A carnival of technology

Slate published a column Tuesday about Thanksgiving from the point of a view of a food writer. The gist is that food writers hate Thanksgiving, because Thanksgiving means a time to find in the day–this secular holiday with no patriots to honor or message beyond that of the moment, a call to give thanks for our fortunes, whatever they may be–something new and exciting, and that isn’t what Thanksgiving is about. It’s about tradition, and while the season can’t be ignored in the Dining & Wine sections across the country, no one’s really interested in finding new ideas for the meal they’ve made the same way every year. The template itself is fairly limited, a celebration of late-harvest New World delights–turkey, cranberries, pumpkins and squash, pecans, sweet potatoes–that nearly always manifests itself as a roasted bird stuffed with bread, some pies, some sauce and an assortment of sides. The Thanksgiving feast comes with expectations, individual or shared, and experimentation takes away some of the comfort we find in it.

I hosted Thanksgiving last year: my parents and sister found space to sleep in my one-bedroom apartment, and I spent most of the long weekend completely stressing myself out for no good reason. For the meal, one change I introduced was that very little of the meal was store-bought. I was buying food from a farm co-op at the time, and, when Thanksgiving rolled around, I jumped at the opportunity to get a pastured turkey and all the trimmings. I don’t think the source of the food caused any problems, but what I did with it might have. On the advice of the farmers, I decided to brine the turkey before roasting it, while the family tradition has been to simply roast an unadulterated bird using one of those oven bags to keep it from drying out without basting. I liked the brined bird; there are some things I would change with the brine itself, but overall the turkey was more moist and had some different flavors to it that I thought were interesting. The joints were a bit tougher, which made carving more of a challenge, and the skin didn’t brown and crisp like a dry turkey would have. It probably would have worked a better on a different day.

The parents are staying at Kat’s place this year, a sensible choice since she has the bigger apartment for now, but I’m still responsible for procuring the food, in part because I’m the one who eats meat. I haven’t paid much attention to the farmers’ newsletter since my job change and their closing of a north-metro dropoff point made getting the food inconvenient, so I missed the chance to get a turkey from them this year. But still, my opinion of animals is essentially: a) they’re delicious, and; b) maybe we ought to treat them kind of ok before slaughtering them and feasting upon their flesh, so in the interest of avoiding Farmer Bastard’s corn-fed curiosities, and out of my laziness with regard to driving to more than one grocery store for one list of stuff, this Thanksgiving is brought to us by Whole Foods. The turkey actually came out a couple bucks cheaper, but ay Dios they charge a lot for vegetables there. My family’s Thanksgiving meal consists of a stuffed turkey, some sweet potatoes, “green fluff” which is basically (deliciously) flavored cool whip, pumpkin and pecan pies, canned cranberry sauce and an assortment of raw vegetables like celery and carrots and such. This year I plan to make the experiments that worked last year: a pecan pie (only experimental because I was the one making it), a sweet potato casserole topped with pecans and some other stuff (veganized for Kat this time by using margarine instead of butter), and this year I’m going to add some acorn squash baked and stuffed with rice and pecans and cranberries and whatever else seems like a good idea come tomorrow morning.

I like pecans. They’re tasty and it’s about the only nut native to North America, one of the fruits of the Columbian explosion. I wish I were able to say the word without thinking about how to pronounce it every single time. My geography and ever-growing drawl suggests [?pikæn], but my family and really not-at-all Southern heritage uses [pI?k?n], PEE-can vs. pi-KAHN to put it another way. Usually I end up using the awkward compromise offered in the middle of Meriam Webster’s choices, the vowels of the first with the stresses of the second. What a weird word. Anyhow, I use lot of pecans for Thanksgiving, and last year buying a big bunch of unshelled nuts meant a lot of nut-cracking, most of which was handled by my dad, who had more of the patience and dexterity needed to extract the intact halves needed for the aesthetics of the pie. I bought unshelled pecans again this time around, mostly because those bags were from fancifully-named south Georgia farms and the shelled ones and the shelled ones from California looked like they’d been sitting on the store shelf for a good while, but I also stumbled across some fresh, shelled Georgia pecans at the last minute, so maybe that’ll make the pie a little easier.

My parents are asleep at Kat’s, and tomorrow I’m going to try to make a few dishes that combine tradition with new ideas for taste, some dishes without animal products to accompany the centerpiece of meat. Shelling pecans sure is a whole lot easier using channel lock pliers instead of a nutcraker.