This is a repeat of an earlier Food Friday Thanksgiving column, because we are still trying to recover from yesterday’s holiday feast. NPR has Susan Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish recipe. Somewhere on the internet yesterday you heard Arlo Guthrie singing Alice’s Restaurant for the 55th year. The Spy’s Gentle Readers get to enjoy the annual rite of leftovers as engineered when my son was in college. In in these fraught almost post-COVID times it feels reassuring to remind ourselves of the simpler times. Here’s a wish for a happier, healthier world next Thanksgiving!

And here we are, the day after Thanksgiving. Post-parade, post-football, post-feast. Also post-washing up. Heavens to Betsy, what a lot of cleaning up there was. And the fridge is packed with mysterious little bundles of leftovers. We continue to give thanks that our visiting college student is an incessant omnivore. He will plow systematically through Baggies of baked goods, tin-foiled-turkey bits, Saran-wrapped-celery, Tupperware-d tomatoes and wax-papered-walnuts.

It was not until the Tall One was in high school that these abilities were honed and refined with ambitious ardor. His healthy personal philosophy is “Waste not, want not.” A sentiment I hope comes from generations of hardy New Englanders as they plowed their rocky fields, dreaming of candlelit feasts and the TikTok stars of the future.

I have watched towers of food rise from his plate as he constructs interesting arrangements of sweet, sour, crunchy and umami items with the same deliberation and concentration once directed toward Lego projects. And I am thankful that few of these will fall to the floor and get walked over in the dark. Of course, now there is the wonder dog, Luke, so nothing much makes it to the floor.

I have read that there may have been swan at the first Thanksgiving. How very sad. I have no emotional commitment to turkeys, and I firmly belief that as beautiful as they are, swans are mean and would probably peck my eyes out if I didn’t feed them every scrap of bread in the house. Which means The Tall One would go hungry. It is a veritable conundrum.

The Pilgrim Sandwich is the Tall One’s magnum opus. It is his turducken without the histrionics. It is a smorgasbord without the Swedish chef. It is truly why we celebrate Thanksgiving. But there are some other opinions out there in Food Land.

This is way too fancy and cloying with fussy elements – olive oil for a turkey sandwich? Hardly. You have to use what is on hand from the most recent Thanksgiving meal – to go out to buy extra rolls is to break the unwritten rules of the universe. There are plenty of Parker House rolls in your bread box right this minute – go use them up!
http://www.rachaelray.com/recipe.php?recipe_id=4202

This is a recipe for simpletons. Honestly. And was there Muenster cheese on the dining room table yesterday? I think not.
http://www.favfamilyrecipes.com/2012/11/pilgrim-sandwiches.html

And if you are grown up and sophisticated, here is the answer for you. Fancy Thanksgiving leftovers for a grown up brunch:
http://www.saveur.com/article/Menu/A-Brunch-For-The-Day-After-Thanksgiving

Here are The Tall One’s ingredients for his signature Pilgrim Sandwich:
Toast (2 slices)
Turkey (2 slices)
Cranberry Sauce (2 teaspoons)
Gravy (2 tablespoons)
Mashed Potatoes (2 tablespoons)
Stuffing (2 tablespoons)
Barbecue Sauce (you can never have too much)
Bacon (if there is some hanging around)
Mayonnaise (if you must)
Lettuce (iceberg, for the crunch)
Celery stalk (more crunch)
Salt, pepper
A side bowl of potato chips

And now I am taking the dog for a walk before I consider making my own sandwich.

“Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.”
-Robert Fulghum

’Tis finally almost the season. I wandered into the grocery store yesterday, hunting and gathering some cheap white wine for dinner, when I realized that my casual consumering was probably slowing down the serious shoppers. This was a Wednesday, a full 15 days before Thanksgiving, and there was full bore, intense provisioning happening. A dozen shopping carts were piled high with frozen turkeys, aluminum roasting pans, boxes of Stove Top Stuffing and clinking cans of Ocean Spray cranberry jelly. The lines stretched far away from the registers, snaking down a couple of aisles. I caught up with my queue near the top of the Bottled Water/Sports Drinks aisle, feeling like old Mr. Gower, the disgraced pharmacist from It’s A Wonderful Life, with my Chardonnay, a bottle of Tabasco sauce, and a bag of tortilla chips. I could feel the scorn of the other shoppers, who were balancing their weighty bags of potatoes, awkwardly wrapped hams, and tubes of crescent roll dough. It’s time to get serious.

Consequently, we had the first conference call with family members last night about our Thanksgiving meal: T minus 15 days, and counting. We will plan it for the next two weeks, spend countless hours weighing the shopping and cooking options before actually cooking, or eating, the meal. The clean up always takes more time than eating the meal. All aspects of the ritual are what we really relish, the meal is merely the catalyst for our small family gathering. We will make construction paper turkeys and faux-feather headdresses in the morning, string the beans, stew cranberries, baste the turkey, warm the ham, set the table, light the candles, carve the bird, talk fondly of the folks who couldn’t join us, clear the table, wash the dishes, wrap the leftovers, finish the wine and totter off to bed. It should be fun.

In our sophisticated twenty-first century world we are offered choices our mothers certainly never imagined. The grocery store in 2022 offers many kind of local and imported foods. We try to be responsible, and think of our carbon footprints, and supporting our neighbors. Sometimes the new and exotic are hard to resist. It’s tempting to suggest a change of ingredient, or ritual. I am mulling over the all-important potato conundrum: should I try this new-fangled concept of roasting the potatoes instead of boiling them as generations have done? Should I make them ahead of time and re-heat just before we sit down? I still haven’t lived down the shame of the Thanksgiving I forgot to prepare, or serve, the green beans – and that was our very first Thanksgiving, before the children were even glimmers in our eyes. This family never forgets, and they honor humiliations endlessly. If I mess up the potatoes, I will never hear the end of it.

That said, it might be worth giving this recipe a whirl: https://www.tastingtable.com/885589/next-time-you-make-mashed-potatoes-try-roasting-them-first/

Food52, always our most reliable source, has mashed potato non-recipes with several variations: https://food52.com/blog/11703-how-to-make-mashed-potatoes-without-a-recipe

If you are a sweet potato family, the sophisticates at Food52 know what you’ll enjoy: https://food52.com/recipes/2561-mashed-sweet-potatoes-with-creme-fraiche-and-herbs

Mark Bittman has a compendium of potato solutions, many of which you can employ for Thanksgiving and its leftover aftermath: https://markbittman.com/recipes-1/potatoes-12-ways

If you need to tailor your meal for dietary reasons, you can substitute butter and cream with chicken or vegetable broth. We still like to remind one family member of the time they came home from college newly vegetarian, and proceeded to drown the vegetarian mashed potatoes in fresh, lump-free turkey gravy. Ah, memories. https://cookeatlivelove.com/substitutes-milk-mashed-potatoes/

Which brings us back around to the kind of potatoes to use for mashing: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/best-potatoes-for-mashing

You can also consider what the grocery stores do to sell us those seductive and luscious potatoes, how we are being manipulated: https://www.producebusiness.com/9-ways-to-sell-more-spuds-year-round/

We are renting a house by a small lake this year for Thanksgiving, so I don’t know what to expect in the way of kitchen equipment. We have had some interesting Thanksgivings where we have had to improvise, which can add both to the hilarity of the situation, and to the holiday tension. Ina Garten said, “If you think about a Thanksgiving dinner, it’s really like making a large chicken.” Being in a strange kitchen and not noticing the dearth of potholders until meal prep is underway can be daunting. There was one year in a rental house that we were spatchcocking a 24-pound turkey, for the first time. Ever. Six college degrees were deemed useless as we grappled with the enormous carcass. This year I am making a couple of dishes ahead of time and will be packing them in the cooler for ease of use and peace of mind. Mashed potatoes are at the head of my list: https://www.onceuponachef.com/recipes/creamy-make-ahead-mashed-potatoes.html

For easy breakfasts I will also be making and packing Paula Deen’s Sausage Balls, because this year I refuse to travel with the KitchenAid stand mixer again: https://www.pauladeen.com/recipe/sausage-balls/

Good luck with your planning. T minus 13 days…

“In the end, I always want potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Nothing like mashed potatoes when you’re feeling blue…The problem with mashed potatoes, though, is that they require almost as much hard work as crisp potatoes, and when you’re feeling blue the last thing you feel like is hard work. Of course, you can always get someone to make the mashed potatoes for you, but let’s face it: the reason you’re blue is that there isn’t anyone to make them for you. As a result, most people do not have nearly enough mashed potatoes in their lives, and when they do, it’s almost always at the wrong time.”
― Nora Ephron