Thanksgiving

Forget 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.

Ever since I first tried it, bread pudding has become one of my favorite homey desserts. Growing up I never knew it even existed. In my household, old bread was made into breadcrumbs not dessert (blame it on eastern European frugality). If you like French toast then there's no reason you wouldn't like bread pudding—they have similar preparations but with different cooking methods. I actually love it more than French toast, which is hard to say for someone who, as a kid, demanded his mom make French toast for breakfast every Saturday morning.

There's something special about the soft, moist cubes of bread in this dessert that makes me go weak in the knees. When I traveled through England during college, I couldn't help noticing bread and butter pudding (or spotted dick as they commonly call it) on almost every restaurant menu—and I always ordered it without restraint. It always came drenched in custard, which is the traditional way to serve it.

You've heard of Thanksgiving stuffing, Thanksgiving pumpkin pie and Thanksgiving turkey. But have you heard of Thanksgiving popcorn? Of course you haven't. That's because I just created it.

Why "Thanksgiving" popcorn? Read on.

I handed Jeff a bowl of popcorn and said, "Here, try this." He ate a couple of handfuls and said, "This is the best popcorn you've ever made."

"Really?" I said. (I thought my best was my maple walnut popcorn.)

He took another handful and tossed it in his mouth. "Oh, yeah. This is definitely the best. What's it called?" he asked.

"I don't know. I can't think of a name I like," I said.

"You should call it Thanksgiving popcorn. It's got all the flavors and smells of Thanksgiving," he said.

And that, my friends, is how today's popcorn got its name. Hmmm... I wonder if I can get my own Wikipedia entry for it.

A 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.