A Holiday Feast

A lot of people ask me, “Mitchell, what is Thanksgiving truly about?” I think that sometimes we can lose sight of what this great holiday is all about. Sure, there are huge sales at Wal-Mart that kill people and football games featuring the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions every year even though a comprehensive survey of the country (conducted in my living room) shows that nobody likes either of those teams. But let’s not forget what is truly important about Thanksgiving: food.

Oh sure, some of you saps out there are blabbing on about family, but that only happens in Hallmark commercials. Trust me, I haven’t seen my family for four straight Thanksgivings, and I’m no worse for the wear. But I couldn’t imagine not eating Thanksgiving food on Thanksgiving.

Take football announcer John Madden for instance. Now, for years Madden announced the Thanksgiving Day football game, yet he spent maybe four seconds talking about actual football during those games. He spent the rest of the time talking about a monstrous creation he loves called a turducken, and yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. It is chicken meat, stuffed inside a duck, which is then stuffed inside a turkey. It’s like a Russian nesting doll made of poultry. Madden would talk about this turducken with way more passion than he ever did when he talked about blitzes or blocking (in fact, I’ve heard couples at their own wedding say their vows with less emotion in their voice than Madden has when he talks about turduckens).

Madden: “But if you wanna go bigger, you take the turducken and then BOOM!, you stuff that inside a pig and then BOOM!, you stuff that inside a cow and BOOM!, you stuff that inside a camel…”

Other announcer: "And the Cowboys lose another fumble!"

Madden: "…but the real problem is finding an elephant, since they’re technically endangered…"

Other announcer: "Huge mistake by the Cowboys. They don’t get any bigger than that John."

Madden: “Well, you could put it in a whale. BOOM!”

Now, I am not suggesting that you cook a turducken, or a whacamacowpiturducken for that matter. I think it’s a little ridiculous that a family can eat an entire flock of birds by themselves while children in Africa are digging up roots. However, cooking a turkey is important for tradition’s sake. Of course, my tradition is different, cause I use a live turkey. I live alone and I don’t even really like turkey, but I stick one in my oven anyway just to piss PETA off. Some people suggest deep-frying your turkey, but dunking a live turkey in hot oil is just cruel. I have my limits okay?

Anyway, with your turkey now running around in your oven (or swimming around in your pot, depending on the route you took), it’s time to get the rest of the meal prepared. That’s where all the good stuff is. You have stuffing and casserole and pies and potatoes and all sorts of other awesome stuff. The only problem is, I’m lazy so I don’t want to cook all of this. But I’ve found a way around it, so I’m going to share my method with you fellow lazy peoples.

But first, a warning. Shopping close to Thanksgiving can get a bit dicey. For one thing, a lot of elderly people suddenly appear. This means that nobody in the parking lot will be driving normally and they will be moving through the aisles very slowly. Also, a lot of people go Thanksgiving shopping with their families. The only problem with this is that families hate each other, and there is no time that they argue with each other more than Thanksgiving. Holidays like Thanksgiving are meant to bring families back together once every few months to remind them why they don’t live with each other the rest of the year. So expect that the store will be filled with large clusters of angry family members blocking the “oriental foods” aisle (what the hell are people doing in the oriental foods aisle on Thanksgiving anyway?).

With that said, here is the shopping list:

• 1 can of cream of mushroom soup
• 1 can of French-fried onions
• 1 can of sweet potatoes
• 1 can of green beans
• 1 can of cranberry sauce
• 1 box of stuffing
• 1 jar of gravy
• 1 pre-made pumpkin pie
• 2 six-packs of beer

Once you’ve left the store with all of your ingredients (allow four to six weeks), it’s time to get started! Luckily, it’s a easy recipe with only five easy steps. So get started, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Mitchell’s Thanksgiving Day Dinner Recipe:

1. Take the cans of mushroom soup, sweet potatoes, green beans and cranberry sauce and donate it to some charity for the children in Africa. If they have hot soccer players working the food drive, like the one I saw today at Safeway, you get bonus points. (No, I have no idea what you are supposed to do with the bonus points. This is a recipe, not a video game.)
2. Drink first six-pack of beer.
3. While sitting on couch, eat entire pumpkin pie straight out of the pie dish without cutting it while eating stuffing and French-fried onions straight out of the box.
4. Crack open second six-pack of beer.
5. Turn on TV and watch Cowboys lose. Enjoy.

Love Is In the Air, and It's Starting To Set Off My Allergies

So this past weekend was Valentine’s Day. For being a very short month, February is filled with a lot of random holidays (by the way, does anyone else think it’s a little suspicious we made the shortest month of the year Black History Month?). Luckily Valentine’s Day only comes once every four years and compensates for the rotation of the Earth. Wait a minute… dammit wrong February Holiday.

Nobody really knows how Valentine’s Day began (okay so by that I mean me). I’m pretty sure it is a holiday conceived by women in order to get flowers and candy. And like many cherished female traditions, this one started with an innocent man suffering. Saint Valentine was some poor soul who lived a long time ago and was killed by somebody. I don’t really know how he died, the Wikipedia article started to get really boring and it began involving French people so I stopped reading and decided to make up the rest of the facts. Besides, if you read this to learn things, you have bigger issues.

Anyway, what better way to celebrate some guy’s life than by connecting with that special someone. And by “connecting” I mean “buying them a whole lot of s**t.” At least that’s the case if you are a guy on Valentine’s Day. You have to buy cards, jewelry, dinner, and lots of chocolates (which they never eat because they say it will go to their hips but still insist you buy). Let’s think for a second who Valentine’s Day truly benefits. Women in a relationship get a whole bunch of stuff, men in a relationship have to buy a whole bunch of stuff, single women are reminded how single they are (which is when they need all that chocolate), and single guys laugh the laugh of the carefree and then go to the store the day after Valentine’s to take advantage of all the cheap candy on sale.

Or at least that’s what I did on Monday night. I went to Safeway and ended up buying a box of Twinkies (which I have been subliminally craving since “Zombie Land”) and Ding-Dongs as part of my new diet, the “Have a Stroke Before You Can Gain More Weight” plan. As if that weren’t enough, there was a Girl Scout stand outside. And I just couldn’t turn down the chance to help out my community by supporting the scouts by stuffing my face with cookies (and for some reason, it took the retarded girl scout almost ten minutes to give me change, so they need all the help they can get).

Anyway, Valentine’s Day is not just about food (or so they say). It actually helps men out in their relationships, because while women are in touch with their emotions all the time and can talk about them any day of the year, men need some advance notice. So having a set day gives men time to prepare to have emotions and communicate and all that other mumbo jumbo. A great example occurred in my journalism class the other day. We were all asked to name our favorite Super Bowl commercial. The women all named the Google one about finding love in France as their favorite, whereas the men in the class had trouble even remembering the ad. We were a little too busy thinking about the Megan Fox ad, thumb doubles and all (which was stupid, because Megan Fox could have gills and antennae and she would still be one of the hottest women in the world).

Do you want to know what men think of true love? Just watch one of the fifty dating reality shows that are on TV at the moment. It always consists of about twenty very emotionally unstable women who think they are there to win the love of a celebrity and one celebrity who is there because the producers told him he could make out with twenty women in a mansion and then ditch all but one of them (and the last one too if he wants another season).

I bring this up because I recently watched the finale and reunion of “For the Love of Ray J 2,” (and for the record, both my roommate and I think he made the wrong choice). Now, Ray J would get mad at the girls for doubting his ability to settle down even though he 1. didn’t bother to learn their names but instead gave them stripper nicknames, 2. spent the entire show making out with twenty women at a time and 3. was on his second season. Yep… can’t see why they wouldn’t trust him.

I feel like I would do well on that type of show. It would be called “For the Love of Mitchell,” and the entire episode would show me trying to choose between a Twinkie and a Ding-Dong.

Thanks for Turkeys

Happy Thanksgiving everybody! I don’t know about you, but I think that Thanksgiving is an underrated holiday. In all honestly, Thanksgiving may be my favorite holiday. What other holiday is simply about eating food? And lots of it? You don’t have to buy anybody any gifts, you don’t have to dress up, you get to miss class, and there are football games. What else could you ask for? It’s the holy trinity of holiday, food, football, and fall. In fact the only thing that I don’t like about Thanksgiving is Black Friday. I hate shopping and particularly shopping malls as is, but shopping malls filled with more people than usual? In high school, my family always used to fly to Oahu to visit family for Thanksgiving and to see the UH football game. But then they would make me go to Ala Moana, the biggest mall in the state. After mere minutes, I would sit wimpering in the fetal position in the corner of Macy’s. But as fun as it is, Thanksgiving is also a necessary holiday because it does one important thing: kills turkeys.

Okay, let me go back a little. So I spent most of this Thanksgiving alone in the dorms. Our school gets the entire week off, and most of the other students bolted for home cooking and clean laundry. Unfortunately, some idiot put Hawaii in the middle of the ocean, which means that the stupid airlines think that since there is no other way to get there, they can charge outrageous prices to fly you there. So being in the dire economic straights we are in, I didn’t go home. It wouldn’t have made any sense to go back home anyway. Because my parents, in a showing of mature fiscal responsibility during an economic crisis, went to Las Vegas (really, can you stray farther from the stereo-typical image of a family Thanksgiving than Vegas?) and my sister is in Atlanta for a club on some kind of goodwill mission (picking up littered heroin needles?).

Anyway, getting back to my point. So I have been doing nothing, along with the other few who stayed. On Wednesday night, I watched what may be the best movie ever made, Black Sheep. It’s a movie about killer sheep. That’s right, killer sheep. These radioactive killer sheep start attacking people and ripping out their intestines and gnawing off their limbs. It’s like Saving Private Ryan meets Babe. The movie ends **SPOILER ALERT** with the main character blowing up the sheep by, get this, lighting their flatulence with a lighter and blowing them up. I swear I am not making this up (at one point in the movie, a dude also has sex with a sheep). How this movie has not won an Oscar is a mystery to me. After that movie, we watched Strange Wilderness. In one scene, a turkey completely swallows the main character’s … erm … we’ll just call it his turkey baster. Let’s just say that if the turkey were a prostitute, he would have had to pay the turkey for services rendered. In the sheep movie, one of the sheep (in addition to eating a large number of Asian business people) bites off the villain’s turkey baster.

As I have stated in previous notes, I believe that PETA is plotting to take over the world. As we can see from these realistic movies, bad things happen when the populations of farm animals get out of control. Do you know who started the whole killer sheep fiasco? Two vegetarian hippies, that’s who. One of them was named Experience for goodness sakes. Of course PETA doesn’t want you to eat animals, cause look at the chaos they cause. Which is why it is so important you eat turkeys on Thanksgiving. Do you think that the pilgrims just randomly chose to eat turkeys over the many other creatures available to them? No, they were eating turkeys because they had just shot them with their ridiculous trombone shaped muskets in self-defense. Have you seen how big turkeys get? They are the Shaquille O’Neals of the fowl family. Can you imagine what they would do to society if they were left to reproduce unchecked? We weren’t put on the top of the food chain for nothing. It is our responsibility to ensure that these dangerous animals aren’t running afoul (haha pun).

So as you dig into that turkey this Thanksgiving, just remember, you’re not a glutton for going back for thirds. You’re a hero.