One of the most challenging Johnson family Thanksgiving traditions was pretending whatever Grandma made was delicious, when in fact it rarely was edible.
When the family dog won’t touch the grape jelly-glazed, bologna-wrapped sweet potatoes she brought for the holiday table (yes, Grandma actually made this one year), imagine the mental and physical gymnastics mom and dad had making the kids fake eating it.
There was no way my sister, brother and I were going to actually take a bite and pretend to like it. But mom was determined this wouldn’t be the year we finally came clean with Grandma about how we really felt about her vile and revolting culinary creativity.
The gameplan was to discretely feed these non-edible nuggets to Cookie, the family mutt who — until that moment — would eat anything.
I don’t remember how my siblings and parents finally got rid of theirs, but I just kept trying to give them to Cookie, who kept turning her nose up. It wasn’t long before I had several pieces of the thing on the floor around my chair under the table.
When there was none left on the plate, I “accidentally” dropped my fork, then picked up the pieces and hid them in a napkin. They were tossed when I went to the kitchen for a new fork.
This was one of Grandma’s most spectacular failures, but there were plenty of others at Thanksgiving and other holidays. One of her go-to dishes was that vile Jell-O concoction with bits of celery and shredded carrot in it.
Thanksgiving With The Johnsons
Fast forward a few decades and my brother, Jay, has become the Thanksgiving wildcard of the family.
He’s actually a good cook, and will try anything.
Like a few years ago when he cut a lemon in half and put them under the skin of his turkey, pointy end up. I still laugh out loud thinking about the look on Mom’s face when he proudly placed a bird with almost pornographic breasts on the table.
It tasted great, and Mom was a good sport about it until my 7-year-old nephew piped up: “I want the nipple!”
A couple of years ago I wrote about how I made my first real date projectile vomit the night before Thanksgiving. If you missed that one, find it here.
A Swine Time Not Had By All
Then there was the swineapple incident.
About five years ago, Jay saw a YouTube video of someone making a swineapple, so he just had to do one for Thanksgiving.
What’s a swineapple?
You peel and hollow out a pineapple, then stuff the cavity with seasoned, marinated pork loin. Keep it whole, just stuff it in there.
Then you wrap the outside of the stuffed pineapple with bacon, slather it in barbecue sauce and put it on the smoker. After a few hours, it’s supposed to be this delicious pork, flavored by the pineapple and bacon.
Jay’s version turned out pretty revolting. It just didn’t cook right, and everything was nasty. Even the bacon on the outside wasn’t salvageable, and until then I thought nothing could make me not want to eat bacon.
Jay Johnson, with a little help from his youngest son, Anthony, make up a couple of swineapples one year. They were not good. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily) 
Before putting the swineapples on the smoker. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
Some Redemption
This doesn’t mean the Johnson family is full of lousy cooks who don’t know how to throw a proper Thanksgiving dinner.
For the most part, they’ve been pretty normal — turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole and homemade pies. Most years, we’d also have a ham because when he was a kid, Jay decided he hated turkey for about 10 years.
For the last 15 years or so before Mom died in 2022, she’d go out of her way to make a special treat for her grandkids.
One year she made turkeys out of pretzel rods, Oreo cookies, frosting and candy accents. Another was huge “turkey legs” made from chocolate Rice Krispies treats molded around a pretzel rod. The pretzel was covered in white chocolate to look like a bone.
When go around the table and say what we’re thankful for this year, perhaps my contribution will be that Jay gave up on swineapple and that Grandma’s sweet potato bologna bomb died with her.
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.
