Thanksgiving: Turkey Stuffed with America

A New York Times piece this week reconfirmed the enduring legacy of Thanksgiving, our national holiday.  It is a meal that represents America – warts, stuffing and all.  The particular gravy ladled on top of the turkey this time is the Left/Right politics over the proper narrative to impose on the original meal and just whose view of America it confirms.

This post will sidestep the particular politics of the moment (we know very little about that 16^th century meal, folks; argue away if it makes you feel more American) except to point out that Thanksgiving is a meal that symbolizes America in more ways than most might appreciate.  To elaborate, When Dad Cooks presents a brief history of Thanksgiving.  I will skip the sourcing so that this does not sound like some boring scholar droning on, but if you’re really interested I’ll send you some citations.

If you’re otherwise willing to trust me, then strap in for another exciting episode of “Much of What You’ve Been Told is Not True.”  You might be surprised at how much of what you find in this category relates to food.

Thanksgiving as a national celebration has its roots in slavery, not a Puritan harvest festival.  We were a testy bunch in the years immediately before the Civil War.  A movement began in what was then the West to bring the country back together through a national day of feast.  By the end of the Civil War, President Lincoln thought it a good idea and proclaimed Thanksgiving as a national holiday. 

Unity is a tough thing, however. Despising anything associated with Lincoln, the newly-conquered southern states did not celebrate Thanksgiving during the Reconstruction Era.  It was not until the nation as a whole tired of policing equality in the South – leading to the Jim Crow Era – that the South joined the party.

“Ahhh, but certainly the meal itself is unsullied by the ups and downs of American history,” Uncle Marvin shouts from in front of the TV in the living room. 

Well, not if you’re a Puritan at heart, Marv.  Puritans would see anything with flavor as having been sullied.  All those wonderful spices and herbs in the stuffing, or the cinnamon in your pumpkin pie?  Sorry.  The Puritans would denounce you as spawn of Satan or worse – Catholic.  The meal that we now look to celebrity chefs to spice up for us was a pretty bland affair until the big migration wave of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  

It was the Italians and many others who brought those ideas about herbs, spices, sausage in the stuffing and such to the American feast.  Many of those people were Catholic, whose ancestors would not have been welcome in the Plymouth Colony.  Owing to the Puritan and WASP inheritance of the meal, these new Catholic Americans did not actually celebrate Thanksgiving at first, viewing it as a Protestant holiday.  The embrace of herbs and such in the meal, in part, marked the arrival of these new cultures into the American mainstream (football had a lot to do with this, too, but this is a food blog; Hook ‘Em Horns).

Most tables this season will groan under the weight of the industrial turkey.  This is a post World War II invention.  The industrial turkey is enormous compared to its natural forebears, stuffed with so many hormones and injected water that its breasts could grace the cover of a men’s magazine (or women’s magazine at the checkout counter; but that, too, is a post for another blog).  The industrial turkey is a symbol of the rise of American industry in the 20^th century.  In so doing, it harkens back to the Puritan ethic of practicality over adornment (meaning it sacrifices flavor for size and profit). 

“Well, maybe so, sugar,” Great Aunt Sadie says while pinching a bruise into your cheek.  “But, American industry also gave us the plastic pop-up thingy that lets us know when our turkey is done.”

Sorry Sadie.  That ridiculous plastic pop-up thingy inserted into that enormous breast has nothing to do with flavor and is only tangentially related to when the bird is done.  It has everything to do with avoiding lawsuits over bacteria from turkeys raised in cages jam-packed with other turkeys.  If you rely on it, you can be sure that the bacteria are long dead.  They were destroyed along with all the moisture in the breast.  No flavor.  No lawsuits.

America’s litigious nature is also represented in the turkey.

In the 21^st century, America is attempting to recover some of its food heritage, picking and choosing among things that have been industrialized, things that are local, things they grow themselves and the restaurant open on Thanksgiving that promises all these things.  So, it is only fitting that many other tables will boast an heirloom bird, or a non-industrialized range-fed organic bird, or a bird that was nurtured in a subdivision in violation of the homeowner association rules. 

The American spirit of rebellion lives on in small ways today.

So, as the Times reported, it is only fitting that the current conflagration of socialism versus capitalism should have a seat at the Thanksgiving table.  American history has always been condensed and stuffed into a turkey.  Would you like some sweet potatoes with that? 

It simply reminds us that this day endures as a truly American feast, something you've been told that is truer than you might have known.

Happy Thanksgiving.

A Fish, A Father and an Avocado Walk Into a Kitchen…

Husbands know that guilt is a powerful motivator.  Putting down toilet seats is simply not in our DNA.  Those of us who do it…do it to avoid the guilt.

Likewise holding purses, not playing basketball with rolled up dirty socks, saying
“gosh darn it” when the quarterback fumbles, pretending to watch the movie “Terms of Endearment” (husbands call it “Terms of Endurance”), voluntarily vacuuming the carpet, and stating an unqualified preference for anything that seems important to our women as if it were equally important to us (see the above mention of “Terms of Endearment”).

For good or ill, guilt and food go together these days.  How far did it travel to your plate?  Is it on a list somewhere?  Did it ever have a face or a mother?  What was its quality of life while living?  Did you use artificial fertilizer to grow it?  Have you considered the starving children in (insert your favorite developing nation; and, yes, if it was good enough for my parents to ask me it’s good enough to harass my own kids about from time to time)?

I want to be clear that many of these questions are good questions.  They can be a bit overwhelming at times, though.  I respect anyone who goes further, but for my family we focus on a saying we heard from our favorite priest once upon a time:  “Do the good that presents itself to be done.” 

Which, of course, leads me to the subject of…fish.

A lot of food guilt is geared toward fish.  And for good reasons.  I wish, however, to side-step most of those issues (NOT that there’s anything wrong with that!).  Tilapia is a fish generally considered to be part of the “good that presents itself to be done” for those of us inclined toward fish.  It is a vegetarian fish that is a highly efficient protein factory, converting something like ¾ of a pound of its own caloric intake into a full pound of protein, though please do not quote those numbers (blast it, Jim, I’m a doctor not a marine biologist).  As you can see in the above picture, store-bought fillets also tend to look like a first baseman’s mitt, but that’s not important right now.

We eat a lot of tilapia around this house.  For those of you who know tilapia, however, you know that as a basic whitefish, it lacks an assertive flavor of its own.  It offers nice texture, though, and with a little thought can be a canvas upon which we can paint a (relatively) guilt-free meal.

On this particular night (as with most nights), I looked around at what I had on hand to add some flavor to the tilapia.  One avocado lurked in the fruit drawer.  I don’t know about your house, but one is not enough to make guacamole around here (a future post, no doubt; making guacamole in my house is like walking into a pit bull convention with a necklace of red meat and poodles).   

But, it is enough for a quick avocado dressing that can paint baked tilapia before serving.  Since I know everyone loves avocado (see guacamole reference), I figured I had an answer.

There is no magic here.  Bake the tilapia for about 15 minutes or so (I had thin pieces, so 15 minutes worked, but you probably do not want to go over 20 minutes regardless; test the thickest parts with a fork to check doneness, when it flakes it’s done).  Before serving, spread it with the avocado dressing.

Avocado Dressing

Ingredients:

~1/2 a good-size pear-shaped ripe avocado

3 cloves of garlic

~ 2 tbsp of canola oil

~ ¼ cup of parsley leaves

Juice of half a lime (added in steps, you can always add more)

A splash of sherry vinegar

A few splashes of half & half, maybe 1/4 of a cup total

Whir it all up in a food processor.  Paint or dob it on the baked tilapia and serve.  Guilt free.  Then go mow the lawn before “Terms of Endearment” goes into the machine.

End of an Era

It has been a fiendishly long time since I have posted, for which I apologize.  There have been good meals to be sure, but alas they have not made their way to the blog.  I apologize for the absence and promise to do better as we approach the holidays.

Along the way, I want to welcome Patrick to the When Dad Cooks community.  Please check out his blog,  Duck Fat and Politics when you get a chance.  It's great fun and those of you who lurk in Minnesota (and I know who you are) might see local fare you recognize.

Anyway, Halloween came and went.  It is a vaguely food oriented holiday so a fitting topic here.  Halloween has been a big deal in this house since the kids were old enough to play dress up.  They have played many roles and I'll remember fondly so many of them.  A Disney princess.  Bob the Builder.  A black cat.  Spiderman.  Padme from Star Wars.  Inspector Clouseau.

And on and on.

My kids are teens or very nearly so now.  Trick or treating is not quite what it used to be.

The high school girl was not interested and made that known early with a simple "No" to the question.  She then went back to her homework.

Her younger brother tried to arrange something with a neighborhood buddy but it didn't work out.  He said his Halloween would be spent giving out candy at the door.  That would be sufficient.

Then, at about 7:30, after the first wave had come to the door, he came downstairs in an updated version of his Phantom of the Opera costume from a few years ago.  The mask still fit because we had made it from a hockey mask at the time.  The cape was nowhere near as long on him, but it worked.

"I just need some candy," he said.

Yes.  Right.  Nothing else besides that.  It's a sweet tooth thing, Dad.  Get over it.

"OK," BMW said, excited for the first time that evening.  "Get me some chocolate.  I don't care about the rest.  Get me some chocolate or you're not going to college."

My wife can be subtle some times.  This was not one of those times.

My son and I wandered the neighborhood for about a half hour.  We talked about Halloweens past and how a couple of the houses seemed scarier in previous years.  He had various theories about houses that would give good candy and conducted experiments against those hypotheses.

Eventually, he felt assured that his college education was secure and we returned home.  BMW and my daughter were sitting on the front porch with a big bowl of candy and study guide sheets for a test in some subject or another.  

The candy was easily divided and we settled in to watch a football game on TV.

Happy Halloween.

Conventional Wisdom

Conventions can be noisy places full of overdressed people rushing from one meeting to another.  But, that’s not what this post is about.

Conventions can also be the standard building blocks of specific activities in society.  They are markers of often unspoken rules.  Following those conventions ensures that we will be accepted within those social activities. 

Writing is an activity with many conventions arising from its various genres.  Genre-specific conventions are things like:

• If you’re writing a mystery, you show the gun in the first few chapters and shoot someone by chapter seven. 
• If you’re writing a romance novel, you show the woman’s passion for a man that she should not want but cannot live without though he might be cruel at times but he’s dashing with his torn shirt and down deep she knows that they will be together unless the Dread Pirate Livingston finds them, anyway you show all this in the romance novel by following the convention of the breathlessly ridiculous run-on sentence.
• And if you’re writing a Star Trek episode, the landing party needs a few red shirts who can die on the planet’s surface. 

Conventions keep readers oriented, assuring them that they are on the right path. Food blogs, too, have conventions.  Thankfully, they are not too limiting, providing plenty of room for play.  “When Dad Cooks” follows many of these conventions, though there is one that this blog has yet to fully embrace.

Many food bloggers, I notice, refer to their spouses or significant others with an initial: “J”, “M” etc.  You might imagine Wilma Flintstone’s food blog with a post that begins: “I made F’s favorite Brontosaurus ribs last night, but I decided to surprise him by adding a sophisticated twist that I found on this Cro-Magnon blog…”

 If you thumb through the When Dad Cooks archive, you’ll see that my wife is a constant character in this blog.  The problem I have in following the convention, however, is that my wife is difficult to reduce to a single letter for a host of reasons.  Put another way: A fine wine cannot be understood by sampling a single grape. 

So, I have avoided the convention altogether.

I am pleased to announce the solving of this issue through a minor massaging of the convention.  My wife will be known in this blog as “BMW.”  At first blush, you will note the parallel with a certain German engineering company that promotes its own “excellence in design,” a parallel I find highly appropriate if you know what I mean (and if you know what I mean, insert your own joke here).

It is also a convention that can be tailored to certain situations.  For the vast majority of the time, BMW will stand for “Beautiful Marvelous Woman.”  She loves to bake, so there will be posts where “Bread Making Woman” will describe her talents.

Now, like any household navigating the complexity of contemporary living, things can get a little out of hand around here.  So, there will be times that BMW will stand for “Beware My Wife.”

No doubt there are moments in between that have yet to be conjugated.

The Mushroom: A Kindred Spirit

I give you the mushroom.  A delectable fungus, bursting with glutamate-powered flavor, it adds an earthy, muscular, comfort-food component to anything it touches.

As you probably know, the mushroom spends a great deal of time in the dark.  For some strains, darkness is mandatory and the most expensive mushrooms in the world can only be found by specially-trained dogs and pigs who dig the mushrooms out of the earth they spend their lives buried within.  Such mushrooms are clueless about the world at large, having never even glimpsed it in all its complexity.  Yet, by virtue of their fungal nature, they nonetheless have a strange social connection to other living things.

Muscular, usually dirty, in the dark and clueless.  Remind you of any members of our own species?

“Hey, when is that big show your daughter is in?”

“Um, I do not know.  Ask the wife.”

I’m sure cavemen had perfectly good reasons for getting married.  For the modern man, one of the primary reasons is social survival in a complicated world. The complexity of contemporary family life is simply not a thing that can be clubbed into submission, thus limiting the usefulness of the skills evolution provided us.  In other words, husbands and fathers spend a lot of time in the dark despite apparent social connections.  Not that there is anything wrong with that…

“Is your son signed up for the soccer season?”

“Um, I do not know.  Ask the wife.”

Males can bring home the bacon, and the more enlightened of us can fry it up in a pan.  But, knowing who needs to be where at what time wearing what shoes and carrying which equipment is beyond the number of moving parts the male evolved to handle.   We are social mushrooms, naturally connected to other things yet, well, in the dark.

So, when a father is asked a factual question about the comings and goings of the family, the answer “I do not know” is a true answer if verity exists at all in this world.  It is a statement of the knowledge that a fact exists in the space-time continuum while expressing true wonder at what form that fact might actually take at any given moment.

“What are you guys doing this weekend?”

“Um, I do not know.  Ask the wife.” 

This answer, when spoken by husbands and fathers, should not be interpreted as “Nothing, what did you have in mind?”  A better, more accurate, far more useful interpretation is: “Talk to the wife.  I’m just the husband and father.”  It is not that the thing in question is not knowable.  Just that someone else knows it.

Now, in fairness to all the ladies out there, I must admit my own wife’s suspicion that this ignorance is not evolutionary, but a willful strategy to dodge the responsibility of maintaining life in a crazy world. 

“How can you know when the Texas Longhorns football season starts and be clueless about dance classes and piano lessons?”

“Um, I do not know.  Ask the – Wait a minute.  This is a trick, right?  Opening day is September 4, but kickoff time is 2:30 Central.”

So, I wish to express an affinity between all the Chef Dads out there and the lowly mushroom.  Organisms that are organically connected to other things, yet spend a great deal of time in the dark.

Creamy Mushroom Pasta

Ingredients:

A bit of butter

~ 1 pound white mushrooms

~ ½ pound shitake mushrooms, stemmed

½ a large onion, diced

A few cloves garlic, chopped

Fresh herbs (here I used rosemary, thyme, parsley, oregano)

3/4 cup or so chicken stock

½ cup or so half and half

~ ¾ pound bulky pasta (here I used farfalle)

Sautee the white mushrooms with a pinch of salt in the butter with just a splash of olive oil over it.  I usually put all the mushrooms in the pan together, though some no doubt would scoff that they are likely to stew before they brown.  True to one degree or another, but as long as you’re browning them afterward and you pay attention to them, I don’t worry about that.  

When the mushrooms start taking on color, add the onions.  Sautee everything until the onions are translucent.  Add the garlic.   Cook further until you get hit in the face with a good whiff of garlic from the pan. 

Add the stock and stir.  Let that cook down, reducing maybe in half.  Add the shitakes somewhere in here.  Putting the more flavorful mushrooms in at this later point allows them to give up their juices right into the sauce and flavor the whole dish. 

Cook until your shitakes wilt, but you still want it all to be a bit loose and saucy, then add the herbs and adjust seasoning.  Finish with the cream and allow that to reduce a bit until it is saucy.  Don’t be afraid to add a little more half and half if you need to.  BTW, once you put that half and half into your pot, watch it like a hawk so it does not boil over and dump all that fat onto the flame under the pan.

Toss with the pasta and serve with fresh grated parmesan.

And if you want to know how good it all was…ask the wife!

On Hillbillies and the Green Family

Those of us of a certain age – and we know who we are – view TVLand not so much as a cable channel but more of a nostalgic place to go from time to time.  Here, we can find old friends, feel safe that Marshall Dillon or Columbo is on the case, laugh at bygone hairstyles and generally marvel at how much has changed in so many subtle ways since we were too young to know better.

One of those changes is our attitude toward greens.  Today, Giada de Laurentis (whose family is far more beautiful than yours) might actually cook with them on Food Network, allowing her manicured fingertips to fondle the leaves, anticipating the moment when something scrumptious made from the greens passes her red, red lips causing her to toss her luxurious, aristocratic, Italian locks about in pleasure.

Compare that contemporary TV cooking image with…Granny.

For those of us of that certain age, she is one of those one-named women.  You know:  Cher, Madonna…Granny.  She was played by Irene Ryan on “The Beverly Hillbillies” in the 1960s.  Granny was a loving, ornery old lady of the South, the matriarch of the Clampett family transported from Appalachia to Beverly Hills after they were afflicted with oil wealth.   Her locks were not luxurious, but gray and pulled back into a bun so tight it raised the pitch of her voice. 

One of the running gags on the show was Granny’s cooking, containing as it did the occasional opossum and, frequently, greens.  Eating greens was then thought to be the sign of a lower class of American, a sign of southern poverty and just plain weird.  In one episode, some uptight Californian suit understood Granny to be describing the brutal murder of the “Green” family – Mr. and Mrs. and the little Green kiddies – when she described cutting up and stewing “the greens.” 

I wonder if Gen X and Y viewers of TVLand quite get the joke in the way it was intended at the time.  Greens do not really have the lower-class distinction they once did and this joke is likely relegated to the category of anachronism.  Credit Food Network and a new generation of chefs – many from the South mixing with the “eat local” ethos – with giving us a new grammar of cooking that does not categorize greens in the same way (not to say that we haven’t invented a new way of “classing” food, but that’s another blog post).

My family and I are approaching the last of a winter planting of chard, mustard greens and spinach in the garden.  I am hardly the first food blogger to write that food plucked fresh from the garden needs very little done to it, but greens come to mind first when I think of the minimalist approach (with all apologies to Mark Bittman). 

They need some washing, some onion and garlic and a bit of heat.  On the night these pictures were taken, I added a cup of chicken stock to the onions and garlic and let that cook down till it was almost dry.  I then piled the greens (just the leaves removed from the main stems; but, hey, you wanna leave the stems that’s fine by me).  They cook down dramatically and I just kept adding them and turning the mixture over. 

From there, you can get as fancy as you want.  Often, I will just grate parmesan over them and serve.  But, they will take to just about anything.  I also like to dice up chorizo (the Spanish salami, not the Mexican sausage) into them.  That, with a splash of balsamic vinegar and maybe some pasta and you have a meal.

Fresh from the garden, greens will keep in the fridge for several days.  If you put them down in the root cellar, watch out for Granny.  She might be sleeping off a purely medicinal dose of moonshine down there.  If you wake her it will take the Tin Man and Barnaby Jones to save you (extra points if you get the connection…).

Of Cowboys and Cooks

The ghost of John Wayne appeared in my kitchen.  I was alone at the time cooking, the wife upstairs on her computer.  I was thinking about Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef, and his TV crusade on obesity and healthy eating in a West Virginia town.

“I wanna talk about this food stuff, hombre,” John Wayne said, stabbing the air over my kitchen island with a beefy finger.  “Want a beer?”

“Sure, Duke,” I replied with his nickname.  As a kid, I remember adults using that nickname because everyone felt they actually knew him.

He shuffled over to the fridge and got both of us a Shiner Bock.  When I picture John Wayne, I think of the John Wayne from the late 1950s and 60s.  He stood tall next to the fridge in a rumpled off-white hat, gray shirt, beat-up leather vest and perpetually-askew bandana around his neck.  Reaching out a strong lanky arm, he handed me a Shiner.  It wasn’t the first time John Wayne had appeared while my mind wandered, though it was the first time in the kitchen.

“You wearing a dress?” he drawled.

“It’s an apron and I’m wearing shorts because it’s getting warm again in Texas,” I said, focusing on the greens I was chopping.  “Didn’t you ever sweat making movies in Texas?”

“We made ‘em in California,” he said, washing the words down with a swig of beer.  “But, what about this girly man of a limey, this Oliver fella?”

“Girly man?”

“He was crying on television.”

“It’s television, Duke.  He was telling a whole town of people they were killing themselves and their children.  Tough stuff.  The star has to be a sympathetic character, so he cried on camera.  What’s really eating ya?”

“That’s quite a pig sticker ya got there,” he said, eyeing my Chinese cleaver as I diced an onion.  “You knick yourself with that and it’ll take your whole arm off.”

“Already did that posting a while ago.  What about Jamie Oliver?”

Apparently, the timeless icon of masculinity had just come from the hallucinations of some poor father living in that West Virginia town.

“What business does he got telling people how to eat?”

“Well, you need to separate some issues, Duke.  Jamie’s the hero.  With his cockney accent, raucous energy and pub-cook background, he’s the everyman who stands up for what’s right.”

“So, he’s kinda the lone gunslinger against the town?”

“Yeah, but this is reality TV, so they have to work hard to create drama and conflict.  That’s weird in this case because most of the usual forms of reality TV don’t work.  They need a villain but they can’t really trot out the whole food industry and a few generations of society who were encouraged to eat junk.  Also, the network probably wants to keep friendly relations with all its food industry advertisers.”

“But, he’s telling school cafeteria ladies and parents they’re killing their kids.”

“If you don’t like it, you have only yourself to blame.”

“Now, you’re bein’ rude to a figment of your own imagination.”

“They borrowed the plot of your movies: The War Wagon, Rio Bravo, Rio Lobo and lots of others.  The bad guy is a wealthy rancher living outside the town that for the most part is not seen.  But, his influence is everywhere.  Everyone in town is under the control of the villain and can’t imagine changing things.  The hero’s job is to swagger into town and make enough trouble to show the people things will change if they work together and stand up to the rancher.  Substitute the food industry for the rancher and you have Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.”

“So, this is my fault?”

“No, actually you helped solve a problem.  The last thing to consider is the message that a couple generations of people need to relearn how to cook and eat.  It’s a good story and you supplied the way to tell it.”

“I never cried.”

“You never wore an apron either, but a lot of people thought you walked funny.”

“Hey, hey.  I told you it’s a football injury.”

I went on dicing up some Spanish chorizo (actually a dry salami, not a sausage) and already-cooked chicken breast.

“What are you making?”

“Just some greens from the garden, about half a large onion, some garlic, a couple diced tomatoes along with the greens.  I’ll saute all that and then add the chorizo and chicken at the end and toss it with some pasta.”

“Your tomatoes could be riper.”

“Best I could find.  So, I’ll add some tomato paste and a splash of balsamic vinegar to the onions before I put the greens and tomatoes into the pan to boost the flavor.”

“Will the kids eat it?”

“You bet your six gun, pardner.”

We clinked our bottles in a manly toast.

“What’s going on down there?”  It was my wife.

“Nothing dear.”

And the Duke was gone.