Thanksgiving has always been a special time of year for me, mostly because I have a socially acceptable excuse to eat too many good foods like fluffy pumpkin pie with walnut-streusel topping. One year, my (now ex) partner made me a feast a la Julia Child, cooking whatever Julia made while watching her early TV shows. I will forever be reminded of that aristocratic Mid-Atlantic twang when I near a cooking Beef Bourguignon. I was still eating the leftovers when we broke up. But I digress.

This Thanksgiving, I was invited to a party type thing with a disproportionate ratio of gay chefs. Being gay, I felt comfortable with the general social atmosphere, but I am not a "real" chef-- my addition to the spread was mainly in cheese and wine format. Consider as well the location of this event: Portland, Oregon. There was a very cute system of flags to designate the vegan-ness, vegetarian-ness, or animal friend-containing-ness of our foods (for the record, my cheese: vegetarian. my wine: vegan.), and being a proud former vegetarian, I automatically took a dim view of the foodstuffs that didn't gratuitously contain at least some of the delicious and varied animals available at the Zupan's down the street. Seriously, they sell rabbit steaks and wild boar and shit. The list of animals I haven't eaten yet is growing smaller by the day. But I digress once more.

After a few bottles of wine, an emotionally charged new-age but decidedly non-religious blessing of the 20 or 30 dishes sitting in front of everybody, I had a newfound acceptance for the vegan and veggie flagged non-baconed Brussels sprouts and this thing that totally looked and tasted like Mediterranean kimchi. I accepted that it might be okay to keep my meat for the day confined to turkey and ham, and graciously plopped little bits of each dish onto my plate as they were passed around. After about 30 minutes, each dish had orbited the table at least once, and a curious white ceramic loaf pan sitting a foot from my plate was the only dish left un-sampled.

Friends, family, and strangers, I am here to tell you that contained within that dish was nut loaf. I had heard of nut loaf before, and had mentally written it off as a thing to laugh at, rather than a serious source of nutrition— yet here it was, and here I was, and the next thing I remember is cutting off a chunk (a slice?) and putting it on my plate, and discreetly tasting a morsel.

Even if you were like my former self, and had never tried nut loaf, you know what it tastes like. That is because it tastes like nuts. It tastes like if nuts had a Halloween party and all dressed up like meats, and they were all giggling and having a fun time and maybe eating some candy or passing around a bong, and then a late nut comes to the party and is all like "why is everyone meat?", but it's okay, because all of the nuts dressed as meats are all like "it's cool, we're really nuts and we're not trying to hide it all that hard!"

And it is cool, because nuts are pretty decent, and nut loaf has been upgraded in my mind to food status. I give nut loaf a rating of 2/2, A++, would eat again.