back to that fateful week when I was silly enough to think I could cook a whole Thanksgiving dinner by myself, and started to give up on the idea. In the meantime, I was trying to write book reviews for my own website, and I had Kardea's new cookbook, The Way Home, queued up and ready to go. As I was reading through it, I stopped in my tracks. Her cornbread recipe sounded just like my mom's cornbread recipe. And her macaroni and cheese? Same thing. Why hadn't I thought of that before?
Long story a little shorter, I made that meal, or at least the condensed version of it, and there were mishaps. There are always mishaps when I cook. But the final product turned out to be pretty darn delicious. I even made a dessert from the cookbook. The food wasn't just like my mom's but close. Honestly, it tasted like all three of our hands had touched it — mine, Kardea's, and my mother's — and that just felt like a truly special thing.
My dad even said, "This food isn't half bad," which is a major compliment from him. A few weeks before that, he'd told me that some chicken I'd made "smelled like heartburn."
So, that's how I do Thanksgiving these days. Maybe someday, I'll have a family of my own to cook for, besides just my dad, I mean, but for now, I look froward to that one day a year I spend in the kitchen wearing myself out with my mom's spirit whispering exactly how much chicken broth goes in the dressing in one ear and the sound of Kardea's soothing cooking show voice in my other, as if she's reading me the words straight from her cookbook.
By the way, Kardea Brown has not one but two cookbooks out now! I don't have the second one, Make Do with What You Have, yet, but if it's anything like the first, I highly recommend it. Every time I open it, I literally feel like I'm going back home to a place I'm nostalgic for but that will never exist again, and for that I am grateful.
