Eat Your Heart Out Martha!

Stuffing? Check.
Potatoes? Check.
Cheesecloth? Random, but, check!
Defrost Turkey? In progress.
3 cups salt? WHAT?!? Who the hell keeps that much salt laying around the kitchen?

After multiple trips to the grocery store to gather the ingredients for a perfect Martha Stewart Thanksgiving meal Martha throws this one at me: 3 cups salt. Seriously, who keeps three cups of salt readily available in their kitchen? Bakers, Chefs and Martha Stewart don't count and anyone outside those genres who has that much salt in their kitchen is clearly having some fast-food withdrawals. Which by the way it took every inch of sanity I had to resist a hot batch of McDonald's fries today, so don't feel too bad you salt lovers, I understand.

Thanksgiving is supposed to be easy squeezy. Turkey. Mashed Potatoes. Gravy. Stuffing. Cranberry Sauce. Rolls. Pumpkin Pie. Maybe even a green bean casserole or fruit salad to boot. Complicated, yes. But if you do a little pre-planning it all comes together to create a perfect meal. Until that 3 cups of salt is called for....

I'd like to think of Thanksgiving dinner as a metaphor for life. You've seen it a million times on TV; it seems so effortless to reach perfection whether it be cooking a plump juicy turkey with all the fixin's or having the perfect life with the perfect man, the perfect job and the perfect child. Now, naturally I prefer perfect shoes but I felt "child" would be more fitting in this situation. Ah, but don't forget the hiccups in life like the 3 cups of salt.

No matter how much we prepare and read the instructions, the manuals, the directions, listen to the advice and the how-to-do-it-betters we can never quite get it right. There's bound to be a step we miss which inevitably takes us two-steps back from where we wanted to be. Now the beauty of this is in some situations we end up somewhere better than where we were heading in the first place.

Unfortunately for me, I'm going to have to strap on my snow boots and equally unfashionable winter layers to trek down the hill and get me some salt!