festive meals

[kindkit]

Will you be having a festive meal for Thanksgiving or Chanukah or both? I'd love to hear what you'll be cooking or eating.

I was lucky enough to get today and tomorrow off (the first Thanksgiving in three years when I haven't had to work) so I'm going to roast a turkey breast. My original, more ambitious plan was a pork roast with orange slices, but then I started thinking about mashed potatoes and gravy and had to change my mind. Maybe Christmas for the pork. Besides the mashed potatoes and gravy, I'll be making a cornbread pudding with greens (adapted from The Splendid Table's How Eat Weekends and a gratin of sweet potatoes with chipotle chiles and cream. There's will also be pie: raspberry, storebought. And I'm making bread today (four-grain pot boule, now made with actually four grains because I remembered to buy rye flour). Yes, it's all ridiculously too much food considering it's just me, but the leftovers will be stowed away in the freezer for all those days when I don't feel like cooking after work.

The bread dough is slowly fermenting, the cornbread is broken into pieces and sitting out so it will go stale for the pudding, and the slow cooker is full of turkey giblets and chicken bones turning into stock. I've been munching on random snacky foods all day but should probably have a real meal at some point. And I'm a little, weirdly nostalgic for the holiday meals of my childhood.

The only problem with the internet as a family of choice (and believe me, I feel more connection and trust for My Internet Friends Who Live Behind the Screen than I do for any currently living blood relation) is that you all live too far away to come and share holiday meals. But at least we can talk about them.

Comments

[tree_and_leaf]

We're doing Thanksgiving, but postponed to next week, as our only other American friend who is near enough to come can't make it till then because of work commitments.

We will have turkey - probably a crown, unless I can find a really tiny one; green beans, which bore me, but Lawyer insists it's not Thanksgiving without them; roast potatoes because this is Britain and somehow it never seems like a festive meal without them; cider gravy; sweet potatoes baked with butter and cinnamon (adding chile is an interesting idea, but I won't try the gratin as cream inevitably makes me sick); some sausages, because one of the guests doesn't much like poultry; broccoli stir-fried with garlic and red chile.

Pudding - I think I will try my hand at shoo-fly pie, what with Lawyer having grown up relatively close to Lancaster County. Also, I can't abide canned pumpkin, and the fresh ones have vanished from the shops.

[tree_and_leaf]

I've come to really love Thanksgiving (and from my perspective it's nice to have a chance to celebrate with loved ones before the sheer insanity of Advent and Christmas breaks loose...)

[kindkit]

That sounds good! The green beans do sound a little boring (I like green beans a lot, but they're a bit ordinary for Thanksgiving), but holiday meals are often a lot more about memory than about taste, I guess.

Shoo-fly pie is the kind with molasses, right? That's a cool idea. I was too lazy to attempt a pie on top of everything else I'm cooking, and I think store-bought pumpkin pie doesn't have enough spices, hence my going with raspberry.

[tree_and_leaf]

Shoo-fly pie is the kind with molasses, right?

Yes, that's right. We'll see you it turns out!

holiday meals are often a lot more about memory than about taste, I guess.

Indeed. I suppose I should be grateful that his family didn't go in for sweet potato topped with marshmallow, which I've always thought was particularly perverse...