It's okay to use the boxed stuffing

Or whatever easy thing you need to get through today

My favorite part of Thanksgiving has always been the stuffing. Or dressing. Whatever you call it. I’m not splitting hairs here. You know what I’m talking about. Stuffing. The kind that comes out of a box, this year, purchased at the Dollar General the day before Thanksgiving.

I’ve tried many fancy stuffing recipes over the years. A kale and caramelized onion stuffing, which was, yes, very good, but really, a whole lot of work on a day when I’m already doing quite a bit of heroic cooking. My family makes oyster dressing, which is like the Platonian ideal for how to ruin perfectly good stuffing—with seafood. Bleck.

This year I had every intention of making a stuffing recipe from Bon Appetit, which billed itself as the Simple-Is-Best-Stuffing recipe. Friends, it was not at all simple. There were several pans involved and a very long time in the oven, which I have never figured out how people manage around the turkey, occupying the oven for half the fucking day. Does everyone have an extra oven hidden somewhere, waiting all year to be deployed on Thanksgiving day? It’s an eternal mystery to me.

At any rate, yesterday after making a cheesecake and the dough for our rolls and the make-ahead mushroom gravy, I looked at the not-at-all-simple stuffing recipe and told my husband I was buying the boxed stuff, which is really, I’m sorry, fucking delicious, as well as being the perfect metaphor for how to approach Thanksgiving.

My husband and I cook extensively all year round. When my daughter moved away to college we started buying frozen pizzas and this was the first time in our marriage we’d ever eaten a frozen pizza together. It was SCANDALOUS! We’d pull the frozen pizza out of the oven and giggle to ourselves at the sheer delight of NOT HAVING TO COOK ANYTHING. That’s how intensively we cook. All the time. Because we like it and because all the restaurants in our town are, well, not good.

This is all to say, it’s not like we’re not used to cooking. We do it a lot. But something about Thanksgiving makes it all so intense. So loaded. So fraught. Even though we’re cooking just for ourselves, the stress comes creeping in the door. A voice starts whispering in my ear, “You’re not really going to make the boxed stuffing, are you? What kind of person does that? Tsk, tsk.” The voice hisses all those ugly words like ‘low-class’ and ‘lazy.’

Friends, fuck that voice. I love boxed stuffing and I’m not afraid to admit it. As long as I’m at it, instant mashed potatoes are also the best mashed potatoes I’ve ever had, except for the mashed potatoes at The 605 Grille, rest in peace, which Julie-Kate told me were made with shit-tons of cream cheese, god bless.

Maybe tomorrow or the next week or never, I’ll make the simple-is-best stuffing recipe, because it probably is good. But not today. Today it’s boxed stuffing for us.

On this very stupidest of holidays, don’t be afraid to do the easy thing. Scarp the extra pie—no one needs it. No one should be eating this much, anyway. It’s gluttonous and disgusting. Use the paper plates. Skip those elaborate table settings that, let’s be honest, just get in the way and make it very awkward to eat.

Today, be gentle with yourself and make the boxed stuffing. Trust me. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fucking delicious.

Thank you You Think Too Much subscribers! Grateful for all of you for being here and making this fun, instead of just me in a room by myself, mumbling incoherently.