Sometimes, a traditional family Thanksgiving is a delicious mish-mash of cultures

How my parents – an Italian-American from Chicago Heights and southern Illinois native – got together, I’ll never know. But their 30-plus years of successful marriage has been a delicious adventure, to be sure.

We’ve spent our Thanksgivings for decades on top of a country hill at my grandparents’ farm near Paducah, Kentucky, a quaint southern city bordering my home state and a two-hour drive from Nashville.

Our turkey day table is a rich reflection of southern sweetness, with a hint of Naples.

My mom’s pasta salad or antipasto tray accompany half-dozen casseroles. We bring red wine, though my brother and I traditionally uncork and polish off the cabernet, since my cousins prefer the sweet iced tea.

All the Thanksgiving favorites of midwestern/southern culture are spread out on the kitchen counter, buffet style. Green beans smothered by a can of Campbell’s soup. Just-fine rolls, deviled eggs and creamed corn. My grandma’s stuffing is my dad’s favorite, though I have no idea how to replicate the recipe since her directions are limited to “a little of this, a bit of that.”

But while the pecan pie is heart-stoppingly good – possibly literally, with all that corn syrup – I save my sugar tooth for the sweet potatoes.

You’ll need to glaze the tots with maple syrup, butter and brown sugar, caramelized by an hour in the oven. The secret here is to cut them in rounds, stack them and drown them in a pool of the sweet glaze. Quite simple, but beats the marshmallow version, I promise.

Though hardly a fan of turkey, I would always save room for seconds of my grandpa’s barbeque. He toils over a rack of ribs for nearly 12 hours, every so often slathering the meat with a secret, vinegar-based sauce of smoky goodness. I’m vegan now, a fact of grave concern and disappointment of my family’s, but oh, the temptation of those ribs …

But I leave you with my mom’s lasagna. Make sure your sauce is sugar-free; Americans too often trend toward sweeter marinara. Cook the pasta first. Enough with the no-bake lasagna noodles! And get the full-fat ricotta, preferably from an Italian market if you have one nearby. Please, skip the cottage cheese. Cook the mixture up with some ground beef, turkey or no meat, mix in shaved Parmesan and generously sprinkle oregano, basil and thyme throughout the dish and bake for around 45 minutes.

Buon appetito, dig in y’all!

This story was originally published November 25, 2019 at 4:00 AM with the headline "Sometimes, a traditional family Thanksgiving is a delicious mish-mash of cultures."