For every Thanksgiving in my memory, I’ve gone upstate to my hometown and spent the entirety of the holiday Thursday helping bake pies and cheesecakes, chop vegetables, set the table, and await a late afternoon pre-meal walk through the woods. In my mind’s picture of Thanksgiving, the holiday is always a relaxing one—physically and mentally far from day-to-day stresses—and only my nuclear family sits at the table, food plentiful and eaten slowly and incessantly throughout the day.

This year Jacob proposed our families meet on Thanksgiving, in Brooklyn, at our apartment. At first the idea seemed foreign—not the challenge of cooking a massive turkey or preparing enough side dishes or even the logistics of the seating arrangement or the fact that our siblings/parents would be meeting in-person for the first time over the course of a 10-hour afternoon. No, none of that was as stressful as my ache for the sentiment of routine—of leaving the city, heading to quiet, leaves-and-dew-covered yards, sleeping in my uncomfortable and perpetually creaky childhood bed, preparing and eating the large and celebratory holiday meal and then enjoying the lethargic worry-free days that would inevitably follow.

But, after some consideration and nudging and poking and gentle reminders that tradition is not lost just because it skips a year, we had Thanksgiving at our apartment, on a bizarrely warm and sunny November day here in New York, with a morning visit to The Meat Hook and a 1 p.m. jog up Franklin Avenue. My mom chopped purple carrots and parsnips and celery and onions into a fine dice even before I’d arrived home from work on Wednesday, and had come with an enormous pot of split pea soup and tupperwares full of salads and Korean food for reheating for dinner on Wednesday night so we wouldn’t have to fret about night-before-big-food-holiday-dinner. And then, my parents woke at 5 a.m. to assure the tenderness of the 22 lb. turkey cooking overnight at 270 degrees so that at breakfast-time the smell of perfectly browned bird was already divine. So, by the time my brothers arrived with homemade potato skins and pecan pie and bottles of wine and loaves of bread and Jacob’s family arrived with salad and cheese plates and more wine and candles and flowers…all of which added to the dishes upon dishes of vegetables and desserts we’d prepared ourselves, it simply wasn’t possible that it could be anything less than memorable because everyone was there to help us make it so.

In the end, this was our menu, many times fretted over, deliberated upon and revised by myself, but ultimately better by the contributions of all:

Starters:
Little bro’s homemade potato skins
Steamed artichokes in lemon and olive oil
Cheeseplate with figs, black pepper crackers, various fruits
Korean seafood + kimchi pancakes

Big Dinner:
Roasted sweet potatoes, purple carrots and parsnips with maple syrup + bacon
Roasted brussels sprouts with parmesan
Krupnick family caesar salad
Fresh-from-the-oven gougeres (cheese puffs)
Grandaisy semolina bread
Roasted cauliflower with chili flakes + toasted hazelnuts
Slow-roasted turkey
Mushroom, leek and parsnip stuffing
Jacob’s cranberry sauce
Wild mushroom gravy
Mashed potatoes
Grilled asparagus wrapped in prosciutto

And last but not least:
Krupnick family cheesecake
Spiced pumpkin pie with roasted hazelnut tart crust
Pecan pie
Homemade, hand-churned chai ice cream

You’re all invited over for leftovers + Hope you all had happy and memorable Thanksgivings as well.

Published Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am. Filed under Family, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.