Lesson Thanksgiving: The Menu

Thanksgiving Butternut Squash--My practice run for this year

I want to write about Thanksgiving because I feel it fits perfectly with my goals of cooking Le Cordon Bleu AT HOME. As mentioned going in to it, French food wasn't the primary draw. Instead the draw being learning the best techniques to apply to all my other cooking, although I am feeling a slow conversion and growing aversion to French food and cooking.

For Thanksgiving I am hoping to use the following things that I have learned from LCB to improve the meal I serve for my family:

1. Roasting--I am going to roast the turkey, as I always do, however I hope the practice will continue to improve the end results.
2. I am going to cook the dish Petits Pois a la Francaise--SPRING PEAS WITH LETTUCE, CHERVIL, AND ONIONS from Lesson 1. I think this will make an excellent dish to go with the Thanksgiving meal. I will not bother with pearl onions because I liked my white onion substitute and know they are easy to find and easy to work with.
3. I will be making stock use with a recipe I created for roasted butternut squash soup that I called "Thanksgiving Butternut Squash Soup". Last year I used chicken stock, but I may make vegetable stock so that I can have the flexibility to make it vegetarian if desired.
4. Successfully use a liaison to thicken a sauce--gravy.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because of the food, I LOVE IT! I also really enjoy the entertaining and the family. I began hosting Thanksgiving meals about 8 years ago in college because I forgot to bring leftovers back from home. I had a friend who worked at a grocery store pick up a turkey for really cheap and had everyone bring over dishes that they prepared. We filled our living room with tables and had a great time (word is one of my roommates met his wife at one of these meals).

The first Thanksgiving after my wife and I bought our house, we hosted our families for Thanksgiving. This was in part to make it so we only had to travel for Christmas rather than for both Christmas and Thanksgiving, and so that we could have extra help with fixing up our house (having 15 extra hands to clean up the yard, paint doors, and repair many items was a huge help).

Now that we have moved to be close to our family, we have been hosting Thanksgiving so that I can continue to cook and because we have a place that is big enough for everyone to get together.

Our menus usually have similarities, however we try to add something new or different each year, with varying degrees of success. Two of my students are taking French class at the local community college, so I asked them to translate my meal into French, to go on blog.  In fact, I also found the Nov. 12 post at Easy French Food to be helpful as well.  Here is the menu that I think we will be cooking this year:

	Lesson Thankgiving
SOUPE DE LA COURGE AU JOUR D'ACTION DE GRACE Thanksgiving Butternut Squash Soup ___ PATATES DOUCE AU LARD GRAS "CHEZ GRAND-MERE" Grandma's Sweet Potatoes with Bacon Fat ___ DINDE ROTE AUX HERBES AROMATIQUES Roasted Turkey with Herbs  ___ FARCE AUZ SAUCISSES ET CHAMPIGNONS Sausage and Mushroom Stuffing ___ SAUCE AUX CANNEBERGES Cranberry Sauce ___ SAUCE DE LA VINADE Gravy ___ LES PETITES PAINS Rolls ___ TARTE AUX POMMES MAISON Homemade Apple Pie

My own thoughts and notes go a little like this: I like to stuff the turkey (I have read much of the don'ts on this one but love the moisture and flavor) and cook some separately as well. Grandma's Sweet Potatoes-I don't know exactly what she does to them, but I like the flavor...not overly sweet. She slices them diagonally and there is word that she fries them in bacon fat that she collects all year. These are served warm or cold and are a great topping for leftover turkey sandwiches or paninis. Pie-homemade apple pie, pumpkin and mince meat pie. We usually buy the last two, and my wife and I took over making the apple pie last year from one of my grandmothers. We are improving in our pie making and will probably be doing more baking this year than in the past. Apple pies turned out well last year, as I think we made about 8 apple pies between Thanksgiving and Christmas for three of use to eat. This year I hope to try pumpkin pie (although I had a previous bad experience with pumpkin so am not really a huge fan of the flavor). Can't forget the cranberry sauce and gravy!

I want to post again about Thanksgiving and my use of the things that I have learned from the first three lessons. In addition, I am not planning to cook Lesson 4 until the week after Thanksgiving. I am planning to host my coworkers who selected Lesson 4 as a meal they would eat, and we can't get together until then because of our schedules.

Lesson 1: Cooking and Eating

I had been looking forward to this for months, and I had all of the ingredients, we had friends coming over to eat and I had a plan.

The plan was clear: start cooking at about 3:45pm for a 5:30-6pm dinner time.  Enough time for our guests to arrive a few minutes late, socialize a bit and then sit down to a warm meal.  

I had all of the dishes planned as to when to do the prep work and when to cook.  It was a great plan…

The plan went out the window about 3-3:15pm, when I got antsy and needed something to do.  I started prepping the fruit salad, with the exception of the fruit that would brown, and then peeled and sliced the cucumbers.  It’s a good thing the plan went out the window because both of these prep items took a lot longer than I had budgeted and would have delayed something down the line.

The fruit was very fresh and I knew the fruit salad was shaping up to be a big hit. The cucumbers, well if you don’t like peeling a million little cucumbers then I would suggest buying the big cucumbers rather than the pickling cucumbers.  The pickling ones allow for consistency in size and it makes a good presentation on the plate with a little extra work.

3:45pm rolled around and I followed my previous plan in stride, beginning with the chicken.  I have roasted turkey for the last 5 years at Thanksgiving, to the great pleasure of my family; however roasting chicken has always been a difficult task for me.  I don’t know what the difference is, but it always seems harder to work with a smaller chicken and get a good result. 

This time was no different in working with the chicken, but let me tell you, the results were TOTALLY different. The bird was perfectly cooked and tasted great!

After the chicken was off to the oven, I had a break to clean up and get ready for completing the fruit salad.  After turning the chicken in the oven after 20 minutes, I completed the fruit salad with its cointreau sauce.  The chicken got turned again and it was the peas’ turn to hit the stove.

Peas remind me of my mom’s, not so pleasing, tuna casserole with canned tuna, mushroom soup, pasta, peas and of course wheat germ topping.  Never a favorite of mine.  So I was skeptical of this dish, and much to my surprise it came out as an amazingly easy, tasty dish that I will cook again for my family at Thanksgiving!  It was a big hit with the adults and the 1 year old that we had over for dinner, and a healthy dish that I am going to cook for my sister and her kids!

Next the chicken came out of the oven perfectly browned, with crispy skin.  It rested and the pan juices were skimmed for fat and reduced to create a perfect drizzle for the chicken.

As I tried to carve the chicken, I always think to Thanksgiving—I roast the Turkey and my Grandpa carves it.  He has been trying to teach me the past two years, but I don’t feel confident in it.  I did well slicing the breasts off of the chicken, they were amazing pieces of white meat, which my wife and our guests really enjoyed.  The rest of the chicken, as you can see from the picture, was pulled and picked off the bone.  This is on my list of things to learn—carving meat.

My wife helped me plate the dinners, with the extras in dishes for the table.

Here is a picture of the dish...I didn't take it until the next morning, so if the peas look a bit hungover you know why.  It does illustrate my carving techniques, although to my credit there wasn't much leftover!  I'm not happy with how the picture made the blog...it was a little messed up, so I will try to upload it later and figure out how to get more pictures on the blog.

How was the first French meal I cooked?  It was easier to cook than I expected; it was extremely flavorful; it was, by my guess, very healthy; it was something my wife and guests enjoyed; and it was a meal I would undoubtedly cook again as well as recommend to others. 

It left me excited about what the next 89 lessons have in store for me!