Cooking for Turkey Day!

We don't get many trick-or-treaters, which means I get to hand out huge fistsful of candy. I enjoy that. There's always gotta be someone on the block who hands out a single penny or unbuttered, unsalted popcorn, so you figure someone has to make up for that. Why not us?

We don't do a lot of decorating for holidays. The only reason I did any at all was so people would know we were handing out candy, really; it makes it more obvious. And at least we managed to find one of those funny assemble-it-yourself decorations of a witch on a broom that flew--splat!--straight into one's front door. Okay, it's cheesy, but it's fun cheesy.


We're finally getting a freezer to supplement the one atop our fridge. It isn't really a good time for the spending, but now that we keep the ingredients for the raw cat food in our freezer, we just can't do thanksgiving dinner properly with a normal freezer any more. And I've wanted a freezer forever.

You see, turkey day is a tradition for us, one that started back when we lived in the Boston area and we knew most of our friends from college. Often a good handful of them didn't really have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving, either because they weren't on great terms with their families or it was too expensive to go home for Thanksgiving. So we'd gather up a good handful of these people, ask them what their food allergies were and what their special requests were, and cooked up a feast.

Now you have to understand that when we say a feast, we mean a feast. We love to cook. (If you don't believe me, check out some of our past Thanksgiving menus!) We would always tell our friends to bring tupperware for leftovers but they didn't believe us, so we got in the habit of keeping cheap disposable tupperware around. We always serve dinner on the Saturday just after Thanksgiving itself so we have two days off to cook--and we do additional cooking in the week before. Yes, that's how much we do. We traditionally collect a jar of change all year and cash it in at Thanksgiving using the machine at the grocery store, then use that to pay for most of the ingredients.

We moved last year, so other than one friend who's flying down to stay with us for a couple of weeks, we don't have a lot of people to feed this year. But why let that stop us, particularly if we're going to have a freezer? We just have to pick dishes that we think will freeze well as leftovers, and then we'll have freezer meals for a while.

We like to make sure we use a lot of the traditional components of a holiday meal (cranberry, pumpkin, turkey, potato, etc.), but we try to pick out new and interesting ways of using them--within the bounds of what our guests will feel comfortable trying, of course. I spend a few weeks off and on writing down possible recipes out of some of our cookbooks--both old favorites and less-used ones. We finally thin the list down using criteria like, "well we have to have at least one chocolate dessert, one fruit dessert, one hot dessert, one cold dessert..." and comparisons like, "well this pumpkin pie recipe has a niftier crust, so let's try it and cross off the other on." Eventually through successive passes we get down to our recipe list.

Next I organize the recipes by when we can make them. Many cookbooks these days (particularly ones about holidays or entertaining) tell you what you can make in advance, freeze, fridge, etc. I write down which things have to wait until Thursday, Friday, or Saturday to be made (which are most of them) and double-check that we haven't done anything silly like double-bill our oven for the afternoon. If there are things (recipes or parts of recipes) that can be made in the week ahead, I write those down.

Next I put together a conglomerate shopping list. This includes the total amount of all the ingredients we need--cups of flour and half-and-half, types of fruit and vegetables, etc. I cross off any that we already have in the house or can substitute for with things we have in the house. Finally I do two finished grocery lists--one for the weekend before, and one for Friday morning. The first one includes all non-perishable ingredients and any we'll need for things we're making through Thursday. The second one includes all highly perishable ingredients that we'll need for Friday and Saturday.

The only difficulty in all this is the turkey, because we prefer to get a fresh turkey, but it's hard to guarantee that there'll be a nice big fresh turkey left on Friday morning.


Thanksgiving
cooking