Manolo’s Food Blog

Inevitable as taxes or that other thing, turkey day is coming. Family may be coming. Guests should be coming. The table will be heaping.

If you opt for a restaurant, however, shunning your traditional responsibilities as cook, will you still be able to savor that quintessential American feeling? In this defining moment, will you stand down? Can you so easily shirk the burden of history?

Will you nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth?

Take heart. Small variations of the Thanksgiving dinner are permitted. Be forewarned, however, your recipes will be compared to those of august and venerated forebears, relatives and antecedents hovering in calendric conjunction.

Don’t screw up.

At the Henry household, labor is divided. Mrs. Henry bakes the pie. Mr. Henry roasts the bird. Unable to reach agreement on stuffing, they each make their own.

Mindful of all that has gone wrong, and of all that can go wrong and be blamed squarely on him, Mr. Henry threw money at the problem. He ordered a Heritage Foods turkey online for the princely sum of $129. (This better be one tasty turkey, brother, because already the vacation is in jeopardy.) It promises to arrive by FedEx on Tuesday before Thanksgiving, which leaves not quite enough time for the dry salt to fully absorb. All the same, Mr. Henry will rub salt and give thanks.

Special thanks will be offered this year to the good Glinda who divined Mr. Henry’s turkey uncertainty and sent him this attractive recipe from the L.A. Times. By the way, the hot oven option works best.

Dry salt rub is, indeed, an efficacious method for roasting. For years Mr. Henry has been flinging salt on meat like a sumo wrestler entering the ring.

Cranberry sauce is de riguer. This recipe is foolproof.

Mrs. Henry will surely make the classic pumpkin chiffon pie. (The trick is to pre-bake the crust – what potters call “bisque.”)

Stuffing is the cook’s signature dish. Mrs. Henry will make a simple bread and sage stuffing for the masses. Mr. Henry will make Nadia’s aromatic 1001 Nights saffron and chestnut forcemeat. The wine will be a Burgundy, a light one, perhaps a Côtes de Ventoux, who can say?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 12:11 pm by Mr. Henry and is filed under American Food, Holidays, Wine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.