Turkey Day

T Day… Rebooted…

Its Thanksgiving, a national holiday (so designated by ) frequently known as “T-Day” for both Thanksgiving, and Turkey, the traditional dish served at our holiday feast… 

Thanksgiving is a day rooted in tradition… National traditions, Family traditions, personal traditions… traditions concerning food… about watching football on TV… gatherings…

This year, our Thanksgiving is a bit unconventional… in place of turkey, we have a pork roast, butterflied, then rolled with a stuffing made of onions, celery, carrots, and mushrooms…  at least it’s a stuffed roast… 

The sides are more conventional… roasted butternut squash (a close approximation for sweet potatoes, with no mini marshmallows in sight), oven roasted brussel sprouts… we live in brussel spout country… we like them… Tina’s dad liked them… they are our green of choice, at least today… Red cabbage… cooked Danish style, per a family recipe from Tina’s family… There is bread dressing… dressing (aka bread stuffing cooked outside the bird) made of San Francisco sour-dough bread, celery, onions, oysters, with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme… (apologies to Simon & Garfunkel),commonly known as stuffing, but in this case not stuffed in a bird, or a leg of lamb… (as Alton Brown says, “stuffing is evil”… It dries the meat… it makes for a bad turkey, if we were having turkey… which we are not…)

The now American Holiday has origins in an early colonial American harvest festival… (the harvest in New England occurs well before the late-November date of the holiday, but details are unimportant and sometimes unwelcome) dating to the Mayflower, and “Pilgrims” religious zealots fleeing England for the freedom of the new land, Plymouth Massachusetts arriving in 1620, where most, unprepared for the new land, and unfamiliar with how to grow corn, squash and such, with limited hunting skills, mostly starved at first… Half died the first year.  A good harvest in 1621 (or so) resulted in a “Thanksgiving” and the rest is history…

For us, some 392 years later… We held our personal Thanksgiving… There was shrimp cocktail over cream cheese earlier… a kind of late lunch… served with champagne… between then and dinner there was wine (white) and beer… with dinner there was more wine, now red… Then the birdless meal…

About 9:00 (in the PM) we piled into the car to drive over to the local Target… to see if anyone would show up at their Turkey Day early Black Friday… to our horror, the line extended around the store, to the side of the store, behind the store… the parking lot was gridlocked…

Why?

We retreated home… we were in need of nothing that couldn’t wait until another, less sacred day…