Mes Petits Choux, Punkin’s, and Dears,
I decided to take advantage of New York’s abundant bounty, and cheffed a Faux Thanksgiving meal just prior to my departure from the lovely city. Though intermittently sedated and totally high on codeine, I managed to remain dictatorial in the food department: Daddy-o and I went shopping for ingredients, and he actually cringed at my fascist fervor and veritable verve! The trouble is, I’m always right. Toujours, really I swear it. But he is my mentor, so it’s odd. The moment has been coming on for a while, and the definitive dawning of the age when I’ve surpassed my teacher in culinary knowledge is here. But I am most fortunate that he is as excited to be outdone as I am to be outdoing. It’s rather grand, actually!
I adore Thanksgiving. It is, après tout, a nationally sanctioned feast! But my history with the holiday is a bit peculiar. My derivation, culturally and genetically speaking, is totally un-American. I’d attended a few Turkey- and- Gravy affairs in my youth, but the first real Thanksgiving I had was the one I orchestrated and cooked last year at the ripe old age of 18. As such, I get to approach the holiday with sufficient cultural detachment that I’m able to use seasonal and historical ingredients in a way that is traditional, but that doesn’t suffer at the expense of adherence to childhood memories of Aunt Gretchen’s parchment-dry turkey. As a culinary celebration that is unabashedly cherished more as an excuse to cook and gorge than to uphold any moralistic ideals, Thanksgiving holds unique appeal to me, and I attack it with particular zeal and respect.
The preparation of the actual meal was unusually misshapen (I may lead a life of chaos and frantic neuroses, but in the kitchen I am a Zen Master. Oh yes, one would think I pour thousands of dollars into Yoga and Feng Shui, and other such meditative activities!), but the result I turned out was, happily, and to my great surprise, wonderful. Every dish I made I had newly conceived of, without any prior experience or experimentation, which is in violation of the cardinal hosting rule: never cook things you haven’t made before when having people over, as this exponentially multiplies your chance of crashing and burning (which LITERALLY happened to me. More on that later…) Cordon Bleu words of wisdom! Also, I was cooking with a magnificent Viking Stove. If you know anything about cooking, you know that a Viking is the kitchen equivalent of a Rolls or a Bentley. Naturally, j’etais surexcitée! But I was disoriented and stoned, and my interaction with the stove would leave me praising the flame-retardant qualities of the marble floor!
I made some rather spectacular Buttermilk Blue Cornbread Muffins! I’ve been dieing to make cornbread for ages now, but it has always lost out to a Jeweled Wild Rice Pilaf as my holiday starch of choice. The time had come, though, I decided, and girded my loins for maize muffins! And just in time to serve a guest with Celiac’s Disease! Ugh, I couldn’t have had worse timing; If only I’d kept on the gluten-free rice (which isn’t actually a rice but the seeds of a marsh grass) until after the diseased had departed. But alas, the muffins were scrumptious, so I shall dry my tears now.
These I followed with Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Maple Syrup Brown Butter, Bacon, and Sage. I love sweet potatoes. Love, love them. Earthy and sweet, evocative of the holidays and provocative of the sort of deep-down comfort that settles low in your belly and warms your mind and body from the inside out. Although only intended to be a peripheral attraction, this dish stole the show. So much so that I had to post the recipe with haste to satisfy multiple requests from my dinner guests for la recette so they could recreate it on le vrai turkey day. That is food at its best!
Then came the Pheasant Roasted with Figs and Chestnuts in an Armagnac Pan Jus!!! Strangely, my interest in pheasant was first piqued in the fourth grade, when I read Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World, a delightful novel set in the English countryside during pheasant hunting season. I do think it’s strange my juvenile and book worm-ish love for a story led me to want to eat it’s characters, but hey, that is me. On a toujours su que je n’etait pas normale! A word to the wise: if you’re going to cook this, have your butcher remove their taloned feet. Touching the leathery skin is very weird, and I had to endure flexing and relaxing spears of nail as I agitated the tendons and ligaments while attempting clumsily to sever them. This dish is also where roaring flames made their appearance. Zen…
Au depart, I forgot to brown the pheasants in a pan before putting them into the oven. I’d never prepared pheasant before, but I was aware that they are notoriously dry and gamy. Mine somehow managed to come out sumptuously succulent, and not at all gamy (I had the particular fortune of having an experienced pheasant hunter at the table who vouched that mine were the only moist birds of this variety she’d ever tried), but they weren’t ideally browned. I have no idea whether to consider my forgetting to pre-brown them an accident that should be corrected in the future, or if avoiding this step is what permitted the birds to stay juicy. Someone else try and let me know!
I still hadn’t quite landed from my Vicodin voyage (of the outer-space sort), so when I tried to remove the finished birds from the oven, I dropped them! The naked and pasty birdies when bouncing around on the floor, the figs and chestnuts fell into a weird fissure in the stove, and the Armagnac caught fire in a major way. Oh, and I also lost all the pan juices. Quelle misere! Chere papa collected the figs and chestnuts while a guest blew out (no, really) the fire, and I fetched up the poultry. Five second rule!!!
This I followed with my signature Tarte aux Poires, which began as my first exploit into baking and has now become my crowning Jewel! Don’t worry all you crust-o-phobes out there! It’s accessible, je vous jure!
Grease your pans people! Make some food and holiday cheer, and let me know if any of my recipes need to be amended to include your wily interpretations!
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