Thanksgiving in December

As Lauren previously mentioned, we were out of town for Thanksgiving itself, but felt the need to make The Dinner anyway.  We did this last year at a friends' house and, well, there were challenges.  Not with the friends, they were great, but with acquiring the more American ingredients.  Cranberries are not only not to be found here, but are also completely unknown and, when introduced, are usually taken for some other frutti di bosco (wild berry) unless their origin and general way of life is explained in exhaustive detail.  Turkey isn't a problem (the butchers seem like they've all figured out the whole thanksgiving thing) but sweet potatoes are.  As in, we couldn't find them at all last year and we really looked.

So, having just been in the states, we bought cranberries and Lauren made and canned 8 pints of sauce which we packed into our checked luggage, being unsure about it's import legality but fairly confident that the immigration folks in the Florence airport wouldn't much care.  We also brought back some Alaskan smoked salmon and Tillamook Cheddar (sharp) that my mother brought us from Seattle to start things off with.  I wanted to showcase those partially out of regional pride and partially because Italians really appreciate regional cuisine.  We had been planning to make rosemary crackers but, due to a lack of oven space coupled with a certain degree of forgetfulness, instead had the antipasta with some of Lauren's herb bread (made the day before in full accordance with the plan).  We also had chicken liver crostini (which are very fiorentini) brought by our next door neighbors/landlords and some peperoncino jam which they went to get immediately after tasting the cheddar.

We didn't really have many problems with the roasted pepper soup, except that it's one of the few things I make from a recipe and the recipe (courtesy of my very skilled stepmother) is somewhere in a box in Oregon.  Near the box with all of our smoked paprika, which sort of makes the dish (and just about anything else you put it in).  Also, we were all out of chicken stock.  But I did manage to find shallots, which I wasn't expecting (after the first 3 places I looked didn't have any). 
The soup basically goes: mince your shallots (onions) and saute in olive oil with fresh thyme.  Pour in a bunch of stock (we used a mixture of duck and prosciutto bone, since that was what we had sitting around) and your pre-roasted peppers.  I do one pot of red peppers and one pot of yellow peppers, mostly to get a cool visual effect, but the taste is a bit different between the two as well.  When the peppers are nice and soft puree the heck out of them and add some cream, smoked paprika, red wine vinegar and salt until it tastes good.  I'd thought to also do salad before the main mass of food but Lauren informed me that the only way salad is traditional in thanksgiving is if it's been baked in butter and served in cream (see kale, later on this page).

The Turkey (which our butcher had for us in any size we wanted, as long as it was 8 kilos) we rubbed with paprika, soy sauce and olive oil and stuffed with chopped lemons, red onions, rosemary and celery before roasting it for somewhat more time than we had anticipated, first under foil and then uncovered to crisp up the skin. 

We put on pretty much the full spread to accompany the bird.  Stuffing, Mashed potatoes with white truffle oil, roasted sweet potatoes and kale sauteed with onions, apples and sausage and then baked with cream and a sprinkling of paprika.  Turns out the trick to finding sweet potatoes is to look for the Chinese greengrocers.  I spent an afternoon wandering all over town going in and out of markets and grocery stores ranging from Italian to African but my first stop in the Chinese corner of Mercato Centrale yielded results. 

We started out with this as our plan:

Alaskan smoked salmon
Tillamook cheddar
rosemary flatbread
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red/yellow pepper soup
is salad traditional?  Lauren says no.  Only if you bake it in butter and serve it with a cream sauce.
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truffled mashed potatoes
roasted sweet potatoes (glaze w/ paprika, soy, honey?, garlic, olive oil and seseme seeds?)
sauteed greens (garlic/onions balsamic?)

Stuffing:
3 c tuscan bread
3 c cornbread
2-3 red onions
butter
celery
garlic, a few cloves
sausage (2-3)
thyme
sage (other herbs?)
chestnuts (2-3 c?)
apples, diced large (2?)
stock (~1 c)

toast breads, saute everything else, mix with stock, salt, pepper and paprika, bake until golden

dusting of parmigiano in addition to paprika?

turkey
rosemary butter w/ a bit of miso, soy sauce glaze, pack cavity with lemons, onions and other tasty stuff.
drippings and red wine gravy
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Pie:
apple:  with hazelnut strussel
pumpkin: with anise seed crust?

Order:
pies day before?
corn bread and herb bread

day of:
bake stuffing and sweet potatoes until edible but not crispy, remove
bake turkey, flat bread -- make soup (2)
remove, turn oven up, boil potatoes, cook greens, put stuffing and sweet potatoes back in oven, make gravy re-heat soup.

eat, put pies back in oven
eat pies

The only real problem was the massive quantity of food we ended up with.  You see, I hadn't really thought that hard about quantities and just made enough to fill the baking pans we had--the cheap disposable roasters we got to fit the turkey.  Which, at 8 kilos, only just barely fit inside our oven.  There wasn't a single dish that got finished. 

The postscript for this is that the one child (9) present has been asking her parents for sweet potatoes.

If you're wondering about the pictures, I forgot to take any after things got to a certain point in the evening (like once food started being done).  Feel pretty dumb too, because the soup and turkey both looked amazing (as did the pies) and the other dishes weren't half bad either.