In Food: Special Thanksgiving issue makes the feast easy.
SPECIAL THANKSGIVING ISSUE Make the holiday feast a breeze by serving it course by course
Having graduated from UC Berkeley in the late 1960s, my parents still tend to disavow tradition. Plus, as a military family, we usually lived several thousand miles away from our relatives in the Bay Area, so we’d often spend holidays in a strange hotel in Philadelphia or New York, seizing the chance to travel rather than to roast a turkey at home.
That’s why it still surprises me that I’ve celebrated Thanksgiving in the same place for the past 10 years.
Every November, we gather in Point Arena (Mendocino County), where my parents and my brother and his family settled a decade ago. Yet my family still manages to reject convention in the form of the Thanksgiving meal itself.
Some of us aren’t huge fans of turkey and were very happy the year we replaced it with porchetta, after landing a fresh pork leg from a friend. The porchetta was delicious. So was the Moroccan-style braised lamb my dad
prepared on the Thanksgiving after the birth of our second daughter, when I was unable to help or intervene.
But call me a traditionalist: Those meals were not Thanksgiving.
Since she grows vegetables and raises chickens, my sister-in-law, Jen, once proposed that we do a seasonal harvest meal rather than stick to traditional dishes, whether or not the ingredients were growing in the garden. I outright rejected that plan.
My dad’s main objection to the standard Thanksgiving meal is that you have to eat it quickly before it goes cold, all the work of several days gone in moments.
We’ve tried a more Italian-style approach on Thanksgiving, to stretch things out, but we all love to cook and have ended up with an overwhelming amount of food. Like the year we had a bunch of starters, then Dad insisted on preparing a huge batch of homemade ravioli, and I persisted in making a full turkey dinner. It was a lot of work and somehow not all that enjoyable.
This year, I proposed we try a hybrid approach. We’ll serve some traditional Thanksgiving dishes and other seasonal dishes, in truly manageable courses. ( Jen laughed when she heard this idea, since it’s what they’ve been wanting to do all along.)
We’ll start with thin wedges of my brother’s kale and goat cheese galette, served with glasses of a Navarro Pinot Gris at the kitchen island. When the turkey comes out of the oven, we’ll put the finishing touches on a winter squash soup flavored with lemongrass and ginger, which is also vegan, so it stays light.
Next will come a salad of escarole tossed with pomegranates and hazelnuts. The bitter and crunchy greens actually improve after they’re tossed in vinaigrette and sit for a while, so we can make the salad ahead.
I will have a little discipline so that the turkey course isn’t a full-on Thanksgiving dinner blow-out. We’ll sacrifice the mashed potatoes and combine the stuffing and vegetables in a dressing full of sauteed trumpet mushrooms and roasted Brussels sprouts, with chunks of persimmon to take the place of cranberry relish. We’ll serve smaller portions of turkey and a gravy lightened with hard cider.
Finally, our dessert will be poached quince with caramel sauce and creme fraiche whipped cream, with no crust to fill us up beyond comfort.
If all goes well, it will all be so satisfying, we won’t even miss the mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. (You’ll find recipes for sauces on Page G5 and the potatoes next Sunday if you’re not convinced of this strategy.) It’s a fantasy dinner that I hope will please everyone, one that both celebrates and defies convention.