Nothing can top Christmas as an overall season; between the music, lots of red, and easy availability of peppermint ice cream (still unclear why this is a seasonal flavor), it’s two solid months of joy. However, there is no meal I look forward to more than Thanksgiving. I love every single thing about it.
All it takes is for the November issue of Bon Appétit to arrive and I get to escape to its pages while I contemplate a whole new menu. Is this the year to bring back squash? If so, how? I then go to all my favorite recipe sites and revisit squash recipes I dismissed in past years. That act of searching for a better option, knowing I’ll likely never use one, is the primary way that Thanksgiving goes from a meal to a season. As a result, the real phases of Thanksgiving are Dreaming → Planning → Prepping → Actual Meal → Cleaning → Leftovers. For all of that, the meal ends up being the shortest part.
Thanksgiving has been so lovingly tweaked over the years and is still so steeped in tradition for me that there are certain non-negotiables, and that usually means the only room to try new things is with one veggie side and the salad.
Except this year, my favorite recipe developer and Bon Appétit alum, Molly Baz, announced her theme for her meal was a very French Thanksgiving. First, I chuckled a bit, remembering one of my worst Thanksgiving meals while studying abroad in Paris, where some attempt at turkey and stuffing was prepared for all the American kids. When I was there, there was an American grocery store called, coincidentally, Thanksgiving, and it was the only place you could readily find peanut butter in Paris in 2003.
I have a smaller table than usual this year, and Molly Baz wants me to be inspired by her “French As Fuck” Stuffing — and while I debated swapping sausage and apricots for lardons and prunes, all I could hear was DMX’s “Lord Give Me a Sign” and realized that just when I asked for the Lord to “show me what I got to do, to bring me closer to [preferred God pronoun goes here],” I had in fact been shown.
So this year, I am making a new stuffing.
Hopefully, the fact that I have made that sentence its own bolded paragraph is making it clear just how big of a deal this is for me. I couldn’t commit to it fully at first, but after sleeping on it, I said: this year’s the year. I have loved my mom’s sausage and apricot stuffing from the first time she ever made it. Something about what could have just been boring bread cubes suddenly including little sweet bits of fruity and salty meaty crumbles was the biggest treat on the table. This was not her mother’s stuffing recipe, so she must have made the change at some point. I don’t know why exactly. My guess is that it just sounded good to her; she was always more open to trying something new than I, uber-risk-averse person that I am, am. She genuinely found cooking and entertaining fun and took joy from others enjoying themselves; I look at a meal as something to perfect.
I also sort of assumed any changes or divergences from established traditions would have an external forcing mechanism. For example, my family has long done talent shows at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I married into a family with minimal talent. So now our talent shows allow for PowerPoint presentations in addition to songs. Last year I presented “Childhood Crushes and Whether I’d Leave Jeff For Them Today,” which gave me an excuse to spend a lot of time looking at Tim Riggins. Jeff did “All the Topics Karen Suggested I Do For My Presentation and Why I Rejected Them.”
I’m not sure there needs to be an actual forcing mechanism as much as external stimuli that inspire change. In all those years of reviewing alternatives, was I beholden to my mom’s stuffing or did I just not see something that really made it worth the leap? And then when presented with a French, pork-and-profanity-laden version from my best source of new recipes, I didn’t need anything else.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Molly’s stuffing isn’t even that much of a departure: lardons for sausage, prunes for apricots, baguette in lieu of fluffier Italian bread. It’s the same stuffing but with a francophile twist and a filthier mouth, which, frankly, also describes me. Apparently the only way I’ll change a recipe is if it’s… basically the same recipe.
After the Thursday dinner, the Thanksgiving carry-over is the leftovers sandwich. Originally inspired by the Turkey Terrific available at Provisions, mine is now greatly improved by making a mayo/gravy blend as the spread, sous-viding the turkey breast for easy leftover sandwich slices, and pan-frying the leftover stuffing in a little butter so it gets warm and crisps up. A whole new stuffing means taking a chance on the quality of two meals and not one.
Once again, in the wise words of DMX: “you either be the one mad ’cause you trapped, or the one huntin’.”
“C’mon.”
For more details on the actual “how-tos” of planning a great Thanksgiving, no matter your stuffing recipe, read “How to Plan Thanksgiving So You Can Enjoy It” on Okay Doak Ideas.
