A plump turkey, golden and moist. (Start defrosting on Monday, wake up at dawn on Thursday to start the long, slow roasting, then baste every hour.) Buttery mashed potatoes. (Peel a mountain of them, slice, boil, drain and whip them to within an inch of their -- or your own -- life.) A rainbow of side dishes and
desserts -- bright orange sweet potatoes, green beans, crimson-red cranberry sauce, golden pumpkin pie. (More peeling, more slicing, dicing, mixing, baking, steaming and boiling. The food, that is, not the cook.) Ah, Thanksgiving. Is there any other holiday meal in which the ideal crashes so resoundingly with the reality?
It's no wonder more and more time-pressed people are giving up cooking the full, traditional Thanksgiving dinner that is 50 percent Norman Rockwell, 50 percent Martha Stewart and 100 percent exhausting.
"I finally get a day off, and I'm going to spend it in the kitchen?" asked Steve Deckelbaum, a salesman who lives in Owings Mills. you're married and you're both working and you have two kids, bottom line, who has time to cook?"
Mr. Deckelbaum, who cooks dinner for his family most of the rest of the year, has become a devotee of what you might call "Thanksgiving-to-Go," pre-cooked dinners that allow you to sit down at your own home to a full turkey dinner that someone else made and you reheat.
Mr. Deckelbaum will pick up his dinner tomorrow at the Stuff'n Turkey franchise near his house and serve it to his family and guests on Thursday.
And he won't feel a bit guilty. He's even managed to convince one holdout to the mythic, homemade Thanksgiving dinner that it's OK if someone else does all the work.
"My mother used to say, 'Oh, we have to cook Thanksgiving dinner,' " Mr. Deckelbaum said. "But those days are over. She comes to my house now."
The Deckelbaums aren't the only ones who would rather spend Thanksgiving Day with their families and football games than with their basters and saucepans.
Caterers and restaurants say they're doing the cooking for more and more customers every year. And food companies say prepared products -- from fully cooked turkeys down to instant potatoes to already baked pies -- are increasingly popular alternatives to the from-scratch fixings.
Alan Morstein, vice president of the locally based Stuff'n Turkey and Talk'n Turkey chain, first started offering Thanksgiving take-out four years ago, to meager interest. It's since become so popular that he no longer needs to advertise.
"It was a very hard sell four years ago," he said. "There's this romantic tradition of doing everything yourself. There's this dichotomy -- the tradition on the one hand, and practicality on the other."
Some may initially shrink in horror from the thought of a pre-made Thanksgiving dinner, but Mr. Morstein says people increasingly are comfortable with the notion of carrying out not just the usual hamburgers and pizza, but a real meal of a whole bird and homey side dishes.
"It goes with the Boston Chicken-type trend," he said of the popular rotisserie-chicken carryout.
Take-out has become so ingrained in daily life that it was bound to become more acceptable for even this most sacrosanct of eating occasions, said Harry Balzer, vice president of NPD Group, a Chicago-based market research firm that tracks Americans' eating habits.
"People used to go out to restaurants to sit down and eat. Now, 75 percent of restaurant business is take-out. More consumers are using restaurants as a sort of a supermarket of prepared foods," he said.
Even if you do cook your own Thanksgiving dinner, you're more likely to be taking some shortcuts along the way, according to the food industry.
Maybe you've stopped making your own corn bread and shucking your own oysters for the stuffing and now let Pepperidge Farm or Stove Top help out. Or, you've given up on ever making the airy, flaky-crusted pie of your dreams and let the real experts -- say, Mrs. Smith or Sara Lee -- do the dessert honors.
You're not alone: Food companies say stuffing mixes, instant potatoes, bottled or canned gravy, heat-and-serve rolls and frozen pies fly out of the stores this time of year. Even Heloise Cruse of "Hints From Heloise" fame is on the record as saying her cranberry sauce comes freshly served out of . . . a can.
The last part of the Thanksgiving dinner to join this pre-fab trend is the most important part: the turkey. People who went the just-add-water route for the rest of the meal still would gamely wrestle a turkey from either fresh or frozen state through a day of stuffing and roasting and basting and carving.
Well, guess what: Even Butterball, the nation's largest turkey seller, has jumped on the prepared-food bandwagon. Last year, they introduced cooked turkeys that can be reheated, and this year added a third variety, honey roasted, to the smoked and baked turkeys that they previously offered.
"We did focus groups, the standard 10 women around the table, and found there is a growing need for convenience even at Thanksgiving," said Dennis Hull, marketing director for Butterball. "There will always be people who cook everything from scratch -- and cooked turkeys are still only a fraction of our business -- but people just need the added convenience today."
The fear factor
Another reason pre-cooked turkeys are becoming popular is that familiar human motivator: fear.
"Surprisingly, we've found a continuing fear about screwing up the most important meal of the year," Mr. Hull said of the company's consumer research. "So this is a way of easing the trauma."
Indeed, turkeys pose any number of anxieties -- ranging from paranoid visions of salmonella poisoning to the more common fear: dried out white meat.
"Every time I made the turkey, it was never moist. Everybody says it's so easy, but it always ends up so dry," sighed Randi Sopher, who lives in Owings Mills. "I have a lot of out-of-town guests this year, so I want it to be perfect. They don't have to know where it came from.
"I'll still steam up some vegetables, make some candied sweet potatoes, an apple cake, some little extra things," said Ms. Sopher, who ordered a turkey, "out-of-this-world" stuffing, cranberry sauce and gravy from Mr. Morstein.
You can choose how much you want to "cheat" with local caterers, stores and restaurants offering a variety of options, from a full, soup-to-nuts package to a range of a la carte selections. But it won't come cheap.
At Classic to Go catering, for example, you can opt for a $99.95 meal for 10 to 12 people that includes a turkey with gravy and stuffing, sweet potato souffle, green beans, cranberry orange relish, pumpkin pie and cranberry biscuits -- and no substitutions. Or, you can pick and choose from two pages worth of options, including oyster stew ($10 a quart), a whole turkey ($4.50 a pound) or just the breast ($6.95 a pound), three kinds of stuffing ($7.95 or $9.95 a pan), rosemary roasted potatoes ($5.95 a pound) and caramelized acorn squash tart ($20).
Harvey Shugarman, of Harvey's Kitchen at Greenspring Station, has found that his $99 complete meal (turkey, stuffing, gravy, green beans, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, cranberry sauce and apple or pumpkin pie) is most popular with customers, but they usually throw in one or two of his a la carte options as well (garlic mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, etc.).
Some even deliver
Some caterers will even deliver on Thanksgiving Day itself -- and more.
"A lot of our clients even have us slice the turkey and put it back on the bone for them," caterer Charles Levine says of his carving-reluctant customers.
Pros like Mr. Levine offer the gourmet treats that some people have become accustomed to eating -- what with the proliferation Sutton Places and other upscale eateries -- if not actually preparing themselves. Are you, for example, really going to make your own focaccia bread or fresh cranberry sauce -- or would you just rather let Mr. Levine do it?
""I think people are realizing how hard it is to cook the kind of dinner they want to eat," said Ann Macdonald, owner of Rendez Vous caterer in Annapolis, which is offering a "Thanksgiving-to-Go" package for the first time this year. "You have to plan it, shop for it, cook it, and clean the house for the guests. It's time- consuming, and people are just tired of being exhausted."
"I love to cook, but my wife and I both work, and she has clients coming in from England, and some of her relatives, so we figured it would just be too much," said one of Ms. Macdonald's customers, Jim Lutz. "Last year, I cooked for the in-laws, the entire family, and I spent all of Wednesday night and all of Thanksgiving in the kitchen."
So this year, Mr. Lutz, who is president of the Cambridge-based Wild Goose microbrewery, instead will focus on his real expertise -- matching the right beer to the right courses of his catered meal.
But here's the real, and entirely traditional, reason he's hanging up his apron:
"This year," Mr. Lutz said, "I want to watch the football games."