After deciding on this year’s menu, it was more than I could do to keep it to myself. In my excitement, I reeled it off to friends, classmates, relative strangers, and the response was the same: “Wow! And how many people are you cooking for?”
The answer to that is five. Yes, only my immediate family and my cousin Mark were present to enjoy the spread, although Matt drove down the next day to help out. The problem is that the kind of people who ask such questions are overlooking a vital point of holiday merriment. Leftovers are essential to feasting process, so I never mind a high ratio of dinner to diners. Besides, Thanksgiving dinner has a roster of dishes from which one may not deviate, and all elements must be present and accounted for.
For example, one must begin with soup. I believe I mentioned the bisque.
This shrimp and crab bisque is from Saveur and it’s possibly one of the best soups ever. It’s rich and creamy and sweet and complex, and it represents its ingredients at their best. Whenever I cook shrimp and crab, I always use frozen shrimp and canned crab. I know it may sound horrible to some of you, but let me reassure you. As long as the shrimp is frozen raw and unshelled, there’s very little danger of it turning out soft and mealy when cooked, although that’s a bit of a moot point when it’s puréed into liquid velvet. As for the crab, the brand is vital. I once tried Bumblebee canned crab, the kind that can sit on the the shelf, and it was horrid. I always use Phillips crab meat, which my parents get at Costco. It’s more expensive and needs to be refrigerated, but short of steaming and shelling your own, it’s pretty much the best quality you can get. It’s sweet and delicious straight out of the can, and the most labor intensive part is finding a can opener.
The soup has a bit of brandy and wine in the base to give it depth, and some Tabasco sauce to give it a little kick. The Tabasco is essential; without it, the bisque would run the danger of being too rich, too creamy, too blah. I added a few shakes, just until I could taste it. I planned to allow people to add more if they wanted a more fire, but everybody seemed to think it was perfect as it was. The only problem the bisque presents was that after deceptively large bowlfuls, the weak among us were less enthusiastic about the rest of dinner.
Traditionally, one combines the requisite soup with the requisite squash, but since I went another way with the former, I did so with the latter as well. Curried squash and chickpeas, from Melissa Rubel via Food & Wine, might seem too exotic for Thanksgiving, but it ended up being a refreshing alternative to the inevitable sweet, mashed dishes.
I would and probably will make this for non-holiday purposes. The recipe, which calls for two large butternut squash, produces an awful lot; I would quarter it for a normal meal. It’s easy enough to make: toss squash and chickpea with spices, roast, top with yogurt sauce. It also keeps well, which is essential for this kind of large scale cooking. I especially recommend making the yogurt sauce ahead of time, since it really allows the cilantro flavor to become one with the yogurt. Poured over the squash, it cools the rich heat of the curry for a spicy twist on an autumn staple.
Of course, the most essential Thanksgiving dish — more essential than turkey, even — is stuffing. This year’s stuffing with bacon and leeks came from Williams-Sonoma.
As I explained before, I wasn’t crazy about the potato bread on its own. It is, however, genius stuffing bread. Even after a day of air-drying, the bread cubes were moist at the core. They still eagerly absorbed the turkey, bacon, and leek juices, and stayed intact, resulting in a texture that was neither too dense and homogeneous, nor loose and dry.
The original recipe called for only the white parts of the leeks, but I can’t in good conscience throw away the greens, so I kept them in. Neither am I such a fool as to toss a pan of bacon fat and melt butter instead. I added more herbs as well, and maybe because of the additions, the dressing was awfully vegetabley. I ended up adding the toasted cubes of a baguette and about eight pieces of (shudder) sandwich bread to round it out, plus a little more milk. As a result, there was a massive amount of stuffing, but that’s never a bad thing in our house.
And, as usual, I made both chestnut and chestnut-free stuffing to accommodate Drew’s delicate palate. Because I was in charge, I put the chestnut stuffing in the turkey and the plain in a dish. The stuffed stuffing, with its rich, turkey-infused moistness, was vastly superior to the unstuffed stuffing, which was drier and crunchier. Or so I’m told, because nothing could have pulled me away from the triumph of my favorite dish.
Stay tuned for part two of dinner, which is slowly but surely coming.
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