PISCATAWAY, N.J. — There’s a policy within the Rutgers football program that no player should be alone on Thanksgiving. That gave Rutgers lineman Henry Highes Jr. an idea to use his passion for cooking to encourage some of his teammates who might be missing home and family.
It is an idea that has been running now for three years. Hughes hosts a Thanksgiving dinner at the team’s facility in the Hale Center where he does everything from menu planning to the shopping and then the cooking.
From appetizers to the main course and even dessert, Hughes pours himself into a recipe that is two parts his passion for food and an equal measure of his compassion for his teammates.
Hughes, who is from Tampa, Florida, has been cooking with his mother for much of his life. At nine years old, he remembers being in the kitchen and making fish and grits. It was the first time he cooked something.
He was hooked.
Cooking runs deep in his family, he says. It isn’t a labor of love for him, it is simply pure love. There is no labor involved in a love that extends to sharing his heart within the football program. It comes during the Thanksgiving season when teammates might feel especially lonely.
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On Thanksgiving morning, he is expecting a turnout of 20 or so people affiliated with the team to show up at the Hale Center for some food and brotherly bonding. Three or four of those in attendance will be coaches and the rest his teammates.
It makes for a nice balance and Hughes’ efforts mean that no one is alone on Thanksgiving.
“Upwards of 40 pounds of turkey or something like that.- it’s a lot of turkey!” Hughes told Rutgers Wire on Wednesday afternoon following practice.
“And then we’re all going to meet here at the Hale Center and get together. The menu? The southern tradition is to make some dressing – I believe you guys call it stuffing up north. Some collard greens, mac and cheese, candy yams, the smoked turkey. And then I’m going to do a pot roast too. And then on top of that for dessert, we’re gonna have peach cobbler and banana pudding.”
It may be a surprise that, given his passion for the culinary arts, that Hughes is a finance major. But he said he is hoping to utilize his degree to help him when he opens up his own restaurant someday.
His signature dish used to be cabbage, fried chicken and rice. But after learning how to barbeque from his uncle, he now says that his new go-to favorite plate is ribs, chicken, mac and cheese with baked beans.
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Planning for this event on Thanksgiving started well before this week. Given his already busy workload with school and football, he admits to having to map things out so that the holiday meal can go off without a hitch.
He got ahead on his schoolwork so he could take the time to do this again this year.
“It’s like you don’t really know how much you care about something until you do it. And it was like once I did it, I couldn’t stop, literally,” Hughes said.
“And then my mom made sure that I didn’t stop because every weekend when I didn’t have any school, she would literally wake me up out of the bed – ‘Do you mind making us breakfast?’ and I was like, ‘I got you.’ So then, I started off with breakfast and ended up with lunch and dinner and then I just expanded from there.”
Being from Florida and being away from home during the holidays is something that Hughes says can be difficult. Teammates local to the area invite other teammates to spend the day with their families and bring them to their homes. Coaches will open up their homes to players and staff alike so that no one is left in a dorm room alone.
And that is significant.
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For many of the freshmen, in particular those from Florida, they’ve never been this far away from home – ever. Let alone on a holiday that is synonymous with family and food.
The plan, Hughes says, is to begin cooking around 3 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon and to have everything done no later than 8 a.m. the next morning. All the cooking will be done at his house off-campus – “because my grill is at home and I have a smoked turkey.”
Then he will haul everything over to the Hale Center and wait for his teammates to arrive. They better come with an appetite.