i was cooking thanksgiving dinner
and a recipe for the most underrated side to bring to the table
I timed this post so you can listen to Future Islands’ “Seasons (Waiting On You) exactly twice. You can find a link to the song at the bottom.
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This year, I’m celebrating my 10th Thanksgiving and cooking my 7th turkey. I started cooking the dinner as a means to ditch class in high school. Since then, it has morphed into a yearly stressful, glorious gathering of friends who don’t go home on this holiday.
Thanksgiving started off simple in my family. In 9th grade in my international school, I noticed that all the American kids got to take the last Thursday and Friday of November off to be with their families. I wasn’t American, and my family didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but it seemed simple enough to tell my teachers “I must go home to cook for my family.”
You know me well enough to know that of course, I actually WAS cooking dinner for my family. In 2011, my dad and I went to the grocery store to pick up the first turkey I’d ever eat, him all ecstatic since he hadn’t celebrated Thanksgiving since living in the US in the 80s, me all mesmerised at the size of the frozen animal (and a little worried that their production date was over a year old).
That first dinner was minimal: a turkey, mashed potatoes, and the one can of imported cranberry sauce my dad found at the Carrefour, the global French supermarket chain in Yerevan. I got a tip from a teacher that turkeys, this massive gamey bird no one in my family—besides my dad—had ever eaten, are meant to be brined, which sent me into a deep dive to those old websites with 90s-era coding, just plain text on a textured papyrus background. These people didn’t fuck around: I learned how to measure out salt and aromatics per gram of turkey weight, to wet brine it for an exact time period for optimal juicy-ness.
In the US, I started inviting people over once I’d moved into my Allston apartment. I’m not sure how we did it, but we pushed my teeny 1-person kitchen to its limits, successfully cranking out and reheating enough food for 12 people.
In 2020, I had the opportunity to execute the entire dinner myself: a buttermilk-marinated chicken surrounded by eight homemade sides, along with an extensive pre-dinner snack spread of antipasti, vegetables, and dips.
If this sounds excessive for 4 people, it was. The dinner was perfect. And it was hard work spread over the course of 3 days. It was the closest I’d ever flown towards the sun and miraculously, hadn’t burned out. The only way it was a bearable feat was knowing that I had a friend staying over to help with the cleanup afterward. Despite how proud I was of how everything came out, this isn’t the ideal Thanksgiving dinner I want to experience every year. I don’t want perfect. Instead, I want everyone to contribute. Helen Rosner, the amazing food writer and cool Twitter lady you should follow, put it more succinctly than I can:
The communal meal is where it’s at. The best part of having Thanksgiving dinner with friends is seeing what everyone brings to the table: cranberry cobbler, red rice, killer green bean casserole, cherished cornbread, mom’s stuffing recipe—all their favourite gems from their own family table make the night memorable. Tomorrow night, catch me enjoying wine at the at the Thanksgiving that everyone contributed to, as opposed to fussing alone in the kitchen.
This year, I’m thankful to be cooking a farm fresh turkey that was processed 5 days before our dinner. I’m thankful I get to have all my best friends around my table again, just like I did in 2019, for a dinner that had (almost) more pies than guests in attendance. I’m thankful to gather again.
I love that this yearly gathering, one that I didn’t grow up with but made space for, is now a regular tradition that hopefully we, all these good friends, can look back on when we're older, as the thing we did in our mid-twenties with the family we made in Boston.
If you are going to someone’s house this Thursday and have no clue what to bring, may I suggest a salad?
Don’t boo me. The salad is a perfect palate cleanser when you’re carbo-loading on mostly bland food. What makes this salad in particular a palate-cleanser? The dressing. This vinaigrette is special because it eschews the standard of a 2:1 oil to acid ratio. Here, we’re going for a 1:1 ratio to kick things up a notch.
In my mind, the perfect salad dressing is a slap in the face that wakes you the fuck up to notice what you’re eating. This one is so acidic, so pungent with garlic and anchovy, and so bitter from the greens that it’s the perfect reprieve from the starches of the night.
The recipe below makes enough dressing for a 5oz box of greens, or one large head of frisée if that’s your game. You’re looking for greens that can withstand a strong dressing, so bitter greens like frisée, endives, or radicchio as well as peppery arugula all work well.
If you don’t own a mortar and pestle, you can chop the garlic and anchovy on a cutting board, very finely, until the two form a paste.
The salad is deceiving in simplicity, but it earns its place on the table. Of course, if you run out of time to make the salad, a bottle of wine and maybe a hunk of cheese is always a welcome sight for the party host. Heck, even some tea to brew post-dinner is a great thing to bring to the party. If none of this is possible, any host would greatly appreciate you keeping everyone entertained and not thinking about their hunger while the turkey roasts for one more “just another 10 minutes.”
frisée salad with anchovy-garlic vinaigrette
Makes 1 cup of dressing, enough for 8 servings of salad as a side
In a mortar and pestle, throw in 4 cloves peeled garlic, 4 anchovy fillets (from a small tin of anchovy fillets in olive oil), and a dash of kosher salt. Pound the garlic and anchovy into a paste. The coarseness of the salt grains will help you. Scrape the paste into a mason jar or pint container. Add a half cup of your best olive oil. Add freshly ground black pepper and more salt to taste. Juice 2 lemons into the mason jar, being sure to discard seeds. Add a dash of turmeric for bright colour.
Tightly seal the jar with a lid, and shake, around 30 seconds, until the oil emulsifies (combines) with the lemon juice and the dressing looks golden yellow and thickened. Remove the lid and taste the dressing: it should be uncomfortably sour, and uncomfortably (but not unbearably!!) salty. If you’re unsure, dip a single leaf into the dressing and taste it. Adjust amount of lemon juice and salt from there. Toss it over washed greens in a large bowl right before dinner is served.
consuming
Petsi Pie’s bourbon pecan chocolate pie, a thing of dreams with fudgie brownie batter on the bottom and pecans on top, encased in a perfect pie shell.
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
All My Relations podcast, “ThanksTaking or ThanksGiving?”
Future Islands’s Singles and In Evening Air. If you’ve never listened to the band before, then listen to “Seasons (Waiting on You).” It’s hard to resist Samuel T Herring’s growl and slick dance moves
doing
attending a friend’s empanada dinner party and being reminded of how special it is to have a home-cooked meal made by someone else
donating to some food orgs doing big work: the Greater Boston Food Bank, Lovin’ Spoonfuls, Project Okra
this one is dedicated to A. Sorry I skipped class so much. thanks for encouraging my writing all these years and for introducing me to feminism and pumpkin pie. both have had an equally massive impact on my life.