Friends Thanksgiving Trifle

There is a Thanksgiving episode of the TV show "Friends" in which Rachel attempts to make a "traditional English trifle," but she doesn't realize that two pages of her cookbook are stuck together. She's reading a combination of two unrelated recipes, and gamely adds a layer of meat to the dessert that is not supposed to be there. Then everyone pretends the result is not awful.

 

Googling taught me that plenty of people have recreated this dish with meat...yikes. But I came across a recipe (Bren Did) to make it LOOK like it has a meat layer, but really the "meat" is coconut coated in Nutella. I was intrigued, and Thanksgiving is coming, and things that would have sounded like a pointless amount of effort eight months ago have now started to sound amusing. 

With time on my hands, the day before assembling the trifle, I made my own pound cake (NYT Cooking; subscription required). It came out great, but needed at least an hour and 45 minutes to cook. I also made vanilla pudding from scratch. You know I like to make things hard for myself. 

Pound cake, jam/raspberry mix, and coconut with Nutella

For the trifle, I had a few challenges: 

• Using a straw on the kiwi didn't work for me, so I just cut the pieces tiny with a knife, and called them "celery" 
• I didn't have the canned pear for the "onion," so I skipped that 
• My dish was too wide; it should have been narrower and taller. I actually wish I had halved the recipe and put it in a smaller dish. There are only three of us!

Despite these obstacles, the result was perfect, in that it looked horribly wrong. 

I had assembled it in secret, and before dessert, I played the above two clips for my backup dancers. Then I brought out the trifle. The backup dancers' expressions were priceless, and Pat kept trying to get me to admit I was pulling their legs. 

In an Oscar-worthy performance, I assured them that I had used real meat, having found this recipe on the internet, in the spirit of Thanksgiving. "But you don't even cook with meat!" Pat said, a note of desperation in his voice, and I reminded him that I believe in "meat as a treat," and what could be more of a treat than a Thanksgiving trifle? He told me afterward he thought I'd finally lost it after eight months in isolation. 

It did actually taste great!

I'm always looking for great meatless recipes, in the interest of reducing my environmental footprint. Obviously, trifle isn't supposed to have meat! So it tickles me to present this dish here on the blog - a little bit of fun irony during a bleak week. If you're like my family, you're anticipating a rather forlorn Thanksgiving this year, with no extra faces around your table, as COVID-19 is spreading disastrously across the country. If you're looking for ways to lift spirits, maybe this will work for you.