David Bry Here’s my tip for your Thanksgiving turkey prep: throw it in the garbage. Tante Marie says, Just Put the F*cking Turkey in the Oven. Both agree that turkey is dry and awful, but Tante Marie prefers to drench it in gravy and let others eat it before throwing it in the garbage. What neither mentions is that turkeys don’t freeze well and the larger the bird, the less flavor it has. So, start with a fresh, unfrozen, turkey, stick some onions and celery in the cavity, and put the fucking turkey in the oven. Occassionaly rub it with a stick of butter while baking and tent the breast with aluminum foil during the middle hour of the baking. (But do throw the giblets in the garbage for feed it to the cats.)
On to the nasty bits. From the top:
- Sweet potato/yams with marshmallows.
- Green bean casserole.
(Could be a tie because I won’t eat either of those dreadful concoctions.)
- Gravy. (Explains why I disagree with Tante Marie’s solution.)
- Mashed potatoes. (Although Julia’s roasted garlic mashed potatoes are good.)
- Pop the can crescent rolls.
- Brown and serve rolls.
- Fruit cocktail appetizer. (There may be a good version, but I haven’t had it.)
- Jello molds.
Not good but minimally understandable.
- Frozen pumpkin pie
- Canned jellied cranberry sauce. (Whole berry is better but both seemed to be made with HFCS.)
Everything else is good; some of it just better than other versions depending on one’s tastes and childhood memories. The high and low fat versions of the vegetables are equally good. (Or almost equally good.) No particular favorites, but apple pie and ice cream should be reserved for other holidays.
What do you relish and skip from the Thanksgiving dinner table?
I like a lot of those things, especially mashed potatoes and gravy. I love cranberry sauce, the homemade kind, but canned is acceptable in a pinch. I like sweet potatoes so much i’ll even eat them oversweetened with marshmallows, but almost any other way is better.
you’re right about jello and fruit cocktail and cheap rolls.
i’m about to leave for a group dinner, i’m bringing green beans cooked with shallot, mushrooms, herbs, and probably too much butter. By the time they’re reheated several hours from now they’ll be overcooked significantly, but still not like that traditional casserole.
happy thanksgiving Marie3 and everyone else.
Your green beans sound good. (Too much butter? Unpossible.) Tip — next time steam the green beans to barely al dente (still crisp). Store covered in cold water (up to a day is okay), drain and put into a baking dish at final assembly time. Cook the sauce and dump it on the drained green beans and bake wherever the meal will be served.
I too very much like yams, but simply can’t eat the marshmallow concoctions. Lunch or dinner has often been a baked yam. For holidays bake them (until just barely soft), cool, peel, slice and saute in butter until crispy brown (the caramelized sugars). Can be done in advance and reheated in the oven (not nuked b/c that makes them too mushy).
Good wishes for a nice T-Day dinner.
Sweet potatoes are marvelously nutritious. Neither the marshmallows nor the butter are good for your health. I grew sweet potatoes in the garden this year and found that when they are truly fresh, they are very sweet without adding anything. I suspect the sugar content goes down with storage.
I went completely non-traditional and made Eggs Benedict for brunch and a meat loaf using good quality ground beef and about 1/3 ground turkey. Baked with small Yukon Gold potatoes and ate late in the evening a la old Spain. I did cheat and buy a frozen key lime pie.
Yum! Do very much like Eggs Benedict. Or salmon souffle or just a hunk of broccoli with hollandaise sauce. Haven’t tried a beef and turkey mixed meatloaf, but my all ground turkey meatloaf has gotten high marks. The pie sounds like a nice finish to your menu (and since you made brunch, you get a pass on the minor cheat).
Also try turkey chili. It smells a little weird, but with enough spice it tastes exactly like regular chili. (Did you tell me recently you don’t like chili?)
Concur with all turkey meatloaf. I’m restricted on the red meat, so I prefer to use my ration as charcoal grilled steak rather than ground beef. Since this is the midWest, grilled sweet corn is a required accompaniment.
I’m fine with chili, but prefer chunks of meat (beef, chicken, turkey) to ground meat in it.
Don’t care for charcoal grilled anything. (Worst T-Day turkey I’ve ever had was charcoal w/hickory chips grilled.) A filet mignon about once a year is about all the steak I eat.
“(But do throw the giblets in the garbage for feed it to the cats.)”
My Mom would boil them with an onion and celery then use the resulting liquid for the gravy. Our dog ate the boiled giblets along with the onion and celery as her Thanksgiving treat. (A dog will eat anything that tastes vaguely like meat. Also, they LOVE spaghetti sauce.)
Giblets only serve to make the dreaded gravy worse.
LOL! BTW, did I have an Italian dog? She also adored pepperoni.
I love green bean casserole with slivered almonds. Likewise #5 and #6. The taste of childhood no doubt. My daughter claims a cat will eat anything it ate as a kitten and maybe a man is the same.
Can’t have the gravy or butter so I’ve learned to eat mashed potatoes and baked potatoes with nothing on them. Maybe I resemble my dog’s eating habits.
A Filipina lady I used to work with told me that when she was a little girl in the Phillipines she loved a delicacy which was a cooked fertilized egg halfway to hatching. Ugh! I like eggs and I like chicken. Halfway? No way!
#2 referenced the french cut green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup and canned french fried onions. Even without the glop, that style of green beans may be the only vegetable that grosses me out.
Blue lake green beans with lemon, butter, and almonds are wonderful.
wrt #5 and #6, too close to Wonder Bread.
One cannot be healthy with no oil in one’s diet. Dry mashed and baked potatoes sounds dreadful. Small ones roasted with a bit of olive oil and herbs would be tastier and healthier.
Wonder Bread, yuck. My wife calls it “Air bread”. Your style of baked potatoes sounds very good. When I first weaned myself from butter and gravy, I used to put Pace Picante Sauce (Medium) on them. If you don’t like Pace, try another salsa. Yukon Gold has a good flavor. Idaho White is way too dry.
A tip, you can buy a bag of organic Yukon Gold from Whole Foods and put it in a dark place to sprout for planting. It’s cheaper than commercial seed potatoes. non-organic potatoes are chemically treated to retard sprouting. Works with organic garlic too. I didn’t have any luck growing the garlic to maturity. Seems that 13 line ground squirrels like it too much.
We went to an Italian Restaurant and I had mushroom ravioli. My wife hates roast turkey (but cooks a lot of ground turkey disguised as chili and meatloaf). She had a dish that was a chicken casserole with pasta.
My favorite Italian dish is eggplant parmesan. Haven’t tired mushroom ravioli but have made chicken ravioli with a mushroom sauce (a reduction of Julia’s mushroom sour recipe) that’s quite good.
Yum! I like eggplant Parmesan too, but this particular restaurant has over 2000mg of sodium in that dish.
I get so angry! The table had salt & pepper shakers. The waitress carries a pepper mill for fresh ground pepper. Why do the cooks have to saturate everything with salt and pepper? Are people too lazy to pick up the shaker? I used to use a lot of salt when I was much younger. I never complained. I just took it as given that the food was not salty enough for me and automatically picked up the shaker. Earlier in the year we ate at Pappadeaux . Ten/fifteen years ago they really did have New Orleans style food. Now everything is drenched in pepper and hot pepper. More like TexMex than New Orleans.
I think that Americans’ tastes have been adulterated with all the packaged and fast food crap we eat. A bit of salt sprinkled on top of a dish doesn’t have the same taste as heavily salted during preparation. Same with sugar.
Cook your own. Buy a nice firm smooth shiny eggplant. Try what we call Sicilian egglant here and this site calls Rosa Bianca.
Asian people like asian eggplant (Duh! What a surprise!) but I find it too bitter. YMMV.
I do. The eggplants in the past few months are been particularly nice.
Just read this article that I think you will like.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/magazine/bread-is-broken.html
Good read. Thanks. My mother insisted in the last decade of her life that the blend of flours had been changed and not for the better. Perhaps she was correct.
Much has changed, including apples. At least we are now starting to get new varieties with some flavor, although nothing like the complex flavors of apples bred in the 16th and 17th centuries. Also, I have been trying to get a hold of a pear variety called “White Doyen” that was the most popular pear in the post-revolutionary USA. It was renowned for flavor, ease of grafting, and wide range of growing, but is now almost extinct. I did locate an octogenarian who was a renowned pear preservationist that grew it. When I wrote him, he replied that he was retired (he died about six months later) and no longer sold scion. But his letter enclosed a cutting! Unfortunately, with my lack of skill the graft died, but that was so nice of the gentleman.
Today, everything is the bottom line and if an heirloom variety in 10% less productive than some bland new variety, it has to go. BTW, there is interest in these old varieties among organic growers because they arose at a time when everything was organic, artificial fertilizers and insecticides not having been invented, and thus have a good measure of natural immunity.
Lots of interest in heirloom everything. The problems are how far away from food sources most of us live (and our huge numbers) and the need for mechanized farming. processing, and transportation. Added to that is that while we Americans prize individuality, we also want whatever everyone else wants. Hence, shiny red apples that travel thousands of miles appeals to our eyes and we ignore the lack of taste.
There was a lot of farming in suburban SoCal after WWII. Dairies, chicken ranches, orange orchards, strawberry fields, etc. (And the Imperial Valley, that wasn’t that far away, filled in all the produce not locally grown.) All that is gone. The land became too dear to farm. What grows in SoCal today is houses, roads, etc. Sonoma once had diversified farming and now is almost exclusively one crop – wine grapes. What isn’t grown here is shipped in from Mexico, Chile, China, etc. SF Gate
Mmmm! Give me some more of that TPP!
China not part of TPP. But I don’t want fish/shellfish from Vietnam (although I’m not opposed to buying non-food items from Vietnam b/c we do have a debt to the Vietnamese that we’ve never paid).
Stopped at Cost Plus last week b/c it occurred to me that I hadn’t been in one for decades. A fun SF place to shop when I was young and poor. There were a couple of items that seemed nice and fairly priced but didn’t need either. Almost everything else was made in China, low quality, and not inexpensive. Guess I won’t need to go there again.