What did I get myself into with trying to follow This American Life? This entire episode was all about poultry. Yup, that's right, an entire episode revolving around chickens, ducks, and turkey. Time to pull out some crazy from my life on this one.
Stuffing
Stuffing, cranberries, mashed potatoes and a roasted bird brings to mind a specific time of the year. You make stuffing, and you're expecting that somewhere in the background that you're going to hear a football game and all of the family arguing about something weird. Or at least, when you're a kid, stuffing only shows up for the holidays and you only get it once, maybe twice a year. Now during that one time that it shows up, stuffing is not to be trifled with. There are different forms of it, I've had it with cranberries, raisins, apples, and all sorts of other things in it, but the basics are always there bread, onions, and spices. You could have it 'dry' or 'wet' and either way it was delicious with the bird that had been roasted.
When I moved out, and ultimately when I got married, everything changed when I thought about stuffing.
My wife, Alicia, was, and still isn't, the best cook in the world. She grew up in a home that didn't cook that much, so I shocked her by doing things like asking her to name whatever she wanted and then popping out home made shrimp scampi without really blinking twice. However, there was one thing that she said early on in our marriage, that she loved stuffing. I don't know what brought it up, all I knew was that she went on about stuffing for a while and she couldn't stop talking about it. She loved stuffing.
The next time that I was at the store, doing our grocery shopping for the next week or so, on the boxed dinner aisle complete with all of the 'helper' meals, there were also the boxes for Stove Top. I had never had stuffing outside of Thanksgiving, so I was a bit uncomfortable buying the box, but it felt better once I had some chicken in the cart as well.
I got home, put away the groceries without any fanfare, and later that week surprised my wife with dinner one night with baked chicken with sides of mashed potatoes and stuffing. It was my first time eating stuffing without Turkey or a holiday to eat it with, and apparently it was Alicia's first time without it as well, but for her I made her favorite meal and didn't even know she could ask for.
"Are you serious? Do you like stuffing that much?"
"Yes! I love it! But, how old is the box?" You see Alicia, in all of her weird quirks, has a strict observance of any dates put on any box or can and follows them religiously. If a gallon of milk is even one day over the date on the bottle, it would find itself in the trash.
"I don't know, not that old."
Not the answer that she wanted to hear, you see I had tried to hide dates of boxes and other products from her before. I'd allowed milk to go past the date, and 'tried to poison' her from doing that, so she checked and saw a date that was months in the future. "When did you get this?"
"When I went shopping. You said you loved stuffing so I got us some."
"How?"
"It grabbed it off the shelf and put it in the cart. How else would I get it?" I wasn't doing well with answers, she didn't like the sass.
"But stuffing is only sold during Thanksgiving."
"Your plate says otherwise, you can get it whenever you want." That lead to us always having three or four boxes of stuffing in our pantry at all times. We've had stuffing with everything. There was even once that we made a weird mashed potato, stuffing, and vegetable casserole.
The worst moment of the stuffing obsession came when one time I went to the store to grab a few basic things (bread, milk, fruit) and on my way out the door Alicia said, "and grab me something to surprise me as well." I got her a box of stuffing. She liked it, but it wasn't the surprise that she wanted.
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