The Tao of Martha: My Year of LIVING; Or, Why I'm Never Getting All That Glitter Off of the Dog

by Jen Lancaster

  “And these are?”

  “Potassium iodide—they protect your thyroid against radioactive iodine released during—”

  “I know what they’re for. I just didn’t realize you’d ordered them.”

  I made a place for the pills between a bunch of vitamins and a year’s supply of Tylenol PM, which, according to prepper handbooks, are a necessity because people have trouble sleeping during crises. “Good to have them, though, right? I wonder if they work on the dogs. Do dogs have thyroids? I’ll have to check. Oh, and next time we’re at Pet Supplies Plus, remind me to pick up Fish Mox Forte. Did you know they contain the same ingredient as human antibiotics? And you don’t need a prescription.”

  “Yeah, I saw that episode with you.”

  “Oh, good, then I don’t have to explain.”

  Fletch’s stomach rumbles audibly. “Can you hand me some of those peanut butter–and-cheese crackers?” One of the prepping sites advised stocking lots of ready-to-eat snacks, because in emergencies, people need quick bits of comfort foods, as it makes them feel like things are normal. That’s why I also have many packs of individually wrapped cookies, chips, trail mixes, and granola bars, as well as a shit-ton of leftover Halloween candy.

  Stupid, nonexistent trick-or-treaters.

  “Why do you want the peanut-butter crackers?”

  “To eat. I’m starving!”

  I shake my head vehemently. “Oh, no. No, no, no. Those are for emergencies.”

  “We have a hundred packages; I can’t have one? Out of a hundred?”

  “If we open up the peanut-butter crackers, then you’ll have crackers and then I’ll want crackers and then there won’t be any crackers left when the big one hits.”

  “What big one in particular?”

  “Whatever big one! You wanted me to be prepared? Well, this is what prepared looks like.”

  He sinks back onto his box throne. “This is unbelievable. I should just be hungry?”

  “Better now than later. You’ll thank me one day for being disciplined. Besides, I don’t want to open any packaging. For long-term storage, we’re going to need a bunch of those number ten buckets, as well as packets to prevent oxidization. And speaking of, I’ve been looking for a local LDS cannery—where the Mormons get their supplies. I found one in Naperville, but I’m not sure they sell to nonmembers.”

  Fletch idly thumbs through my “fire-starter shelf,” which is full of waterproof matches, flints, and lighters, as well as mini camp stoves, lanterns, and Mylar blankets. “I have to hand it to you—you’ve really thrown yourself into this project.”

  “It made sense. Not only am I helping to safeguard our future, but I feel like I’ve embraced all the principles of Martha here. Although I can’t say that my foray into prepping meets the letter of Martha’s laws, I’m convinced that it satisfies the spirit of them. Everything Martha features in her books and magazines and on her shows—whether it’s canning or building your own chicken coop, or just preparing a tasty apple pie—in some way improves people’s quality of life. And I’m convinced being ready for the unexpected will absolutely improve our quality of life, you know?”

  “I agree, even though I don’t think one set of crackers is going to send our whole world crashing down.”

  “Probably not, but do you really want to take that risk?”

  Truly, I believe that being ready in case of disaster is an important tenet in the whole Tao of Martha, that specifically being: Proper preparation ensures a better tomorrow.

  “Well, I’m going back up to the surface to get a snack.” He begins to climb the stairs, while Libby and Loki trail behind him. Hambone stays by the binned food. See? She appreciates my preps.

  “Thank you for your help. I’m probably good from here.” And I am good. I’m locked and loaded for whatever may come our way next.

  He gets halfway up the stairs before poking his head around the corner. “Hey, I just realized—isn’t Thanksgiving this Thursday?”

  Shit.

  How did I not realize that Thanksgiving is Thursday?

  This Thursday?

  As in four days from now?

  How do I spend eleven months following in Martha’s footsteps, only to screw up the one holiday that counts more than all the rest in the Living playbook?

  WTF, self?

  I feel like that marathon runner on Seinfeld who overslept and missed the Olympics.

  Of course, Christmas is a big deal in the Martha universe, but that holiday entails events all month long, from baking to decking the halls to parties, yet everything comes down to one crucial day on Thanksgiving.

  Thanksgiving is the big dance!

  Thanksgiving is the Super Bowl of homemaking!

  This day brings in every element I’ve been concentrating on all year, from organizing to cleaning to entertaining. And decorating and, duh, cooking. There’s even a pet management element in regard to not letting dogs eat turkey bones (and keeping asshole cats off the buffet). And I didn’t even realize it because I’ve been so busy rearranging cans of turkey SPAM.

  What is wrong with me?

  I knew Thanksgiving came particularly early this year, but I still wasn’t expecting it for at least another week. Shoot, I haven’t even reserved an organic turkey yet! (“I’ll take ‘The Most Overprivileged, First-World Complaint to Ever Be Uttered’ for a hundred, Alec!”)

  I go directly to my office to look at my calendar to make sure he’s not just messing with me. Please, please, please…Crap, he’s not.

  I gather up all my recipes folders and cookbooks and dash back to the kitchen to start making a list of everything I’ll need to execute this day with so little notice.

  Damn it.

  Just doing the pies alone will take me an entire day, because I want to make crusts from scratch. I’ll need to have the carpets cleaned, the linens have to be dry-cleaned, or at least laundered and pressed, I have to figure out a menu, followed by making an actual guest list, and then I have to grocery shop and buy liquor and I’m already overwhelmed.

  I pound my fist on the table and scream in frustration and the dogs scramble.

  Oh, great, now I’m stressing them out, too.

  I just don’t know how I let this slip past me, except that we have TiVo and I never see any commercials about Black Friday sales. Also, I don’t work in an office, where all of us would have been counting down the days to this four-day weekend for a month.

  If Joanna and her family were coming, she and I would have been discussing plans for weeks. Last year, I deferred everything to Joanna and her superior-registered-dietitian-industrial-kitchen management skills, and the day was outstanding. Our goal was to eat at five p.m., and we missed that goal…by a single minute, largely because we were half in the bag by then. However, her brother’s coming into town this year, so she’s hosting at her house. She’s invited us there, but I feel obligated by the spirit of the project to do the day on my own.

  I start tearing through my recipes and I’m getting more and more anxious. Haven’t I been learning to improve my skill set since January so that I could take this holiday in stride? All I wanted last year at that fateful dinner party was to be able to make a nice evening for my friends and sit down and enjoy their company. And yet with my lack of planning and forethought on this event, I’ve pretty much guaranteed I’m still going to be a sweaty mess, thrusting recipes at guests when they walk in the door, and forcing them to help cook. This is not how I envisioned the day, at least not again.

  I’m in a full-on lather by the time Fletch strolls into the kitchen. I’ve got stacks of magazines open next to half a dozen cookbooks, plus I’m concurrently Googling on my iPad and phone, while scrawling away on a piece of paper. He sees the state I’m in and settles into the chair across from me. “So…” he says, grabbing an apple from the bowl. “Excited for Thanksgiving?”

  He snickers and then ducks as I whip a magazine at him.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but you should see
yourself right now. You look possessed. Maybe you should slow down.”

  I snap, “Maybe you should help me figure out a goddamned plan for this goddamned day.”

  “That’s the spirit!”

  I scowl and continue to frantically paw through all my material. He strokes his beard and watches me furiously tear out pages and make notes. Then he polishes the apple on his shirt and takes a juicy bite. What is it about people casually eating apples that’s so infuriating? There’s nothing inherently aggravating about someone eating grapes or an orange, but an apple? Puts me right into the red zone.

  He takes another loud crunch. “You think Martha’s busy swearing at her family right now?”

  “No, I suspect Thanksgiving didn’t sneak up on her like a criminal in a dark alley.”

  He munches some more and I feel my hands balling into fists. “She’s likely pretty Zen about the whole day?”

  “I’d imagine so, yes.”

  “Let me ask you something—do you even want to host Thanksgiving this year?”

  I don’t hesitate to answer. “Of course I do! It’s our tradition! I want to make a huge meal from scratch and I want to have the house perfect and I want to have the Christmas decorations hung so as soon as we finish eating we can have a big Clark W. Griswold moment and light everything and we can all sing ‘Joy to the World’ just like in Christmas Vacation. I want to demonstrate everything I learned this year.”

  “As do I. But I have to wonder, if you were so into the idea of the massive, traditional Thanksgiving, wouldn’t you have started earlier?”

  “I didn’t know, and it’s not like you were reminding me!”

  “Yeah, but did you even actively solicit that information? If you were so excited, wouldn’t you have had your menu planned weeks in advance, like you did for the Fourth? You were finalizing shopping lists for that party at the beginning of June. Remember in 2011, when you were running through Target on July third looking for ‘something flaggy,’ you vowed that you would take your time and do the day up this year?”

  “Which we did,” I agree. “And we had a great time. Even as worried as I was about poor little Maisy that day, I was still able to enjoy the party.”

  He wipes a stray bit of juice from his beard and rolls the core into a paper napkin. “And what did you realize? What is the Tao in this situation?”

  “Fletch, clearly you’re driving at something. Just tell me, okay? I’d love your help and I. Do. Not. Have. Time. For whatever mystical shaman guessing game you’re playing.”

  “Taoism’s about going with the flow, about not swimming upstream, about not struggling against nature.”

  Exasperated, I reply, “Thank you, Professor Fletcher. Does that mean I should or should not make Martha’s creamed onions with sage?”

  “What does the Tao tell you?”

  “The Tao tells me that your philosophizing is making me stabby. I need more doing and less thinking. Can you please call Stanley Steemer to see if they can come in the next two days and then check to see if the tablecloth is clean?”

  He doesn’t burst from his chair and fly into motion like I’d hoped. “Let me phrase it like this—do you want to live in the kitchen for the next four days, sweating your ass off while you make a meal it will take twenty minutes to eat? Do you want to attack a pile of dishes for three hours afterward? Do you want to spend a week eating old turkey and cranberry sauce because that’s all we have room for in the fridge?”

  I lay down my pen. Am I delusional from all the time I’ve been in the basement, or is he making sense?

  “Of course not. At least, not when you put it like that. But we can’t not have Thanksgiving, not after all of this.” I gesture to the piles of recipes.

  Yet the idea of not slaving away for four days isn’t without appeal. I’m currently on deadline, too, and I hate to think of how far behind I’ll be if I take the next four days off to cook and clean. Plus, I’ve been a little obsessed about what all the Hurricane Sandy victims are doing for the holidays. I’ve donated as much as I can, yet no matter how much I give, there’s a part of me that feels really guilty about having a big celebration this year when so many others are having a terrible time of it. Seems…disrespectful.

  “Can’t we? What’s stopping us from calling a TV time-out this year?”

  “What about Gina, Lee, and Tracey? I’d feel awful bailing at the last minute.”

  The dogs have been monitoring my panic level, and it must be down an acceptable amount, because they’ve stationed themselves back around the table, each of them eyeing Fletch’s napkin-wrapped apple core.

  “Listen,” he says, “we’ve monopolized them at half a dozen huge parties this year; is it possible that they have other friends and family who’d like to see them for a holiday? Be honest with them—they’ll understand why we want to cancel.”

  Freaking out for the next four days really does seem counterintuitive to what I’ve been working for this year. The Tao principle that I keep encountering again and again is that all Martha’s undertakings seem effortless because they are effortless, and right now throwing a proper holiday celebration seems like the ultimate haul upstream.

  As I reflect, I realize that I’ve been so enthusiastic about disaster prepping because I want a system in place to shelter not just Fletch and me, but all the important players in my life. I don’t need to stuff a turkey to show the girls how much I care; my sardines speak for me.

  Of course, I’ve lost my head a little bit in the execution, but only because my heart’s been so firmly in the right place.

  I immediately get hold of the girls, and they’re exactly as understanding as Fletch assured me they would be.

  So it’s a plan—Thanksgiving is canceled.

  And the level of relief I feel at not having to coordinate the whole day tells me that this was the right call.

  We have Thanksgiving with Joanna, Michael, and family, and it’s lovely.

  Martha spent her Thanksgiving sick in bed with salmonella poisoning.

  She figured it came from all the raw turkeys she handled on the Today show.

  This fact shouldn’t make me feel better about my choice to bail on orchestrating the day, yet it does anyway. Martha didn’t host Thanksgiving and the world didn’t end.

  Get well soon, Martha.

  Christmas will be here faster than we think.

  NOT SEMIHOMEMADE

  With the holiday season rapidly approaching, my thoughts turn to what kind of gifts I’ll give this year. As Martha has devoted thousands of column inches and months of video to the notion of handmade presents, I can’t exactly dole out Amazon.com gift cards this year.

  (Again.)

  I figure doing homemade gifts will trigger a number of my guaranteed happiness increasers—I’ll have fun, I’ll engage in the creative process while learning something new, I’ll feel a sense of achievement once I’m finished, and I’ll likely make my friends happy, which will lead to praise.

  We’re nothing but win here!

  So, now I’m tasked with deciding what to make. Festive cookies are a no-brainer, of course. I’ve made holiday platters by the truckload every year since I had my first postcollege apartment in 1996. I could bake long before I could ever fix a non-sandwich-based supper. Baking is an excellent way to become familiar with the kitchen, because it doesn’t require specialized knowledge, expensive equipment, or a vocabulary that includes the word sous-vide. If you can read and if you have a ten-dollar Pyrex pan, you can make seven-layer bars.

  To be clear, if you’re a shearling-coat-clad IKEA monkey—or Sandra Lee—you can make seven-layer bars, since all they require is dumping one ingredient on top of another. Cocktails optional.

  (Yes, I still detest Sandra Lee and her semihomemade lifestyle. Throwing acorns on a store-bought Kwanzaa cake isn’t cooking, and sticking a plastic plant in a pot isn’t decorating, no matter how drunk you are.)

  Baking’s relatively easy if you use a recipe from a trusted source
and are careful with measurements/oven temperature. Follow the directions and your end result will be edible. Granted, more complex, multistepped recipes exist—like the goddamned Momofuku crack pie I attempted for Thanksgiving that made me want to kill self-comma-others—but in general, even a novice can bang together a batch of oatmeal scotchies.

  Yes, baking is science, but it’s not rocket science.

  Cooking well involves more experience and finesse…especially when freestyling a meal instead of following a recipe word for word. Time and practice are the most important ingredients in developing a palate, understanding how to pair flavors, and, most important, learning how to fix mistakes. Like if your stew seems overly salty? Did you know you can add potato chunks or milk or lemon juice? Is your tomato sauce New Black levels of bitter? Experienced cooks swirl in a little butter or baking soda. (As someone who spent years forcing Fletch to eat overly salty stews and bitter tomato sauces, trust me when I say I’m as proficient at employing fixes now as I was at ruining things previously.)

  Anyway, food gifts are an absolute given, but cookies are a bonus gift-with-purchase in my mind. They’re not a stand-alone present. I don’t want to be all, “Thanks for the Jo Malone bath oil! Here, have a Snickerdoodle for your trouble.”

  (Hint: I would love Jo Malone bath oil, particularly Nectarine Blossom and Honey.) (No one’s bought me any yet—likely because I don’t deserve it—but hope springs eternal.)

  I’m superpsyched for baking season to begin. I’ve been eyeing cookie photos on Pinterest for the past month. I’m still winnowing down recipe finalists, but the one treat I know I’m making is kind of a cheat. I always do white chocolate–dipped Oreos because they’re fast, they’re tasty, and they nicely contrast with my predominantly milk chocolate–based offerings. This year, though, I’m taking the little dippers to the next level.

  I found a recipe on LulutheBaker.com where the author inserted sticks, turning the cookies into lollipops. Then she individually wrapped the top of the pop in clear cellophane and tied the bottom shut with red and white craft string. So professional! These dipped pops look like something I’d happily buy at Fannie May for a buck apiece. I’ve already gathered all the materials, too, in case there’s a run on clear cellophane in mid-December. (BTW, Martha makes the perfect striped craft string. Of course she does.)