the thanksgiving recap
Behind the scenes of a relatively low effort, and very tasty, Thanksgiving dinner.
I’m back home after spending the past week in Florida at my parent’s place for Thanksgiving. (Which is why today’s post is a few days delayed, apologies). Stepping off the plane late Monday night and getting hit with the chilly air made me question if I can endure this weather for another three months.
I’m usually not the type of person who’s anti-winter. I can find the joy in the season — enjoying soup-based dishes like ramen and pho, layering my clothes, bundling up inside to watch movies. Maybe it’s because I skipped the city’s adjustment period from fall to winter in favor of drinking Aperol spritzes at the beach and playing tennis and pickleball like a true retiree in heaven’s waiting room.
But now that I’m hunkering down in the city and slowly acclimating to my daily routine, I thought I’d give a recap of what I made and ate for Thanksgiving dinner. Ed came down to Florida with me and we tackled the menu together. We were cooking for a small crowd, just five people total, making things relatively easy. I didn’t want to go too hard so we could really enjoy our vacation. We decided to roast a chicken instead of a turkey, and serve it with a few, simples sides:
stuffed saffron chicken
Ed’s been trying to figure out the best way to make a simple, juicy roast chicken. He’s gone iterations of trying to find the “perfect” recipe, spending days brining, poaching, roasting. Meanwhile, I maintain that a buttermilk brine is the superior way to go. He finally put my theory to the test for Thanksgiving and made a stuffed chicken in a buttermilk saffron brine. It was pretty straightforward. He combined buttermilk with saffron tea and salt, then brined the chicken in the fridge for a day.
Ed continued the nod to Middle Eastern flavors by adding dried red currants to the chicken’s stuffing. He cut up a loaf of bread into small pieces, toasted them in the oven until they were basically croutons, then mixed them with toasted pine nuts, herbs, cream, and eggs to bind it all together. He stuffed it in the chicken, sewed it up, and roasted it in the oven at 375 degrees for about 30 minutes. There was a bunch of stuffing leftover, so I put it in a buttered casserole dish and threw it in the oven next to the chicken.
a quick jus
For the gravy, Ed made a quick jus inspired by a technique from Thomas Keller. We bought a second chicken and deboned it to use the bones for the sauce. He started by browning the bones in a pan — it created this golden crust at the bottom which he then deglazed with water. After letting the water reduce down he repeated this step two more times to create a rich broth. Ed strained the mixture, sautéed aromatics like onion, celery, and carrots, made a roux, added the stock back into the pan along with some saffron tea and a squeeze of lemon. The resulting gravy was rich and complex — a delicious sauce to pair with the chicken.
green goddess salad
I wanted something bright and crunchy to put on the table and opted for a classic romaine salad with green goddess dressing. I used a standard green goddess recipe with mayo, lemon, parsley, cilantro, tarragon, anchovies, and a splash of Champagne vinegar. Initially, I dumped all the ingredients in a food processor, but the greens wouldn’t break down. Ed said I should’ve blitzed the herbs first, before adding the rest of the ingredients in to get a finer puree. To recover the dressing, I moved all the ingredients into a Ninja smoothie blender. The rapid moment of the blender immediately emulsified the dressing, turning it into one homogenous, bright green mixture.
I wanted to use those cute, small heads of romaine that you find at the farmer’s market, but Florida doesn’t have the best selection of produce. To recreate a similar vibe, I bought a standard bag of romaine hearts from the grocery store and removed the outer, larger leaves (saving them in the fridge for later) and used the inner, more tender leaves for the salad.
To bring it all together, I tossed the romaine hearts with thin slices of honeycrisp apples and the green goddess dressing. The salad was refreshing and crisp, a nice side to break up the heavier main dishes of our Thanksgiving dinner.
the accoutrements
To ease the burden of work, I delegated the mashed potatoes to my brother, freeing up time for me to make two sides and the dessert. The first of which was Claire Saffitz’s chive and sour cream dinner rolls. I made a few missteps, like forgetting to add the eggs until after the flour was incorporated and slightly over-proofing the dough because I was out playing tennis. It was hard for me to concentrate on cooking in the kitchen with my family constantly popping in, but even with all my errors, the rolls looked picture-perfect out of the oven and were nice and fluffy inside.
I relied on an oldie but goodie, Sohla El-Waylly’s carrots from her cookbook Start Here. These were a crowd-favorite at last year’s Thanksgiving, but I completely forgot to snap a picture of the recipe before I left the city and relied on my memory to recreate the dish. It didn’t work. I burnt the carrots and subbed out Greek yogurt for labne, resulting in a texture that was a mix of soggy, chalky, and watery. The worst of the worst. Sohla is a genius, and this recipe is a winner if I had just followed it as is; she creates a salsa verde with the carrot tops that brings a nice acidity to the dish.
As for dessert, it wasn’t worth the effort to go all out and make three different pies for five people. Sohla came in handy again with her pumpkin pecan sheet cake from NYT Cooking. It was the perfect mashup of all those classic Thanksgiving autumnal flavors in one. Plus, it was recently my mom’s birthday, so it was nice for her to have an actual cake instead of a pie with some candles thrown on top. The cake was SO good and very easy to make — I’m definitely putting this in my rolodex of favorite dishes, which at this point, is pretty much filled with Sohla’s recipes.
the leftovers
I made a salad with the leftover chicken, greens, stuffing, and the green goddess dressing, before packing it up to enjoy at the beach. It was refreshing, crunchy, and bright — exactly the type of food I was craving the day after Thanksgiving.
Later, my cousin Liz texted me to say that she used her leftovers to make a turkey tahchin. I’ll definitely copy her for next year’s leftovers. I’m curious what others made for Thanksgiving. Do you go the traditional route with turkey, stuffing, all the classics? Switch it up? How do you use the leftovers? Let me know below :)
coming up next week . . . i’m venturing to red hook for a chili competition.
— Rayna