Mrs. Teabody Makes "Filling"

Good Morning on this chilly Thanksgiving morning 2016, and I hope you started your day by sending up a Thanks to the Heaven who hears you for this day, this food-filled, family-enhanced, traveling-optional celebration of  gratitude. If you slept in a bed with a roof over your head, stopped by indoor facilities as your first stop of the day, and are now finding your way to your computer and your link to the interwebs, you already have PLENTY to be grateful for, don't you?  If you did not send up a Thank You when your eyes opened, do so now. Mrs. Teabody can wait.

How will you commemorate this day of Thanksgiving, Gentle Reader? Mr. and Mrs. Teabody will be hosting family who always make all the work lighter and the food better by sharing in the preparation. The first course  will be served an hour ahead of the main event.  This will be some delicious soup made by the culinary genius team of Ross and Elaine from Orrtanna with side nibbles of healthy munchies brought to the event by Shirley from Frederick. Sandy from South Carolina and Joyce from Warfordsburg will arrive early at Chez Teabody with their Kennebec potatoes and decadent desserts and play integral roles in all the other preparation and the menu will be as traditional as you can possibly get and too many cooks will NOT spoil this broth. Doug and Nancy from Clear Ridge will be bringing delicious sides and hopefully everything will come together for an hour of family and friend fun around the table followed by a loosening of belts and a chorus of moans. And that brings us to today's topic: filling, which you may already know as stuffing or dressing. No matter. It IS delicious.

Truth to tell we didn't really celebrate Thanksgiving as such when I was growing up. If there was anything to celebrate in November, it was the hunting season. Turkey was not a staple at that time but roasting chickens made many, many meals and these were stuffed with that universally-loved bread concoction which we called filling - -not dressing. Not stuffing. Mrs. Teabody's mother made  the loveliest tall and crusty bread every week and  this was the backbone of the filling. She would  put a couple of her slightly stale loaves into an aluminum dishpan and start pulling these apart into  bite size pieces. This was a fun process to watch as she then threw a great blob of butter into the middle of the shredded bread and began working the butter all through the bread. By this time a small crowd of children had gathered because we all loved in order: our mother, her bread, her butter. Once the butter was evenly distributed, it was time for salt and pepper generously added  directly from the aluminum salt and pepper shakers that always sat on the  stove. She would take a bite, adjust the seasoning and then respond to our begging by rolling us each a tight little ball of bread and butter, salt and pepper and we were in filling heaven. She would stuff the roasting chicken or chickens with some of the filling and bake the rest in an open pan.

Mrs. Teabody made her filling last night exactly as her mother made it, and the process recaptured the emotional core of the process: our mother. Without her we wouldn't even be; without her we would not have the brothers and sisters and extended family of in laws and nieces and nephews and all the people who prop up our centers, straighten our paths, take all the work out of Thanksgiving preparations and replace that work with love. And THAT, my friends, IS filling. Have a wonderful day and don't forget to let your heart be full of gratitude. Thanks for reading.