For nearly no reason whatsoever, my flatmates & I threw a thanksgiving dinner on Sunday. Thirty of the people we enjoy the most came to celebrate & eat with us.
Up in the Italian District, in between cafes & pizza places, hotels & high-end restaurants, hides a poultry butcher complete with a backroom full of live chickens & geese. On Thursday, I ran up the hill & asked if they had any turkeys in. The owner pointed to his friend, telling me he only had the one in (har har). But he went out to a local turkey farm & got a beautiful twenty one & a half pound turkey for me, plucked, cleaned, & very fresh.
On Saturday, the girls & I stopped by the Hope High School farmers’ market to grab veggies & apples for pies. A little farther north on the same street is a great locally owned bakery where we picked up some dense wheat bread & a few baguettes.
Oddly enough, once we put everything together, all of the food except for the turkey & three of the desserts ended up being vegan. Only one vegan showed up, but I don’t think any one else noticed or minded. The ten pounds of mashed potatoes were mixed with two tubs of tofu sour cream & about a half cup of margarine. Anna made a sweet potato gratin by baking sweet potatoes, slicing them, & pouring vegan sour cream thinned with unsweetened soymilk over it. Then she baked it again with some nutmeg. I love sweet potatoes. This came out really well.
We sautéed collards & green beans, baked squash, threw together a salad with some red cabbage & edible flowers, & made stove top stuffing. Personally, I hated the stuffing. But what did I expect from a bag that said “Ready in 5 Minutes”. Also, it’s not something I recommend making on the scale that we did. It did make pretty good Thanksgiving sandwiches the day after, though.
Sunday morning I rubbed finely chopped onions, mild miso, & some unsalted butter under the skin of the turkey, a trick I wanted to try from last November’s Gourmet. Then I salt & peppered the skin & the inside cavity, tied up the legs, & stuck it in the oven for five & a half hours. Our oven cooks oddly, so I rotated the roasting pan after three hours when I basted the turkey. I think it looked absolutely beautiful.
For dessert, Gabriela, Maggie & Sharon brought yummy peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. The apple & pumpkin pies were easy classics that I made the day before. You really can’t have a serious turkey dinner without one or the other. And when you are feeding nearly forty people, you really should have both. We also made two of my favorite desserts. The seasonal one is called a cranberry duff, but it’s also known as Cape Cod or Nantucket Cranberry Upside-down Cake, or really any other New England name dropping title. This year’s recipe came from last November’s MS Living.
My other favorite is great anytime – Vegan Chocolate Pie. This is the easiest & richest chocolate pie I’ve ever come across. It’s also chock full of soy protein. The recipe for chocolate mousse comes from Heidi at 101Cookbooks and I put it in a pie shell for easy serving. I buy a package of Silken Soft tofu because any other brand ends up having a tofu aftertaste. This kind is sometimes unrefrigerated & comes in a carton like a juice box. I melt nearly a whole package of vegan chocolate chips, about 10 ounces, then blend them with the tofu & ¾ of a cup chocolate soy milk. The blender gives the smoothest results. I’ve never been able to get the job done with a hand mixer.
All I can say is that I adore my friends & the friends that they brought with them. Thirty-some-odd smiles & a house that smelled like the holidays made me the happiest I’ve been in a while. On top of that, we pulled together $41 for Second Harvest Food Bank. You people are amazing. Additionally, Etan & Josh did basically all of the clean-up. We are forever indebted.
(A few days before, Jessica's painting that used to be in our kitchen went up at Hillel. He's so cute!!)
