feast #2

My husband and I have been together for seven Thanksgivings. We've spent the last six of them together; the first, in 2003, he went to visit family and I stayed home and watched The Wild Bunch for the first time and ate pizza. If you're going to do Thanksgiving by yourself, that's the way to do it. Over the years, we've visited his family or mine, and had one or two Turkey Days at home, going out to somewhere like Hill's Cafe for dinner.

We had decided last year that it might be good to make a habit of going to my parents' house for the holiday, since they are so disappointed that we don't visit at Christmas, and it was a good compromise. But this year, all the women in my family were going to NYC to see my new sister-in-law perform with the Rockettes ("my brother married a Rockette" is one of the greatest conversation starters ever), and no one was planning anything fancy.

So C. and I decided that we would stay home this Thanksgiving, especially since we had a vacation planned fairly close to the holiday and didn't want to miss any more work time. I looked into the possibility of taking a short trip with a B&B, figuring that no one goes to, say, Fredericksburg for the Thanksgiving holiday, and boy was I wrong. Turns out tons of people go to San Antonio and Fredericksburg and Wimberley to shop and such. Fine.

But I didn't want to go to Threadgills or Hill's or Katz's and eat off some set menu where the dressing would be all wrong and they'd try to force pumpkin pie on me. I told C. I wanted to cook our own Thanksgiving dinner this year. We emailed a few close friends, but everyone we knew was leaving town for the holiday. So I would be cooking turkey -- a turkey breast, since we didn't need an entire huge turkey -- and dressing and whatever else was easy and appropriate for the two of us.

The turkey was the part that worried me. I have cooked a turkey breast before, and I thought I had used some easy instructions from Julia Child's The Way to Cook. But when I reread the book, I didn't find anything that easy or straightforward. I hit the web and went through dozens of suggestions and recipes before writing down what I thought would work for me. Then it turned out HEB did not have any turkey breasts two days before Thanksgiving. I ended up at Whole Foods the day before and while the store was in-sane, the guys at the butcher counter found me a half-breast, slightly less than three pounds, and assured me that it was just what I wanted. I also was able to get a very small amount of cranberry sauce there, which I wanted even though C. thinks it's nasty.

I started as soon as I got home by putting a "dry brine" on the turkey -- essentially rubbing it with salt -- and sticking it in a plastic bag in the fridge. I could handle that. Everything else, I decided to do on Thursday. It would have been so much smarter and less tiring to make the cornbread dressing in advance, but you have no idea how crazy the week was before Thanksgiving. Movies and freelance articles everywhere, deadlines galore.

On Thanksgiving Day I got to work after making us a nice breakfast with some of the extra cornbread. (Mom's recipe for cornbread dressing includes making more cornbread than you need for the dressing so you have some to eat. This is extremely smart.) I stuck my fingers under the turkey skin and rubbed herbs and butter all over, threw it in a pan with some celery and onion and a cut-up apple, then put it in the oven and hoped for the best. The cornbread dressing was easy, especially since C. helped with a lot of the chopping. I'd made it before, but I'd forgotten just how much dressing it makes. We now have dressing in the freezer for Christmas, despite eating it with turkey as leftovers and even frying some up for breakfast that weekend. I'd bought rolls, steamed green beans were easy, and I was ready to Make Gravy as soon as the turkey was done.

This is the one talent I have for holiday meals -- I can make good gravy. One of my few serious kitchen skills is the ability to make a roux and not burn it. The only difficulty was that turkey breasts just don't exude a lot of drippings, so I had to enhance them with some chicken broth. It was a lighter gravy than I normally like, but still quite tasty.

But the turkey! The turkey was practically a religious experience. C. lavished compliments on the bird and he wasn't just being nice about it. The dry brine and the herb butter and the stuff in the pan gave us the most juicy and flavorful turkey ever in the whole history of Thanksgiving dinners for both of us. Fried turkeys come close, but they have to be fried, which is a pain and also not healthful. Not that a bird with a butter rub is exactly a health food, either. The turkey breast was the perfect size to have leftovers later, too.

It is the first time I have ever cooked anything significant for Thanksgiving. If I'm visiting from out of town, no one ever wants me to cook anything, although last year we did bring an amazing chocolate pie (The Pie Shoppe in Katy) to Thanksgiving dinner at my sister's house. One of my aunts used to host many Thanksgivings, and she never let the younger generation bring anything more important than appetizers and desserts. I made cornbread dressing for a Thanksgiving potluck with friends one year, but they all preferred the stuffing made from white-bread croutons. Certainly no one ever asked me or entrusted me to cook a turkey before.

And I didn't burn the turkey, or burn the whole house down, or give all of us salmonella. I have no hilarious cooking stories. I could not be more pleased. We had a great Thanksgiving dinner, just C. and myself, and then we settled down to try to find a movie to watch from the stack of end-of-year DVDs I'd received. They were all either too annoying or too difficult to follow after a big meal, so we ended up watching a Burn Notice episode.

I think this was the best Thanksgiving Day feast I've ever had, although if I did it all over again, I'd probably try to find better rolls somewhere else.

Now, will we do it all over again for Christmas?

Posted at December 10, 2009 04:44 PM