Another Non-Traditional Thanksgiving

Monday, December 1. 2008

Another year. Another occasion for not eating turkey in the Ashley-Berkus household.

Yes, once again we've put together an "alternative" ethnic meal for the most gluttonous of American holidays: Thanksgiving. Unsurprisingly, given my recent trip to Salzburg, dinner had a strong Austrian theme and involved reverse-engineering some of the dishes I ate there. I'll give you the dinner, first, then follow it up with recipes and notes later in the week.

Dinner preparation started 24 hours ahead with making the semmelknödel, or Austrian bread dumplings. Or, more technically, what I made would be called "serviettenkloss" which would be boiled wrapped in a linen napkin, though I used plastic and foil. These are best cooked, chilled, sliced and reheated so I made them Wednesday night. Success. (picture from Winemonger.com)

As always, Thanksgiving means beaujolais nouveau, this year Georges Duboeuf. I didn't like it as much as the Louis Tête, so I think I'll stick to Tête in the future, or see if I can find a more interesting label. We drank the beaujolais with salad and soup, and followed it with a merlot reserva from Greis winery in Bolzano (more about this in a later article) for the main course. And, of course, port and tea with dessert.

First course was a salad of lettuce and apples from my in-law's garden, pomegranate seeds and Crater Lake Blue cheese from Rogue Creamery, with a balsamic vinaigrette.

For the second course, my mother-in-law had an excess of pumpkins, so I decided to make pumpkin-beer soup. This required seeding and roasting a bunch of small sugar pumpkins, as well as making pumpkin stock.

Speaking of stock, the parsley sauce I made required making fish stock. Fortunately, my in-laws had a supply of freezer-dessicated cod on hand. Sadly, I didn't remember to take a picture of the mess I made with the parsley in the Vita-Mix.

Here's the soup. It looks better than it tasted; the pale sugar pumpkins simply weren't flavorful enough to stand up to the beer and stock, despite the long roasting. It's dotted with creme fraiche.

My in-laws had also stopped on the Oregon coast, where they'd picked up a lion's mane mushroom the size of an adolescent rabbit. Or a human brain; I did my zombie act for my wife (braiiiiinnnnsssss ...). So I enhanced the main course with mushrooms.

I pulled some steelhead salmon out of the freezer from last year (fishing is very restricted this year), seared it on both sides, then placed it in the parsley sauce. I oven-fried the sliced dumplings and put them alongside, and topped them with mushrooms.

Here's my wife's plate, without the mushrooms. You can see how the semmelknodel look.

For dessert, my wife went crazy with apples, making "apple-apple bread pudding" from Dorie Greenspan. This involved making a bread pudding using brioche slathered with apple butter, layered with apples in caramel.