Andy Rooney's Homemade Thanksgiving Feast

One of the best things about Thanksgiving is it isn't Christmas. It's not as commercial as Christmas.

Thanksgiving is a very American day, too. A lot of countries have Christmas, Easter and New Year, but no other Country except Canada has Thanksgiving.

The only bad thing about Thanksgiving is it's too close to Christmas.

Thanksgiving dinner is the big deal, of course and that's the time to remind ourselves of what to be thankful for.

We ought to do things that would remind of the virtues of the Pilgrims. To begin with, we should to go back to fixing Thanksgiving dinner the old-fashioned way. No mixes, no frozen food, nothing canned. There were no A&Ps in Plymouth in 1621.

The turkey would be fresh, of course. Frozen turkey isn't bad, it's just not as good as a fresh-killed turkey. I'm not happy using the term fresh-killed but that's what happens to turkeys.

Don't buy a stuffing mix. Make bread or buy good bread, let it get stale and use that to make the stuffing.

Make cranberry sauce and cranberry jelly. The difference between cranberry sauce and cranberry jelly is, you strain one and you don't strain the other. It couldn't be easier than that.

Don't put anything fake in the gravy. When the turkey is cooked, pour off most of the fat and scrape the dark brown goo off the bottom of the roasting pan. Mix in a few tablespoons of flour and some water. Boil it and you have turkey gravy. I use canned chicken soup instead of water in the gravy but you don't have to do that.

Make a pumpkin pie. Don't buy a can of pumpkin, and don't buy a frozen pie crust.

I don't know if the Pilgrims had ice cream or not, but I always make ice cream and we have that for dessert along with pumpkin pie. If you do that, get yourself a real ice cream freezer. The mixture is just milk and sugar or as much cream as you can afford and vanilla or whatever flavor you want.

After Thanksgiving dinner, put the dishes in the dishwasher. The Pilgrim fathers and especially the Pilgrim mothers didn't have dishwashers, of course, but I think they'd excuse us.

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Written by Andy Rooney