SC - Thanksgiving and Semi-Alternate Lifestyles (long)

[Christi Rigby]

Adamantius wrote:

- --The requisite Amurrican green bean casserole, definitely exotic
foreign food as far as I'm concerned, but not unpleasant


So.... was this topped with French Fried onions... the ones that are of some
renown in your history?

Murkial


- -----Original Message-----
From: owner-sca-cooks at Ansteorra.ORG
[mailto:owner-sca-cooks at Ansteorra.ORG]On Behalf Of Philip & Susan Troy
Sent: Sunday, November 28, 1999 12:24 PM
To: SCA COOKS
Subject: SC - Thanksgiving and Semi-Alternate Lifestyles (long)


Hullo, the list!

There! I knew that would get your attention!

Having just survived my third and final Thanksgiving dinner of this
calendar year (unless you count the planned blowout at the Grand Central
Oyster Bar after we close on the new apartment on Wednesday), I thought
I'd give a rundown.

The situation is that my wife and I had originally made a silent deal
that we'd alternate between our respective families for each
Thanksgiving and Christmas, but in recent years it's become evident that
Thanksgiving is when my [extremely numerous] relatives come to my mom's
house from wherever they are on the planet, usually for 12-24 hours, and
generally at [almost] no other time. My wife's family, on the other
hand, is small and more or less New-York-based, and we see them all
pretty frequently. As a result we've taken to spending Thanksgiving at
my mom's house, usually visiting my mother-in-law on either Friday or
Saturday, then giving my mother-in-law dibs on Christmas. No, I have no
illusions about my overall level of popularity, but most people like my
wife and son a great deal ;  ) .

Anyway, on Thursday we arrived at my mom's place with just under two
gallons of piping-hot mashed potatoes (this is what I'd been asked to
bring, and I brought the manhole-cover-sized apple pie and the
oven-caramelized acorn squash on my own initiative, my spies having
informed me that apple pie would otherwise not be forthcoming).

We encountered a whole lot of da usual schtuff, not necessarily a
problem for me:

- --The requisite turkey, with an outer crust of coarse salt, and herbs
under its skin
- --Brown gravy made for and from same
- --The requisite ham (a Maryland apple-smoked, pre-boiled version,
heretical but not bad)
- --Bacalao con verdura (salt-cod salad with green plantain, boiled yucca,
h.b. eggs, avocado, and too much red onion, the way I like it) courtesy
of my sister-in-law
- --Butter-and-salt corn cut off the ear and stewed, with, interestingly
enough, butter and salt
- --Mashed potatoes simmered with a head of garlic, run through a food
mill and whipped with immodest quantities of butter and heavy cream
- --A large pan of butter, brown sugar and pecans, reputed also to contain
mashed sweet potatoes in some quantity, presumably as a light seasoning
for the other ingredients, but I'm not sure it's true
- --The requisite Amurrican green bean casserole, definitely exotic
foreign food as far as I'm concerned, but not unpleasant
- --tiny green French lentils baked with garlic, olive oil and herbs
- --the requisite oignons a la Bechamel, a.k.a. creamed pearl onions
- --a cornbread-and-sage stuffing, cooked outside the turkey so perhaps it
is technically a dressing
- --another dressing, this one of chestnuts and sausage
- --cranberry sauce with shredded clementine zest and Grand Marnier
- --pumpkin chutney (I found a couple of jars of this from several years
ago, still in excellent shape)
- --Acorn squash roasted with olive oil, coarse salt, pepper and a bit of
garlic, until caramelized
- --Mushrooms stewed in their own juice, with roasted shallots and chopped
flat parsley and chervil
- --Mixed olives from the South of France
- --One measly apple pie the size of the state of Connecticut
- --Several pumpkin pies, only the size of Rhode Island
- --Several chocolate cream pies, similarly skimpy
- --Brandied home-grown sour cherries
- --Seven-year-old oak-aged blended sack mead, fortified in the keg with
Calvados
- --Moderately dry cherry wine, from one of Digby's recipes and from the
same sour cherry tree as the brandied cherries, a year(+) old and
slightly sherried (oxidized)
- --Various commercial wines I mostly ignored

As you can see, we were in a distinctly austere mood, and there was a
lot of clandestine talk of sending out for pizza...

Same thing, more or less, on Friday: Thanksgiving II: The Leftovers in
the traditional attempt to get to talk to all the relatives that didn't
go back home on Thursday evening, and the standard "Help Mom with
getting rid of the leftovers" drive.

Saturday, after a rousing bout of chandelier shopping (dun't esk, the
excitement was almost too much to bear), we went and played our part in
the drama that was Thanksgiving III: Revenge of The Mother-In-Law. My
mother-in-law is defintely getting lazy. Slacking off. She pursued the
usual course of Thanksgiving traditions from the south of China, and
after some illicit collusion with my son, conceived of the following
half-measure menu, which had us greatly disappointed.

- --No soup, either of frogs' legs, squab, or otherwise -- I was in shock
- -- as I say, she's slacking off
- --White-cut chicken (basically poached in highly seasoned water) with
ginger and scallion oil sauce
- --Roast young pig with hoisin sauce and five-spice rubbed into the
scored inner "meat" side of the carcass, REEEEEAAAALLLLLY crunchy skin,
obtained commercially from one of the cooked-meat shops in Chinatown
- --Steamed stuffed black mushrooms
- --Bak tsoy sum (a.k.a. baby bok choy) absolutely plain, blanched and
very quickly sauteed in peanut oil
- --an unidentified vegetable slightly resembling dandelion greens, but
with a slight chrysanthemum flavor, sauteed with a little bit of fu
ngoi, a.k.a. fu yi or fermented bean curd cheese
- --Real Lobster Cantonese, made from rather soft-shelled, roe-bearing hen
lobsters, in a sauce of fat ground pork, fermented black beans, and eggs
swirled in at the last second. For those who consider this a bland dish,
I'll point out that this turned out to be the source of the eye-watering
garlic and ginger I smelled a block away from my mother-in-law's place.
- --Plain Steamed Rice
- --Clementines
- --Pomegranites
- --Pu Ni (Pu erh) and Lok On teas, as well as seltzer for the Large
Red-haired Barbarian (i.e. me), all frowned upon at the dinner table but
tolerated in the absence of soup

And, because we all looked so undernourished after all that unhealthy
Western food, we were sent home with a shopping bag of the pig, the
chicken, an additional soy sauce chicken, and some cha siu (barbecued
pork with malt syrup and spices) as a secret surprise for da kid.

The suffering one goes through for one's family...

Adamantius
- --
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

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