For the 7th year (we think), Joel, Avinash, and I hosted the
Annual Straggler's Thanksgiving with the help of Gabriel Brostow. The premise
behind the Straggler's Thanksgiving is to ensure that everyone we knew had some
place to be for Thanksgiving. Years ago we discovered that there are a bunch of
us who don't go home for Thanksgiving weekend because of logistics, distance, or
lack of the tradition in our upbringing. Now ironically (or not), Joel's parents
are from Germany and Austria, Avinash's are from India, Gabe's are from Poland,
and mine are from China. I don't think any of us grew up with a strong
Thanksgiving tradition. But in the grand tradition of American immigrants and
their children, we adopted and established our own traditions. Our social group
tends to have a number of potlucks and get-togethers through the year.
Thanksgiving is the one day where the three of us have supplied the majority of
the food - specifically the turkey and the traditional trimmings. There's
usually something wacky that happens each year and we usually don't leave until
late in the morning after many rounds of The Great Dalmuti.
First we had a round of solicitations to see who could make it. After
discovering that we could have up to 24 people, we had to do some planning.
First of all, we moved it to a larger place - and for the first time we would be
at someone else's apartment (Thanks, Gabe!). Secondly, we had to buy enough
turkey and settled on 2 13-lb turkeys as opposed to the Food Network
calculator's suggestion of buying a 24-lb turkey. Then the Sunday before, Joel
and I made a trip to the Dekalb Farmer's Market to buy the turkeys and the rest
of the groceries. The weird purchase ended up being the stalk of Brussels
sprouts. Now, I needed Brussels sprouts for a particular dish but not being
normal (as Joel was nice enough to remind me for the rest of the week) I bought
the stalk instead of paying a per pound fee. At about 2.5 feet in length, it
made a nice conversation starter if not an attractive centerpiece after being
stripped of the sprouts. Also, it turns out that the plant is not called a
Brussel, at least according to my dictionary, which I find rather strange. The
turkeys were stored in Joel's fridge to defrost.
Each year we rotate the turkey responsibilities. Last year, Joel cooked a
Southern fried turkey just to see what the fuss was about and cooked a second
turkey as backup. This year was my year. We briefly discussed buying a "turducken"
- invented by some Georgian and basically a boneless turkey stuffed with a
boneless duck stuffed with a boneless chicken - but decided that it was too
silly of a food item. Cooking started the night before when Gabe and I started
brining the defrosted turkeys. We also ferried over a lot of cooking gear and
dishes from my apartment along with a wide assortment of games. Brining involves
boiling then chilling a mixture of vegetable broth, salt, sugar, allspice,
ginger, and other stuff. Then the turkeys, this mixture, and as much ice as we
could manage went into a cooler borrowed from Zack and Candi to sit for
approximately 10 hours. According to Alton Brown, the Good Eats guy on the Food
Network, brining seasons the meat and helps to make it more resistant to drying
out while cooking. I was more concerned with not giving 24 people salmonella. We
discussed whether we had enough ice and thought briefly about leaving it outside
where the ambient temperature had dropped to about 31 degrees. My argument
against this was the "Wild Dogs" argument - if we left it outside,
wild dogs would make off with both turkeys and I'd never hear the end of it. If
we'd been thinking a little more clearly, we could have moved it to the trunk of
a car. Last time I checked, wild dogs still hadn't figured out how to break into
a car trunk. Anyhow, Gabe promised to check the next morning and get ice if
necessary. It turned out that we had enough ice in the cooler and the wild dogs
discussion was completely unnecessary. That night I baked the sweet potatoes,
boiled the chestnuts, and then spent a long time learning how to peel chestnuts.
The eventual dish failed terribly on the presentation metric.
Thanksgiving day arrived and I had a leisurely breakfast - up to the point I
realized that I had a hell of a lot of work to do - including picking up Avinash
from his house since he'd flown in the night before. I also brought my radio and
my "Iron Chef" soundtrack that has become it's own kind of wacky
tradition at the potlucks hosted at my apartment.
Iron Chef, in case you don't know about this, was a Japanese cooking show which
might have gone off the air in Japan by now. It replays on the Food network from
time to time. The premise of the show is some guest chef challenges one of
Chairman Kaga's Iron Chefs - a super specialist in a style of cuisine. They then
have 1 hour to prepare a 4 star meal based around a theme ingredient. The
ingredients have been as mundane as potatoes or Shanghai cabbage and as exotic
as king crab (live) and shark's fins. The charm or central attraction of the
show is partly the cooking but mostly the very funny English dubbing that puts a
rather off-kilter spin on the show. In the last 15 minutes is the tasting by the
celebrity judges and then the final scoring. It's all very dramatic and you get
the impression you're watching two samurai dueling each other with sauces and
spatulas from the dialogue. When I was watching it regularly out of curiosity we
did silly things like call ourselves Bronze Chefs (2 hour time limit to prepare
a 1 star meal not based on any ingredient at all). Since Thanksgiving was not
going to be at my apartment, I dug out the Backdraft soundtrack and some other
music to mix a CD based on the show and that would be appropriate for
accompanying frenzied cooking.
The day's first exciting snafu came when Joel, the other major cook, was called
to work by a math error committed by the incompetent boobs of another part of
his company and called to let us know that he wasn't sure if he could make it in
time. We made a frantic trip to his apartment to get his cooking supplies.
Fortunately, Avinash was there to take over Joel's dishes. We prepared two
turkeys - one Cajun style stuffed with green peppers, celery, and onions and
coated with oil mixed with Cajun spices and the other in the more traditional
New England style - rosemary, sage, onions, apples, and a cinnamon stick and
coated with oil mixed with nutmeg.
I know that at this point I can hear various readers grumbling something that
evokes the "stuffing vs. dressing" debate. I adopted the
"aromatic" approach which is to stuff the turkey with aromatic herbs
and vegetables. Stuffing causes the turkey take longer to cook and has the
increased risk of poisoning the guests. Maybe some other year, I'll do both but
in the meantime, I'm quite happy with this approach. One strong argument that I
would make for not stuffing the turkeys is that the aromatics really did add
some distinct flavors to their respective turkeys. I suspect that the high
starch content of stuffing benefits in flavor from roasting in the turkey but
doesn't contribute in the same way to the turkey itself. Having said that I now
expect to hear several emails from the stuffing fanatics.
By the time Joel was able to show up, we were well underway. The four of us made
macaroni and cheese (note: next year we need to use more cheese - preferably the
recipe that called for using 2 pounds of cheddar), mashed potatoes, blanched
Brussels sprouts with chestnuts, apple and sausage cornbread dressing, cornbread
for eating, green beans with bacon, cranberry sauce, brandy flavored sweet
potatoes in orange cups, turkey gravy, 2 blueberry pies, and 2 pecan pies. Gabe
cooked us lunch about halfway through, a very nice spicy shrimp and pasta dish,
because we were hungry but also to help us "break the buffet". Finally
after some minor injuries from touching the sides of a hot oven and some dicey
knifework, the cooking was finished. In addition to all that, other people
brought food - Heather brought a family recipe dressing, spaghetti squash and
tomato casserole, and apple bread. Katrina brought pumpkin bread with cream
cheese frosting. James and Dana brought some wines and a pecan pie. Jay brought
cranberry jelly. Gabe also supplied ice cream to go with the pie. Then Alex
brought his specialties from his Cuban background - fried plantains, fried
yucca, and yucca in mojo sauce - all of which took him an amazing amount of
scavenging from local grocery stores, a lot of time and were amazingly good.
Later, Vernard showed up after the first round of eating with chitlins made by
his mother. It's a Southern thing and an acquired taste but still fun to eat if
you're not squeamish. All in all, it was an amazing amount of food. The day's
2nd amazing snafu gave Alex an opportunity to laugh his head off. Last year or
the year before, there was an issue with forgetting the giblets and the paper
bag that contained them. This year, Gabe watched as I did a full cavity search
on the turkey and came up with nothing. As I began carving the turkey, Alex
asked if I removed the bag with the giblets. Naturally, at that very moment, my
knife hit something un-turkey-like and I realized that the bags are stored in
the top cavity which turkeys have but ducks don't. I grew up eating ducks as the
holiday bird and when you only cook a turkey once every 3 years, it's hard to
remember these little details. At least they use paper bags.
The evening went more or less like this (interspersed with conversation, game
playing, and wine/root beer drinking).
Last minute cooking and panicking
Setup of tables
First round of eating,
First round of washing dishes
First round of dessert
Second round of washing dishes
Relaxing
Second round of eating
Third round of washing dishes
Second round of dessert
Hot chocolate
Third round of eating
The Great Dalmuti
Fourth round of washing dishes
Ejection of lingering guests
Distribution of remaining leftovers
Clean-up and staggering home
During the second round of dessert, Sean and I also made hot
chocolate with as much chocolate, milk, cream, and half-and-half as we had. We
used good Lindt bittersweet chocolate and used a French recipe. Good stuff.
Games have become a staple at our usual get-togethers ever since Joel and I
started Atlanta Board and Card gamers and were fortunate enough to meet Frank
Branham, our local games guru and uber-collector. In addition to a variety of
newer German games (Blokus and Villa Paletti) and Liar's Dice, we played some
party games. The surprising part of the evening was the 7 students from mainland
China connected to Gabe's lab who enjoyed themselves thoroughly. We weren't sure
how they would like the food or take to the games (one was Apples to Apples
which requires some English as well as some grounding in various Americanisms)
but they had a very good time with it. After a game that appeared to be a some
variant of Mafia where Vernard led the murderers to victory using one of the
most astonishing examples of reverse psychology that I've seen in a while.
"Vernard must be a murderer." Vernard replied, "Yes, I am the
murderer, you should vote me out." They didn't. The next game was Werewolf
- cards are dealt to everyone and two people end up being Werewolves. There's a
moderator who has everyone close their eyes. The werewolves select a victim to
murder. Then daybreak happens and the villagers now pick someone to lynch,
hoping they are eliminating a werewolf. When my friends and I play it, we're
very random, often selecting people to eliminate on whim or for comedic value.
The Chinese students played it with deadly earnest and had spirited debates to
determine guilt or innocence based on behavior. I heard that they group took
about 45 minutes to vote on who should die for one round. While interesting from
a sociological perspective, there seemed to be something to the application of
logic to mob rule. The funniest incident I saw involved one of the students who
fought to get a particular person lynched. When that effort failed and some
other poor soul was voted off the island instead, he made the equivalent of a
dying declaration, "If I die tonight, then this person and that one are the
werewolves." Sure enough, he ended up as werewolf kibble that night and it
turned out that the werewolves really were those two people. It was very
entertaining as a spectator sport.
The party finally broke up at about 3 am after a Revolution caused the Peons and
the Dalmutis to change places (darn that Vernard!). Some of our guests had such
a good time that we finally forcibly kicked them out of the apartment so we
could survey the damage and clean up. Those of us who cooked stayed. I
finally got home at 4:30 am and got all the leftovers put away. The next day I
spent the afternoon cleaning up after myself alternating between napping after
eating turkey leftovers (stupid tryptophan!). Saturday I did some more cleaning
and organization and made turkey stock with the leftover carcasses and bones.
The only lingering bit of Thanksgiving business still remaining is a missing
bowl with the Brussels sprouts and chestnuts. As near as we can tell, it's been
Twilight-Zoned. All of us remember seeing it at the end of the night but no one
knows where it went. Argh! It's one of those large noodle bowls in a Chinese
motif that I use often. Fortunately it's only $7 but I hate losing things and I
was looking forward to finishing up that dish. It turns out that fresh Brussels
sprouts cooked correctly taste pretty darn good. Anyhow, if you happen to see a
bowl full of Brussels sprouts and chestnuts scurrying along the highway or
hiding in a cupboard, let me know.
I hope you had good Thanksgivings yourselves.
* As a footnote to the wandering bowl, it turns out that it never wandered off but was kidnapped by one of our guests who was taking home leftovers. If I had described it properly as a white bowl with a red Chinese mosaic motif around the exterior, they would have known to return it to me sooner. Go figure.
