Thanksgiving Menu

My father is an amazing chef and Thanksgiving is his favorite holiday. We usually cook a number of dishes together, from the father-daughter cranberry sauce (fresh cranberries cooked with fresh orange juice and secret flavoring) to the bread stuffing. I love sharing the kitchen with him and learning from each other.

I shy away from the turkey. As a former vegetarian, I still get the willies when I think about touching raw meat. Dad is the one who lifts it into the brine and stuffs it. Last year, I decided I should at least learn how to carve the turkey. (You can see Dad offering advice in the picture.) 

My mother usually makes the “primo” – either a pasta or a soup. This year we’ve decided on homemade pumpkin gnocchi that I made recently and froze. Mom is going to be responsible for a few sides, escarole and candied carrots.

Planning the menu this year, my husband and I are working on forming our own traditions. (While that will probably happen naturally, I am neurotic enough to try to plan them.) He loves ginger and we are integrating it into the yams and pumpkin pie. We aren’t straying too far from my family’s traditions, though. The cranberry sauce and bread stuffing are here to stay.

We have some family recipes and I’ve been reading about others in the Joy of Cooking, Epicurious, and the website hosted by the Ginger People company.

I’m excited to cook, but I’m really excited to eat! Let the feasting begin!

What are your favorite Thanksgiving dishes?

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Naked lemons and recipes

No matter how much you love to cook, sometimes you need a little inspiration.  

I have a absurdly large collection of peeled lemons in the fridge. I made one recipe that called for a hefty amount of lemon rinds and now that I have recovered feeling in my hand after all that peeling, I need to find something to do with the naked lemons.

I usually start with Epicurious when I need a recipe. This website combines recipes from Gourmet, bon appètit and more. I type in an ingredient and peruse a list of recipes. For my pesky lemons, it has offered me pasta sauces and coffee cake. I might try a lemon chicken in the next day or two. 

I’m not a neat enough chef to dare bring my laptop into the kitchen. I know you can log into the site and save your recipes, but I prefer to print them out and keep them in a binder.

Of course, I also love my cookbooks. I have shelves of them and a few out from the library, too. I take notes in the ones I own and remind myself of what went well, and what didn’t, in the various recipes. I even date them to remember when I first made them.

To prepare for our Greece trip, I’ve been experimenting with Greek recipes. My favorite cookbook is Vefa’s Kitchen, which is an encyclopedia of Greek cooking. It was published by Phaidon, who also published the amazing translation of the Italian cookbook The Silver Spoon. According to the index, there are some lemon recipes in there, but they seem to call for more food shopping. They might have to wait for a bit.

A friend recently told me about Tastebook. It comes recipes with social networking. You can collect your favorite recipes and even self-publish and share cookbooks here.

Where do you find your inspiration?

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Dinner in a Meat Market? Yes!

Sparrow Meat Market in Kerrytown (Ann Arbor) hosts a semi-secret monthly feast. They take over the supermarket and Sweetwaters Café area with long tables covered in white tablecloths. They serve multi-course meals and guests share their BYOB wine with each other. The entire complex is closed except to those who made a phone reservation and know to enter through the only open door (closest to the parking lot.)

I’d seen flyers for it when I looked for it on meat counter after browsing the Saturday Farmer’s Market outside. There are no ads and no mention of it on the Sparrow website. Friends have raved about it, but mostly because they heard great things, not because they’d ever gone. 

After eating in the packed rooms filled with the aromas from the five dishes and the live music by Douglas and Andrew Brown, I understand why they don’t advertise. They don’t need to. Through word of mouth, this dinner is “legendary,” as one friend described it to me in an email.

Here was the menu:

1^st course

Baby spinach with dried Traverse City cherries, toasted pecans, crumbled blue cheese, and balsamic vinaigrette. 

2^nd course

Marinated tomatoes and zucchini served alongside a selection of Italian salamis.

3^rd course

Seared scallops with cream sauce over roasted garlic and pumpkin polenta. 

4^th course

Pork loin stuffed with fresh herbs, garlic, and grated pecorino cheese slow cooked in marinara served over braised escarole greens.

5^th course

Fresh prepared Amaretto cannolis.

My favorite part of the meal was the pumpkin risotto. I don’t care much for scallops in general, but this polenta was perfectly seasoned. It wasn’t sweet or spicy. The pumpkin flavor was appropriately slight and complemented by the creamy sauce. This is something I want to try to recreate at home. Minus the cream sauce, this Epicurious recipe sounds about right.

The fresh basil on the zucchini in the second course helped to bring out the fresh flavor of the vegetable. The salamis were room temperature and their fattiness (a positive!) was offset by the light vegetables.

The salad dressing on the first course was a bit heavy for the light baby spinach leaves and the pork loin would have benefited from just a bit more spice (salt and even hot pepper), but considering the large numbers of people being served, I don’t think it should be held against them.

This dinner was something we’d like to repeat. And repeat.

If you need more convincing, you might enjoy this review on AnnArbor.com by Jennifer Shikes Haines. 

The menu changes according to the seasons. Be in “the know” and check out the flyers on the meat counter. The cost for the five course dinner is $45.00 and you can call for reservations/information at 734-761-8175.

 

 

Thanks to the Ann Arbor Chronicle for linking to this article.

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