The Cupertino Safeway at 5 p.m. isn’t exactly brimming with frantic energy — after all, the kind of people who scour the “pre-cooked” rack for some semblance of a turkey on Thanksgiving evening are either a) superb procrastinators, the kind who proudly erect their Christmas trees on Valentine’s Day, or b) entirely oblivious to the existence of Thanksgiving, the most calorie-friendly and possibly forgettable holiday of the year.

And according to store employee Anne Yi, the one with the worst history.

“Thanksgiving gets a bad rep,” Yi said. “But every year there are more people buying the food [for it].”

The cart-pushing, baby-toting crowd is hardly a surprise for Yi; these last minute shoppers are notorious for their unorthodox shopping strategies, from “midnight pie runs” to the classic “who needs turkey when there’s dried cod on sale, let’s get it!” mentality.

“When you wait this long,” Yi said. “You gotta work with the bottom of the barrel, with what’s left after the picking-over.”

And every year, they do work with it, to sometimes terrifying and sometimes hilarious results.

Apples to Apples

David Qi, brushing off the brim of his beige hat before clapping it back on, squats in front of a barrel of fruit roll-ups.

“What about this for dessert?” Qi said, rolling his eyes. “I swear, I get worse and worse with [this] every year.”

When his two daughters first chastised him for his “un-American” habits, Qi decided in 2008 that a Thanksgiving Party (to be called the Turkey Trot, because he couldn’t think of anything else more original) would compensate for all those years of missed Fourth-of-July barbecues.

“I had everything ready,” Qi said. “Well…in my head, I had everything ready.”

When his daughter called Wednesday night before the big day, inquiring about the contents of the meal, as her son was allergic to “almost everything,” Qi realized that he had been lounging on the sofa for the past month, attaching clip-art turkeys to his emailed invitations but not doing much else.

“I wasn’t even alarmed at the time,” Qi said. “I thought, ‘Oh, I have tomorrow.’” Little did he know, most grocery stores, such as Whole Foods in the evening and Trader Joe’s during the day, were closed on Thanksgiving.

“Thank God for Safeway,” Qi said, laughing. Still, the selections were disastrous, at least compared to the image he had in his head: an oak table sagging with a glazed 14-pound turkey, a heaping bowl of mashed potatoes and a cornucopia of flowers.

On Thursday evening, 5 p.m., his daughters and sons-in-law and cousins and parents and his friends and their friends piled through his front door. He didn’t bother mentioning that ten minutes ago he had been stalking through Safeway’s fluorescent halls, not-so-silently panicking in a phone call to his wife, who was in Nevada with her parents.

“She told me everything to buy,” Qi said. “She just picked up the phone and said, ‘You forgot the turkey, didn’t you?’”

The 50 or so guests chatted on the way to the dining room, commenting on the dimmed lights and the festive candles, which Qi had unearthed from the basement. They stopped before the table. Someone gasped.

“It was a table with just piles of apples, applesauce, more apples,” Qi said. “And in the middle of the table, this duck that I got at the Chinese supermarket.”

Qi’s guests laughed so hard they didn’t eat for another several hours, opting instead to circle around the table and take pictures of their so-called “festive, home-cooked” meal. In fact, Qi doesn’t remember if they ever ate that duck, which wasn’t cooked anyway.

Either way, to him, the food was and is irrelevant. It’s been six years, and he’s still willing to lug several pounds of apples and raw celery and raw ducks across the chilly Safeway parking lot every year if it means getting to spend a few extra hours with his daughters.

Not-so-secret recipes

For the first time ever, Miriam Zhang’s secret stuffing isn’t a secret. This year is going to be the year.

“My daughter has a family of her own now… and I thought, ‘These recipes have to go there!’”

She shakes her head, as if she can’t possibly comprehend how her recipe has come to become someone else’s.

“Secret recipes are very special to me,” Zhang said. “…I don’t always think [they] should be shared, but then what would I do with them?”

Her family, who never seems to do anything on time, whether it’s a birthday party or a holiday celebration or naming a new niece (one of whom was nicknamed “Bean” for a month before she was officially named). In true fashion, she’s shopping for her “secret” ingredients while most other families would be saying grace or setting the final garnish.

“I’ll only tell you one ingredient,” Zhang said. “It’s eggs in stuffing. I know, sounds strange, but… sorry, I can’t tell you more.”

Then, after examining several cartons, she selects an organic, humane-farm variety. She recalls the days when she herself owned chickens, and her grandmother would tease her by asking whether she wanted new dolls for Christmas or more chickens. Nowadays, even without her own chickens, she knows how to judge eggs like any seasoned farm girl: by watching their yellow yolks.

The darker and rounder they are, the fresher and more fragrant they will be when cooked and nestled in their white ceramic bowls.

“Now, though, instead of thinking about how I choose eggs, I think [about how] my daughter will have to do this all on her own,” Zhang said. “Now how does that happen?”

The Great American Sauce

His wife plunged her finger into the mixing bowl and brought the sauce to her lips. Immediately, she winced and scurried to the sink, shaking her head as she ran. “Oh, no!”

“When she asked what was in it,” Larry Katō said, shrugging, “I told her… it’s barbeque sauce and some other things.”

Horrified, his wife poured the mysterious syrup down the sink and confiscated his jug-sized bottle of A1, his slightly smaller bottles of Studd’s Bar-B-Q sauce and ranch dressing. When his wife had asked him for something to dip the carrots into, she certainly did not expect him to put his chemistry degree to the test.

“I think she was quite disturbed,” Katō said. “I always come to Safeway… for their American sauce collection.”

On trips home to Japan, often during Thanksgiving week, Katō would sneak several quarts of ranch and steak sauce through security, usually to some resistance. Nothing in any other country quite suffices, at least to Katō, who would rather dip gyoza (a kind of dumpling) in ketchup than vinegar and soy sauce.

After that one incident, his family would not let him near the glaze, the dressing or any kind of bowl, for that matter: even the slightest brown smudge on the serving platter was suspected to be a part of Katō’s conspiracy to douse everything in glops of sweet and sour.

“I never understand why the food has to be made so fancily,” Katō said.

He’s at Safeway for green onion, or at least that’s why he was sent. As usual, he’s found himself in the sauce aisle, gazing longingly at the red-and-brown array.

“Maybe next year,” Katō said. He’ll head home in a few minutes, presumably to the sight of his family, who will welcome him with their usual warmth, exasperation and soy-sauce glazed turkey.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” he said, waving. He whistled on his way to the front door, empty-handed and smiling.