What’s for Dinner
Well, I delayed going to the store to pick up our turkey for as long as possible, because I wanted to incorporate some of this week’s veggies into tomorrow night’s Thanksgivng feast…but the vegetables didn’t get here till after 5. Which means I went shopping, and that our fridge is now BURSTING with food.
The box, when it came, held one huge leek, a bunch of chard, a bunch of kale, a bunch of collard greens, four smallish beets (and I BOUGHT beets too, goshdarnit), some broccoli, some bok choy, two lemons, nine kiwis (kiwis?! who knew THOSE were local!) and seven fuyu persimmons.
Well. Tonight we’re ordering in because I have to start on the cooking for *tomorrow*.
Tomorrow—Thanksgiving!—we have Nanita and Marqueño in the house, plus the three of us, and that’s it: a very small crowd as Thanksgivings go. So I’ve forced myself to be rational and pare things down to the essentials. We’ll have turkey, obviously: and I’ll admit that I’m excited about this year’s so-called “heirloom” turkey, even as I think the branding is ridiculous. What are we doing to do, wrap it up in tissue paper and pass it down to future generations? In fact the turkey is only called “heirloom” to distinguish it from the “heritage” label, which applies to really old breeds of turkey. Heritage turkeys are rarer and quite probably tastier but we can’t get them locally. There’s a shop in the Ferry Plaza that’s importing them from Kansas at astronomical prices per pound, but that seems absurd, so we’re sticking with our lower-tier (and lower-price) “heirloom” turkey. It was range-grown on a local family farm and that’s the most important thing to me.
Oh, also we’ll have a roasted beet salad, a slab of herb bread, cranberry sauce, and a sweet potato pie in pecan crust (Leah Chase’s recipe) for dessert. I’ve already made the cranberry sauce and roasted the sweet potatoes; I want to get the whole pie done tonight, so that all I have to do tomorrow is roast the beets, make the bread, cook the turkey, and throw the salad together at the last minute. That seems sane. This year I’m trying Alton Brown’s method of turkey-roasting: I’ve already got the brine sitting in the fridge.
For the rest of the week? Oh, gosh, I don’t know. I’m thinking turkey noodle soup with kale for Friday. The Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market Cookbook has a good recipe for persimmon and radicchio salad with feta and pomegranate seeds, so we might have that a couple times given the number of persimmons we got. It’s a good thing Robin actually likes kiwis, because I don’t. But we all love collard greens cooked with onion and bacon. Everything else, I’ll deal with at dinner time when it’s staring me in the face.
