Thinking Ahead to Thanksgiving

I am so looking forward to this Thanksgiving! It will be the first time in at least five years that we will celebrate the holiday in our own home. Not that I haven’t enjoyed the out-of-town trips to feast with our extended family, but I have a strong desire to establish some of our own traditions while our Littles are still little. And although it has been nice in years past to divvy up the cooking and cleaning duties among all of the folks in attendance, I’m ready this year to take on the task of creating a complete menu and cooking everything on it from top to bottom! One reason I’m delighting in and not dreading this challenge is that it provides the perfect opportunity to convert some standard dishes to real-food fare. The centerpiece, of course, will be the pastured turkey we ordered from A Bar H Farm, where we also get pastured chickens and eggs, as well as grass-fed beef and lamb, throughout the year. I will pick up the turkey on Friday, and I won’t know what size it is until then—although I requested one in the 12- to 15-pound range. And thanks to my friend Wardeh Harmon’s incredibly detailed instructions for cooking a pastured turkey and keeping it moist—click here to find those instructions on her blog, www.gnowfglins.com—I feel prepared to turn out a top-notch bird on my first try. (To clarify, it won’t be my first turkey—just my first pastured one. And from what I gather, the rules for roasting regular turkeys don’t apply.)

While some of my focus will be on the turkey, I intend to concentrate just as intently on the all-important side dishes, which will include roasted garlic mashed potatoes, gravy, two kinds of stuffing—one gluten-free and the other made with sprouted-grain bread—a twist on a traditional family fruit salad, and, of course, a dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free pumpkin pie topped (by those of us who can have it) with raw dairy whipped cream. Two of these side dishes—the sprouted-grain stuffing and the fruit salad—will be a departure from the norm for me and will require some extra prep work. For the stuffing, I’ve already baked, cubed and frozen a loaf of sprouted-wheat bread, which I will thaw and dry out a bit a day or two before Thanksgiving. And I’ve sprouted more wheat to combine with cornmeal to make cornbread that also will be an ingredient in the stuffing—along with sage, butter, chicken stock and toasted pine nuts.

Stuff for stuffing: sprouted bread.

Fruit salad fixings.

In my head, I’ve already made over the fruit salad my mom has served every Thanksgiving I’ve ever known. Her recipe combines apples, bananas, raisins, celery, walnuts, mayonnaise and maraschino cherries. I’ve decided to forgo the bananas (because they’re not representative of the season and because some of my family members exhibit a slight allergy to them) and replace them with pears. I’ll substitute soaked pecans for the walnuts (mostly because I have a lot of pecans in my freezer that have made the circuitous route from my aunt’s pecan trees in southern Arizona, to my parents’ home in northern Arizona—where my dad shelled them all—to me in central Arizona). The maraschino cherries are definitely out, and instead I’ll include coarsely chopped cranberries simmered in a bit of raw honey or agave nectar to tame their tartness. Finally, I plan to make my first attempt at homemade mayonnaise using the yolks from the pastured eggs I’ll pick up Friday along with my turkey.

As I have pondered all the possibilities in coming up with our Thanksgiving menu, it has occurred to me that I have a lot of work ahead of me to put together this one meal. But rather than feeling overwhelmed by the prospect, I am eager to discover what can actually be accomplished. And I am hopeful that some inspiration will spill over into our daily food life—that ideas and techniques will take root here and help us continue to grow in the ongoing transformation of the way we eat all the time, not just on special occasions. For that, I will be most thankful.

I have shared this post and its images in the Gallery of Thanksgiving Sides at www.gnowfglins.com. To link to the complete lineup, click here.