Post-Turkey Day Musings

It’s been 10 Thanksgivings since I was last in college, and in all that time I had never hosted a Thanksgiving dinner. Of course, I have helped in the kitchen several times, but it was never my Thanksgiving. I was always helping somebody else (or eating Tapas in Sevilla). This year I did it and I wanted to put my mark on it. My goal was to make it a nice long enjoyable meal as opposed to the 45 minute gorge fest.


My plan was to have Thanksgiving dinner over 5 courses. By doing it over courses, we could slow things down and let people enjoy themselves. So here was the menu:


1) Soup- Carrot Dill as inspired by Limani
2) Salad- Spinach Salad with chevre, craisins, pecan pralines, and lavender vinaigrette
3) Pasta- Sweet Potato Gnocchi with a maple, sage, brown-butter sauce
4) Entrée- Fried Turkey. Andouille and cornbread dressing, Green bean casserole
5) Dessert- Apple-calvados tart, chocolate-pecan pie, pumpkin crunch


The Soup- This wasn’t a challenging recipe, and overall it tasted very good. The basic concept was cooking down and browning a bunch of carrots, pureeing it all together, and adding heavy cream. Hind sight being 20-20, I wish had cooked down some more white wine and had added it to the mix.


The Salad- This came off really well. My sister had been working the dressing earlier in the afternoon. It is really hard to have a bad salad with crumbled chevre and craisins.


The Pasta- I’ve learned my lesson on gnocchi. Not how to do it better, but rather buy it from someone who knows how to make it. To be fair, I tired finding someone else to make it and no one accepted the challenge. Still the gnocchi itself was decent and the sauce a decadent.


The Entrée- The turkey tasted great. The beauty of frying a turkey is that there is a lot of forgiveness, it cooks quickly, and it doesn’t take up oven space. The negative is that it forces the meal to become regional. The biggest failure of the night came with the dressing. The combination of the Andouille sausage and unfettered cayenne pepper made the dish too spicy. It had great flavor but it came with a cost to those eating it. The green bean casserole was a Paula Dean recipe. My mom did a great job with it.


The Dessert- I subbed all of the desserts to different people. All were well received. I was able to try only a bit of everything because I was still quite full.

Overall, it was a positive experience. I think everyone enjoyed themselves and I look forward to trying it again. Special props to my sister, she truly made this whole thing possible. I always forget how challenging it is to get up from the table and get the next course ready, especially for 10 guests.