Me: I should post the turkey sandwich with the cranberry sauce. Everyone will have leftover cranberry sauce to use up.
Me: Nope. Too much like Thanksgiving. I'll go with the Southwest sandwich.
Me: But cranberry sauce won't be around much longer; habanero Gouda cheese is around all year.
Me: No, no. Too much like Thanksgiving.
Me: I'm just gonna post both; that way, people can decide for themselves.
Jeff: Who are you talking to?
This Turkey, Cranberry, and Gruyere Sandwich with Sage Mustard is all about opposites attracting: toasty, fragrant rye bread and moist, savory turkey; tart cranberry sauce and mild Gruyere cheese; earthy sage and tangy mustard. Somehow, they all come together in perfect harmony.
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving
Stuff It!
In 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.
Victorian Thanksgiving
In a Thanksgiving article Harper’s Bazaar published in 1900, the
author, Anna Wentworth Sears, recommends a jolly game of Pin The Head
On The Turkey. Rather than a tail and donkey, this requires a large
paper bird missing his noggin which, given the bill of fare, seems to
me not so jolly and also somewhat tragic. But that’s just me. She also
suggests, should this game grow tiresome, that ‘reciting Longfellow’s
poetry to music’ makes for swell after-dinner fun.
Ten Americans and Six Foreigners Sit in a Circle
“It feels like we are in a movie,” said Alessandro across the living room as he stabbed his fork into a giant piece of turkey. “We see this in the movies, but we never experience it. This is my first
Thanksgiving.”
Alessandro is an Italian man that one of our classmates, in Italy, took time to make friends with over the last three weeks. He is sitting across the room from me. To my left, a woman from Israel is laughing. Next to her is an Englishman, and another Italian. Just past a light shade, that obstructs my view, is a German. If you take another look around our room, you might not only notice the foreign differences but also the age differences as well. A retired woman, born in America, who grew up in Canada, is sitting three spaces to my left while others in the room have just nearly hit 23. You might think we are sitting in a support group for diversity, but this is far from what is happening. This is our Thanksgiving—ten Americans, and five, eventually six people who have never celebrated the giant turkey in the middle of the table, the green bean casserole, or cranberry sauce (which go for 3.90 Euro each at the International Ingredient store) before.
How to Pick a Wine for Your Thanksgiving Dinner
From the International Herald Tribune
Suppose I told you that with your turkey, your stuffing, your cranberry sauce, and all the delicious side dishes that will grace your holiday table, one wine and one wine only would match up. Unless you pick that one wine you face the specter of horrible embarrassment. Sound ridiculous? Well, of course it is. Yet more people than I care to think about feel exactly this way when selecting Thanksgiving wines.
Choosing the wine for any occasion is well known as an exercise in agony. Thanksgiving, for some reason, fills people with an extra dimension of dread. Perhaps it's the idea of performing for one's loving family, always so ready to heap scorn for your benefit. Or maybe there's secret pleasure in being squashed in the paralyzing spotlight, dancing, as Tom Lehrer once put it, to "The Masochism Tango."
If the prospect of shame and disgrace is a welcome part of your holiday ritual, by all means enjoy the feeling. But I would be remiss not to point out that it's all so unnecessary! Picking a wine should never be an occasion for self-flagellation, and at Thanksgiving least of all. The meal itself is typically a riot of contrasts - the savory stuffing, the sweetness of yams, the blank slate of the turkey - and wide open to individual eccentricities like marshmallows, almond slivers and the like. The wine selection task couldn't be simpler: versatility and plenitude.
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