Some salads are supporting actors; this salad is a star. It’s worth your attention and stomach space on a table full of other foods— yes, even (and especially) like Thanksgiving. I like to keep the farro, olive, and cheese treasures at the bottom of the serving bowl, with the leaves layered on the top for a fun surprise every time someone scoops.
This recipe is flexible, so don’t get flustered if you don’t have both endives and radicchio or Castelfranco. Just one type of leaf is fine! Don’t have Parm? Swap in feta or even blue cheese. If you want to skip the nuts, go for it, but I’d strongly advise you keep the olives in. And, you could even add in a sweet element, like a dried cranberry, golden raisin, or sliced pear, if that’s your kind of thing.
We’ve put this recipe here because, unlike the pot pies in the first chapter, this is a traditional pot pie with a bottom crust and a top crust, making it a double-crusted pie. This pot pie uses the carcass of the holiday bird to make a rich turkey stock. Making stock is a very flexible process, so use common sense rather than precise measurements. Of course it’s fine to use store-bought turkey stock, but homemade is so much better and takes less than 10 minutes of active time. It’s well worth the small effort, since the turkey is abundance itself and shouldn’t be wasted.
Scientist and inventor Dr. George Washington Carver, the child of a Mississippi slave, believed peanuts, sweet potatoes, and science could free Southern farmers from poverty. Cotton had exhausted the soil of the Deep South, and at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) in southeastern Alabama in the early twentieth century, he showed farmers the benefits of planting sweet potatoes. They were well suited to Alabama, and he worked to grow demand by developing 118 products made from them, including flour, vinegar, molasses, ink, rubber, and even postage stamp glue.
And, of course, he cooked with them, slicing them into this tantalizing pie where, with spices, molasses, and cream, they cook down inside the flaky pastry. When you fork into a bite, it’s a bit like pie and a bit like your favorite sweet potato casserole. This recipe is adapted from The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro (1958).
This fragrant brine is rooted in Vivian’s home woods of North Carolina. Pine needles and rosemary are steeped with spices that conjure up those deep woods. And, some would say, evoke the smell of a Thanksgiving-scented candle!
Its November and I’m gearing up for my holiday turkey. I love a brined turkey and cooking with beer, so I combined these elements to create a juicy beer-brined turkey with a Dankful IPA gravy. Dankful IPA has piney hop aromas, so I paired that with juniper berries in the brine to accentuate those flavors.
If you need a stunner for Thanksgiving dinner, here’s your recipe, which is modeled on the traditions of coastal Veracruz. It results in a moist, juicy bird, with an irresistible adobo marinade and a to-die-for stuffing. The turkey is marinated for a day (or two) in a pineapple and orange adobo sauce. The adobo is poured over the turkey before it goes into the oven, so it caramelizes as it thickens and seasons the bird even more. The sweet and tart flavors in the adobo harmonize with those in the stuffing, which is made with a soft bread and a colorful mix of ingredients that include cashews, tomatoes, and chorizo.
I’m the type of person who adds extra cheese to pizza, so this cornbread is a tribute to my love for cheese. It’s a riot of flavor, with sharp cheddar; sweet, tiny nuggets of corn that burst in your mouth; and a little fire from the red chilli flakes.
When you cook a turkey on the pit the way we do, you don’t end up with a pretty, gold bird like the ones you see on the covers of the Thanksgiving issues of all the food magazines, But I don’t think most of those pretty birds taste as good as the one that’s been smoked on the pit or grill and seasoned the way we do. Spatchcocking the turkey allows us to cook it more evenly and get seasoning throughout the bird. You be the judge.
This flan, which is perfect for Thanksgiving, is almost like a crustless pie, but it’s much silkier than traditional pumpkin pie filling. My favorite part of the dessert is that it can be completely made ahead of time and refrigerated. In fact, the flavors meld together over a day or two and become even more complex. And at the holidays, its light texture is a welcome reprieve from all the richness that precedes it.
Like cilantro and circus clowns, pumpkin pie can be quite polarizing. Some take a hard pass, whereas others can’t imagine cold-weather holidays without it. My earliest pumpkin pie memories involve trying not to stick my fingers in a store-bought Mrs. Smith’s pie on Thanksgiving Day, baked from frozen that morning and cooling on the washing machine in the tiny laundry room off the kitchen at Gramma’s house, while the rest of the Thanksgiving meal was prepared. By the time dinner was finished and the desserts rolled out, I was more interested in stealing spoonfuls from the Cool Whip tub next to the pie than I was in the pie itself. I became a late-in-life pumpkin pie convert, especially the homemade kind (no offense to Mrs. Smith), and have grown to love the simplicity and warming spices in an amber slice at the end of a celebratory meal.