In our house Thanksgiving is the one day a year my wife is in charge of the cooking. Because I work at home, part of my day-time ritual is to shop for and cook our dinners. But for Thanksgiving, I’m her sous chef. She tells me the menu and I prep the mise en place, so everything is ready for her.
Besides corn bread stuffing with Italian sausages, dried apricots, and pecans, a 24-pound organic turkey with mushroom gravy, home made cranberry sauce, string beans sautéed with almonds, oven roasted Brussels sprouts, and an arrugula salad with persimmons, pomegranate seeds, and roasted hazelnuts, she makes garlic mashed potatoes.
This past year I’ve been experimenting with sweet potatoes. I made them for her to see what she thought. With a light dusting of cayenne, after you’ve enjoyed the sweetness of the sweet potato, your mouth is surprised with a hint of heat that drives you back for more. She agreed that the yams are delicious: sweet, salty, savory, “meaty” (from the mushrooms”), and buttery from the butter. For Thanksgiving they’ll be added to the menu.