A New Thanksgiving Dish

a dish that became thankful

My first job after I graduated from college was as a substitute teacher. I attended an orientation during which the only topic discussed was the new school-shooter protocol.

My first sub job was as a choir and music teacher for a middle school about a mile from my apartment.

I threw up on my way to the school.

You see, I am an anxious person. Not only do I find most social situations both taxing and a little nerve-wracking, I also have always struggled not to beat myself up for every social misstep. I have struggled all my life to let mistakes of any variety go.

When I was in fourth grade, I got a C on a math quiz. I grounded myself despite my mom’s protestations that it was fine and that I was overreacting.

I still remember the feeling I had that time when I was ten that I accidentally put my head on the shoulder of the boy I had a crush on.

And the time that I gave a presentation of my research I had done on dog social communication. I’d used my own three dogs. The woman who was running the presentations decided that she should critique our presentations before we gave them, and when she got to mine she told me that nothing that I had prepared meant anything because I hadn’t used a larger test group. I was twelve, and I did the presentation with my face the color of tomatoes and talked mostly about how my research hadn’t been good enough.

Over the years, I’d improved greatly at this struggle. I’d learned to laugh at my missteps, my social faux pas, my conversational misphrasings. But all of this progress that I made seemed to fade with my step into true adulthood — substitute teaching.

On my first day substitute teaching while the teacher was showing me around her room, my phone, which I had left sitting on the desk, started blaring an alarm that I’d set for myself, the title of which contained a lot of expletives, that was designed to help me meet my writing goals each week. I saw a girl look down at my phone and read the alarm. She looked up at me and started laughing. My face beet-red, I smiled and held a finger to my lips. She nodded, and didn’t tell a soul.

A few weeks later, I took another job at that same school for the same class. I had one choir class that had 60 students, a mix of boys and girls from 6-8 grade. I was the only adult in the classroom. While I was helping a small group of girls learn their vocal parts on one side of the room, two boys got into a fight and started wrestling on the other side of the room. They were shoving desks aside and sending chairs flying. I broke them up as the bell rang. I sat on the floor and sobbed in the corner of the classroom behind my desk for five minutes and then went to the principal’s office to make sure everything was ok.

At another school, I showed up to teach music, and on my break, they called me into another classroom to teach algebra. The other teacher in the math class yelled at me when I couldn’t help the students with their math problems. I’d told them I was no good at math.

Substitute teaching was hard.

I thrive on routine and gentle interactions with people I know well. Harsh words and bad memories live in my head for months and years after they happen, repeating themselves in the back of my mind whenever I mess up again.

I would stand in my apartment kitchen with its uncleanable grime tucked into the corners and the fridge that had arrived filled with black mold and prep my lunches for the week. The recipe I’ve included here was my favorite lunch recipe to make — sweet potato, kale, and quinoa bake.

It was fall then. And sweet potatoes had a comforting flavor and color. It was nice to eat the same thing for lunch every day. To have one thing I could count on being delicious and soft and gentle in my day.

I’ve gotten better since then at not beating myself up. I no longer substitute teach, and I work jobs now that I am much better suited for.

Now I can remember all the good things that happened while I was teaching. Like the time that I taught a second grade music class and coaxed a boy out from under the piano. He was socially anxious, too, and some of the other kids had been bullying him. While the other kids worked on a music coloring sheet, I sat next to the piano with him and we talked all about how he was learning to play the clarinet and could read the notes for piano and clarinet, which are very different. I told him that he knew more about reading music than I did because he could read both kinds of music. At the end of the class he drew out an explanation of how to read for clarinet in crayon and gave it to me.

Now, when I eat this dish, it’s with thankfulness. Thankfulness that I get to write part-time. Thankfulness that I get to spend this year living with both my husband and my parents. Thankfulness that my other jobs are things that I enjoy with people that I enjoy. And thankfulness that I can often laugh at my mistakes and am getting better all the time at remembering positive interactions and laughing at negative ones.

I never would have thought of this dish as a Thanksgiving one when I first made it. It contains no turkey, no cranberries, no stuffing. And yet it always makes me feel thankful.

To me, this has become a perfect Thanksgiving dish. I hope that when you make it it fills you with thankfulness for this time of year, for its delicious taste, and for how quick and easy it is to make.

Thankfulness Bake

You will need:

1 cup quinoa, dry (cooked according to package instructions)

3 small sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped into bite-sized pieces

1 bunch kale, stems removed and chopped (the Lacinato kale variety works better in this dish than curly kale)

1 package of sweet Italian sausage

Salt and pepper

Olive oil

1/3 cup shredded parmesan cheese

What to do:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. After peeling and chopping the sweet potatoes, toss them in a bowl with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Spread the potatoes out on a baking sheet and bake them for about 30 minutes or until they are tender.

Cook the quinoa according to the package instructions. Once its cooked, fluff the quinoa and set it aside.

Drizzle about 1 Tablespoon of olive oil into a large pan and add the chopped kale. Sprinkle this with salt and sauté it until the kale is wilted. Transfer this into a baking dish. In the same pan you cooked the kale, cook the Italian sausage until it’s browned.

Add the rest of the elements to the baking dish and gently stir it together. Top with shredded parmesan. Bake for ten minutes (until the cheese is melted). Top with more parmesan if desired.

That’s all for this week. I hope you all have a lovely Thanksgiving! Thanks for reading. Come back in December for some Christmas desserts and another journey back in time with Miss E. Neil’s 19th-century cookbook.

With thanks,

Juliana Nicewarner