As you sit down with your family for Thanksgiving, your table may not look that different from what the astronauts aboard the International Space Station are enjoying. Except that you’ll actually have a table, and you won’t need to rehydrate your food.
NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Andrew Morgan and North Carolina’s Christina Koch recently shared Thanksgiving greetings from the ISS.
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“If you can’t have it with your own family, you might as well have it with your cremates who are like family,” said Morgan. "We’re going to be sharing it with our international friends on board.”
This year's menu includes smoked turkey, green beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese, cornbread dressing and a cran-apple dessert. Astronauts will also enjoy a special treat sent for the occasion, jellied cranberry sauce that “has got to stay in the shape of the can after you open it," according to Morgan.
Christina Koch is thinking outside the box. “We’re also coming up with some ideas of how we might create our own pumpkin pie, maybe stuffing a little bit of cookies into the [reconstituted] candied yams," she said.
If you’d like to bring a little bit of the astronauts’ meal to your table, NASA published its recipe for the cornbread stuffing served in space. It serves about 15, so adjust accordingly. The recipe also calls for heavy seasoning to compensate for flavor lost in the freeze-drying process, as astronauts' sense of taste is also dulled in space.
Since the early days of crewed spaceflight, astronauts have also reported a difficulty tasting their food as microgravity causes fluids to pool in their faces.
Feeling a bit like a cold, swollen sinuses impact the sense of smell, an important component of taste. While that fluid generally shifts over time, the smells of the confined spaces of the ISS also dull the sense of smell and taste over time. A bottle of hot sauce is always nearby at mealtime.
If holiday baking is in your plans, fruitcake fans can try a recipe originally created for the Apollo 17 astronauts. The recipe, originally created by the U.S. Army Laboratories in Natick, Massachusetts, for the space program, appeared in newspapers across the country in 1972. International Association of Culinary Professionals Director and Iron Chef Tanya Steel recreated the recipe last year at the Smithsonian Museum of American History's Cooking Up History festival.
Sticky foods like fruitcake work well in space where crumbs can be dangerous for astronauts and equipment. The recipe is spiced with cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon, and it also calls for candied cherries, pineapple and pecans. This fruitcake was also part of Skylab astronauts 1973 Christmas dinner after a particularly long work session outside Skylab repairing a telescope mount.
Tony Rice is a volunteer in the NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador program and software engineer at Cisco Systems.
You can follow him on Twitter @rtphokie.