Thanksgiving

turkey-hash-630x407-1Forget about Thanksgiving dinner. I can’t wait until the day after Thanksgiving for leftovers. When else during the year can you look forward to turkey soup, turkey chopped liver, smoked turkey sandwiches, and above all turkey hash in a single day? All this month, on www.barbecuebible.com, we’ve been telling you how to cook turkey on the grill. Make sure you manage to squirrel away a pound or so of the cooked turkey meat for hash.

Our word hash comes from the French verb hacher, "to chop." (Yeah, it’s the same etymological root as that chopping device favored by George Washington, the hatchet.) Hash originated as a way to use up leftovers, but it now turns up not just at hash houses (a nickname for diners) but at high-falutin’ restaurants from coast to coast.

The most common version of hash contains corned beef and potatoes, but you can make hash with an almost endless variety of ingredients. Rural New Englanders combined corned beef, potatoes, and beets to make red flannel hash. In seafaring communities it was common to find salt cod and fish hash. Hachis parmentier, garlicky chopped lamb and potatoes, is classic comfort food in France.

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pumpkinbread.jpgOur family will pause during Thanksgiving dinner and each of us will take a moment to mention what we're most thankful for in the past year.  Other than that, I have to confess our holiday is all about food. 

The eating begins the moment I arrive at my sister's house.  I put down my suitcase and head for the kitchen where a loaf of fresh pumpkin bread is waiting.  I'll eat my first slice of many before I even take off my coat.   

We have turkey of course, but pumpkin bread is the official food for the week of our family's Thanksgiving.  I've already done the math – and I'm worried whether the 14 loaves Carla already made will be enough for the 14 people in the family  before fights break out over the crumbs. 

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basic-stuffing.jpglaraine_newman_cameo.jpgIn my book, Stuffing has held its place in my penalty box along with green bell peppers; cilantro, cumin and lime flavored Life Savers. For me, it’s the Buzz Kill of Thanksgiving.

I have never met a Stuffing I’ve liked, but not for obvious reasons.  I find the premise of a food item that’s made from torn up bread to be, somehow, cheating, not to mention being a food group that’s utterly unappetizing to me.  Justin Wilson, The Cajun Cook from a while back once made something that even he copped to being the height of poverty cuisine; faux potato salad! It was made with old torn up bread.  Nothing wrong with poverty cuisine by the way.  Southern fried and most Jewish food is exactly that. But substituting potatoes with bread is just sad.
 
Wikipedia outlines the history of stuffing dating back to Roman times where you could get anything from a chicken to a dormouse stuffed with vegetables, herbs, spices, nuts, spelt (which is described as ‘old cereal’ by Wikipedia) and a variety of organ meat still considered palatable today. 

Nothing wrong with that, I say. But, as it had evolved and morphed, it has picked up and been dominated by bread.  Gross. Especially when you consider the quality of bread in our country.

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ImageA couple of years ago I raised a pair of heirloom turkey chicks – a Bourbon Red and a Spanish Black. The Spanish Black Tom was roasted, the Red still struts and preens in my chicken yard. I’ve taken to calling him MOLE.

Along the way we gave shelter to a Narragansett turkey hen from Ilse and Meeno’s Sky Farm. (The hen, hatching from an egg that was shipped overnight from Amherst, MA, and slipped under a brooding Silkie.) The hen began laying eggs last year – none fertile.

This year in March, old Mole garbled and squawked all night long, and come summer, there were fertile turkey eggs in our coop. (I know this as I cracked open an egg with a partly formed chick inside-ugh.) Aside from laying eggs, the turkey hen had no mothering instincts. She was not interested in nesting.

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wild-rice-003.jpgThanksgiving may be my favorite holiday. Families gather. And as they surround the dining table they celebrate and give thanks for all blessings, including the bountiful meal before them. When my mom was living, she prepared most of the Thanksgiving meal herself.

Trying to please everyone, she’d make baseball-sized dumplings and sauerkraut for my German dad, lump-free mashed potatoes for the grandchildren, sweet potatoes with a crunchy topping of melted marshmallows for her daughter-in-law, stuffing for her son-in-law, and lentils for herself and me. My brother wasn’t hard to please. I think he ate everything. And, of course, there was always a huge turkey. I am not kidding when I say there was hardly room on the table for our dinner plates.

Not to be forgotten was the wild rice. In Minnesota, where wild rice is plentiful, most cooks have favorite ways to prepare this “gourmet grain.” It seems my mom could never come up with a recipe that lived up to her expectations.

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