Thanksgiving Question: What’s Your Glark?

growing up, we’d always go to my dad’s mom’s house for every family holiday (my mom’s family was in the midwest, we were in CA), and the only good memory of those holidays i have was stuffing my face with deviled eggs. it started with just easter dinner, but ultimately morphed into an ‘any excuse to have a deviled egg eating contest with my uncle’ lol.
cut to adulthood–i’ve been living a day’s drive from my closest family for 15 years, and have always been at the mercy of whoever i happen to be dating when it comes to holiday meals. my ex and i had lots of issues (i had even more issues with his entitled, freeloading parents) BUT the one part of their thanksgiving that i miss is his mom’s lumpia. i literally would be fine eating nothing but lumpia at thanksgiving dinner, even with a table full of ‘traditional’ holiday dishes.
this year will be my first holidays with my boyfriend’s family (last year was our first as a couple, and was obviously very quiet and lowkey amid Covid lockdowns), and i’m over the moon anticipating a family holiday with a house full of excellent cooks :]

This is not exclusive to Thanksgiving but a dessert we had frequently at family gatherings when I was growing up was called “fruit cocktail cake”. It’s a cake made with a can of fruit cocktail but the real magic happens after you have baked the cake when you melt a whole pound of butter with something like 2 cups of sugar and pour it over top. It is weirdly delicious and always feeds a crowd.

Oh the jello salads make me shudder! No interesting food additions from my own family but the friend we usually celebrate with always has to make coleslaw with the Thanksgiving meal! Her mother was southern and always made it so now she does too. It’s the kind with the tiny pieces of carrots and cabbage, heavy on the mayo and mustard, with pineapple chunks. I don’t think anyone eats it but her!

I’m not sure how I missed this post, but every Thanksgiving my mom made “Kentucky Salad”. What’s in Kentucky Salad, you ask? Green jello, molded into a bundt pan, complete with pineapple chunks, pecans, roasted red peppers, apple cider vinegar, and I think, lime juice?! To top it all off…..a big glob of MAYONNAISE right in the center hole. The horror. My dad ate it growing up, and my sister seems to be the only one who inherited the gene that finds this side dish tolerable. The one fun thing about Kentucky Salad is just its sheer presence at the table and how we can’t believe it keeps appearing year after year!

That sounds so good!

From Urban dictionary:
Glark: Verb: The funny, sloppy, gulping, choking noises one makes while performing deep throat fellatio.

Now I can’t stop laughing…

My grandmother made a 50s broccoli casserole with everything that sounds 50s and bad in a casserole (ritz crust! cream of mushroom! mayo! frozen chopped broccoli!). It is DELICIOUS and we all fiend for it. Every partner/SO who joins our family gets converted and at least 2 doubled recipes are required. It is a Thanksgiving-only tradition and it is not permitted to make or eat The Cass at any other time. I know she didn’t invent this, but I’ve never actually met another family with this tradition (anyone??). I hate turkey and kinda don’t care about any of the other dishes. Thanksgiving to me is a row of perfectly toasted broccoli casseroles.

Since I was twelve, my mom has made seven-layer salad for Thanksgiving – I like to think of it as 10% iceberg lettuce, 5% bacon, and 85% mayo/sour cream. (There are supposedly other layers, but I cannot tell you what they are or if they actually make the cut in my mom’s version.) It is everything I dislike in a salad. But one year my mom ran out of time for Thanksgiving prep due to a promotion at work and had to rely on a bit of help from the store in preparing dinner. As soon as we sat down, I ignored the store-cooked turkey and instant mashed potatoes and asked loudly, “But where’s the salad?” Oh, tradition.

My father’s mother always made “Under the Sea” jello salad for the special meals – cream cheese & lemon jello on the bottom, lime jello with suspended fruit and mini marshmallows on the top. I never did understand why the “sea foam” was on the bottom, but it was delicious. My parents never served it, but I started making it again about 10 years ago. Love the nostalgia, and I get a kick out of Jello “salads”!

I am from Ohio; anyone else have to have homemade noodles (not pasta…this is like a thick noodle and chicken broth) which you add over mash potatoes? We cant have a family holiday without this dish.
Also, my sister in law would bring the same cool whip dessert (the one with pudding and crust and then layer with cool whip on top) EVERY family gathering and she would take home the leftovers which was the whole pie minus one piece that someone would eat. I asked one year for her to bring a different dessert for a change and she brought the fucking same dessert with vanilla pudding vs. the chocolate! LOL!
I am curious that someone mentioned calories above and I cant recall a calorie talk among my aunts and mom during our holiday gatherings in the 70 and 80s. They were in shape gals and brought very high caloric dishes but nothing was ever shunned or discussed because it was “bad for you” or caloric. It is always a hot topic at the modern dinner tables.

What a fantastic read! I’m sitting here relating to so many of the comments (my mom’s side of the family being from the Midwest and my dad’s family being from South TX – I had no chance! I’m just sitting here trying to get an outside perspective otherwise, I’m not sure I even realize we ate anything strange at our yearly feasts ?!)
Our Jell-O salad I think we called Star Salad ?‍♀️ and I loved it….apricot jello, canned fruit cocktail (including cherries), banana, little marshmallows and shredded coconut! And, yes, I do realize that topping all that with whipped cream and grated cheddar cheese is totally weird as well as the fact that it was served in a great big Pyrex casserole dish! Best leftovers.
And we always had sweet corn because my grandad grew it ?

Originally from Buffalo, NY here, and my family is from rural areas close by. We’ve always had “grape salad” at Thanksgiving which is some sort of cream/gelatin hybrid (I’m vegan now so all I know is I can’t eat it) with halved grapes, pecans, and pineapple in it. What a palate cleanser!

My guess is it’s called glark as that is the sound it makes when it comes out of the mold.

My grandmother used to make a broccoli casserole with those little pearl onions called “Broccoli Surprise” until we all were joking – “Surprise it’s not good!”

She’s a good sport and we love reminiscing about the Broccoli Surprise.

New Mexican here and we always serve red chile cheese enchiladas!!!! Turns out i like red chile with my turkey more than gravy. I’m a Utah transplant now but i still make enchies for any thanksgiving dinner i attend… any fellow New Mexicans out there?

@cupofjo could you find out from google , how many people googled glark since the post? :)

Lime jello with applesauce. My mom used to also make a version with Cool Whip and walnuts and it was called the Waldorf.

And a can-shaped block of cranberry jelly. It might get sliced, or we might just fork off bites. Delicious.

At my house our most ridiculous conversations happen while we are all doing dishes. Once we tried to come up with the grossest food we could thing of, and bananaise (banana mayonaise) was the winner. Now you’re telling me bananaise is real????????

my sister just sent me this. had to share. speaking of thanksgiving and funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foA0MGUbYH0&feature=youtu.be

My inlaws serve something called “pink salad” which is an unholy combination of cool whip, condensed milk, and cherry pie filling. Needless to say, it is DELICIOUS, and now has a regular place on my table as well!

Any other Italians in the house?? Of course after the huge antipasto during the day, we sit down to A LASAGNE alongside the traditional turkey…

On a little plate placed at every setting, there was always this: A piece of lettuce topped with half a canned pear, dollop mayo + Kraft shredded cheddar. No one ever eats it but it’s always there. WHAT IS THIS??

For years my family has made those Sister Schubert frozen dinner rolls for Thanksgiving. One year, my mom couldn’t remember the brand name and called them Englebert Humperdincks. That’s just what we call rolls now.

BURNT BROWN ‘N SERVE ROLLS! With bottoms as dark, hard, and tasteless as hockey pucks. Since the early 1980s. Every. Year. And every year, I scrape on a generous pat of Irish butter in attempt to soften the char. I am fully convinced my parents do it on purpose at this point, to keep the tradition alive. Or maybe they’ve been at the forefront of the activated charcoal trend all along?

Oyster dressing. My mom makes it only for my dad every year because his mom used to make it.
its disgusting. Oysters have no place in thanksgiving dinner. These are the canned kind… not fresh.
She also makes an amazing cornbread and regular bread dressing that is unique to our family and we all love. The oyster one gets made in the smallest Pyrex she owns. The cornbread gets 3 large Pyrex dishes.