“The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.”
This is the line that begins Joy Harjo’s poem, Perhaps the World Ends Here, which I always think about this time of year. It’s the poem that I printed on the reverse side of all the Thanksgiving menus that I made in 2020, a year when we didn’t gather around a kitchen table, but still found a way to share a meal. I think that was the year that really established the way we do Thanksgiving. We don’t travel, we don’t see family, but we do cook for people we love, and we do it in our own kitchen. In 2020, the second Thanksgiving of my PhD, we made a full holiday menu, and portioned it into takeout containers. All our graduate student friends who couldn’t travel came to our porch to pick up their meal. There was turkey, and gravy, and cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes, and stuffing, and sweet potatoes and green beans. For dessert, we packed up apple snack cake and pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.
Each year, our Thanksgiving menu is a mix of old favorites and new experiments. There are certain dishes that never change, like the gravy (from scratch, with a roux), and others that we tend to switch more frequently, like the vegetable sides (usually an orange vegetable in some form, and another that’s dark green). The menu also shifts based on our guests’ dietary needs–we always cook gluten free, but have also layered in dishes for vegetarians and vegans some years. And of course, there’s always the game of kitchen constraints–how many things will be hot from the oven, what can we make ahead, what will hold heat or serve well at room temp.
Creating the menu is a sort of unending revision process. What will we keep, and what will we leave behind in favor of something new? We cooked four Thanksgivings in Lincoln, Nebraska while I finished my PhD–each year a big buffet spread, for more grad student guests than we could seat at our table. We brought out folding chairs, and some folks sat on the floor, and we prepared as many different dishes as our kitchen could handle. This is our first year cooking Thanksgiving in Hattiesburg, in a newer and larger kitchen, but with our same table. We’re having a smaller gathering, which means everyone will be able to pull up a chair around that kitchen table, the one that’s seen our Thanksgiving menus grow and change, and held our cooking each year.
Here’s what we’re cooking this Thanksgiving, with a few notes on the recipes:
- Roast Turkey: for a few years now, Jason has been breaking down our turkey into parts before roasting it. He likes the butchering practice, and I like having the turkey carcass available a day ahead so that I can make a rich turkey stock that we use for our gravy.
- Gravy: we use a roux of butter and rice flour, plus that glorious turkey stock, and a splash of white wine or vermouth. Any time we have vegetarian guests (including this year!) we also make this vegan mushroom gravy that is genuinely good–I’m always happy to finish off any leftovers.
- Cranberry sauce: from scratch, and you really don’t need a recipe, though you can find plenty online. I usually add sugar, orange, water, some spices. It holds well in the fridge, so it’s usually the first thing I make, a day or two ahead.
- Dad’s stuffing: I still refer to the notes that I took down the first time I was cooking thanksgiving away from home, when I called up my dad to get the stuffing recipe over the phone. We use gluten free bread from Trader Joes, which absorbs the copious amounts of butter in the recipe.
- Mashed potatoes: we’ve tried different methods over the years, including the crock pot method, which is easy for a big crowd, but always turns out a little grey. This will be our second year of trying the oven-roasted method.
- Green Vegetable: David Chang and Tien Ho’s Brussels sprouts with fish sauce vinaigrette, which we tested a month ago and loved. It’s hard to find celiac-safe rice krispies, so we sub gluten free panko for the crunch.
- Orange Vegetable: Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever’s Candied Sweet Potatoes with Bourbon. We haven’t tested this one, but it sounds delicious, and I can’t imagine it going horribly wrong.
- Dessert: a favorite from last year, Basque Cheesecake, which has to be made a day ahead, and goes well with a vanilla bourbon cranberry compote (same method as the cranberry sauce, but seasoned a bit differently for dessert). It’s crustless and uses only a few tablespoons of flour, which we substitute with Bob’s 1 to 1 to make it gluten free.