This is my favorite thread of the year, and it's off to a good start. Our Thanksgivings have been pretty tame for the last couple of decades ever since my "step-grandmother" with her at-the-table, racist comments about her WalMart coworkers in Sealy, Texas" was out of the picture.
So my mom is in an assisted living facility about 15 minutes from us and has been since 2020. Since she moved here, we no longer had to make the trek to Houston for the holidays and my sister and her daughter come to us (occasionally, my wife's dad and step-mother join us along with my Uncle and his new-ish wife). Anyway, this year, it's just my wife and I, our two sons, my mom, my sister, and her daughter. Great success!
My sister and I split up cooking duties. This year, I'm handling the turkey, the dress, the gravy, the rolls, and some bread. She's got mashed taters, green beans, and apps. My wife is handling dessert. Easy. But there's a hint of of past conflict that I may twist a little for amusement's sake. It starts with my taking over gravy duty. My mom always made some baller gravy, the base of which was Heinz gravy in the jar, to which she added milled vegetables from beneath the roasted turkey and drippings. Along with something to make it darker (probably Brown 'n' Serve). Last year, my sister brought a jar of gravy and some sauteed veges that were diced up in the blender. Twas not that great. So this year, I took over the gravy. I spoke to her on the phone the other night and told her how I'd worked my ass off on the gravy, explaining the process. She jokingly said that I'd gravy-shamed her. All in good fun.
So here's the weirdness. In 1982, when my grandmother was in her last hospital stay, my sister went to visit her and got her to give her the recipe to what she now calls, "Mamaw Bread." It's a dense white bread with a very soft crust and has a short shelf life. It's tasty, but nothing earth shattering. But when she first made it for our family and we asked her for the recipe, she refused to give it to us, saying she would pass it down to her daughter. I gave her sufficient hell over this because secret recipes are ridiculous and it's about process and technique, blah-blah-blah. No dice.
For several years, I, who was not much of a baker tried to crack the code and create a good spite recipe for my grandmother's bread. I really didn't get close, but I did proceed to get a lot better at making bread, most of which was better anyway. Well, last years, she shows up for our Christmas gathering with loaves of Mamaw Bread as gifts. And during the holidays, I took a crack or two at getting a close clone of the leftovers we took home. I got closest with a modified loaf of Amish White Bread. And before moving on with life after the holidays, I remember thinking that using all milk instead of half-milk/half-water in the recipe would soften up the crust and get as close as to make no difference. I started planning the rolls and trying to decipher my wife's grandmother's recipe for that (because of course, the written-down version has no amounts for flour and seems to be written in reverse), when I remember something about using 100% milk in the spite bread recipe, which I took on again because the texture of the rolls was similar. But since it hasn't been a matter of utmost importance to me, I never wrote the recipe tests down with my other recipes. But thankfully, I'd emailed the recipe to my wife.
So tonight, the bread lab is cranking up. My mom has been raving about the sourdough bread I've been making for her lately, and I said I'd bring some to Thanksgiving. I'll also be bringing some of the spite bread to serve alongside the sourdough bread and the rolls. No point will be made of it. It simply will be there. I'll see if it raises any eyebrows or leads to accusations of recipe theft.
Sorry, all I have is self-manufactured drama as the younger brother.
edited to add that I now realize that my life is, in part, a lower tier episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.