Friendsgiving/The Day I Ate My Weight in Carbs

This Bird Was Made For Stuffin'

I read an article recently that talked about a new phenomenon called "Friendsgiving" wherein groups of friends eschew the madding crowds of holiday travelers rushing to their home towns to watch hours of football and bicker over turkey and ridged, cylindrical cranberry sauce. Instead, they spend Thanksgiving with a few chosen ones and drink good wine as they prepare timeless, cherished recipes out of Bon Appetit or from the backside of the Butterball label.  Heck, this is not a new thing at all as we've been doing this for years since my entire family remains in the Great Frozen North and the closest thing I have to a knitted cap and fuzzy mittens are days I don't comb my hair and snap on latex surgical gloves before blowing them up into turkey balloons. I love my family to death but I express it better when my teeth aren't chattering.

Our dearest friend P usually hosts Thanksgiving dinner, and we return the favor on Christmas Day. This year she had a rather unfortunate confrontation with her garage floor (the floor won round one) and although perfectly mended after several months of rehab and hard work, still remained a little too delicate to have people over.  So we hosted it at our house, enlisting the help of J, who is our good friend as well as an astonishingly good cook.  This is a man who leaves no detail to chance when it comes to ingredients and preparation.  (When he makes gumbo he calls a cajun named Jimbeaux in Bossier City and has him overnight fresh gulf shrimp so he can boil them and use their shells to start his fish stock.  He mills his own flour for pie crust and milks the baby black and white goats he keeps in his condo's spare bedroom for feta cheese.  Don't even show him a packet of  Betty Crocker Instant Idaho Reds or he'll twist your arm behind your back until you finish choking the whole thing down dry.)

Use Your Noodles

I got up early on Thanksgiving to start the lengthy process of making home-made noodles, which are a holiday tradition in the mid west like tamales in Mexico without the meat filling, banana leaves and serapes. They are basically eggs and white flour stirred until you develop a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome and rolled out and cut into OCD narrow strips with a long sharp knife.  Then they are left on newspapers all day to dry, before boiling them in sort of a turkey soup until they are tender and savory. (Never put them on colorful want ads or you risk dying your noodles red, which after stewing them in turkey stock with giblets for a few hours looks like someone has recently been disemboweled.)  A lot of people have never heard of noodles for Thanksgiving but once they try them fall deeply in love with their pure, turkey-flavored carbyness.  One guest long ago had never had them before and then ate nothing but noodles for dinner.  She asked for leftovers and I found out later she had them for both breakfast and lunch the next day.  I am quite certain this is a sure-fire recipe for strangers approaching you on the street and inquiring when the baby is due.

Brie Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow

For an appetizer, I made a fun and cholesterol killing baked brie in puffed pastry with tart raspberry jam and toasted pecans that everyone enjoyed immensely.  It's sort of my go to edible party trick.  There's a food snob in Milwaukee whom I used to like who sneers at this concoction as pedestrian and ridden with cheese cruelty but it was the only dish that had no leftovers.  So there, TW.

Meanwhile, our all-star chef was busy at the stove with all four gas burners going full blast.  He was making consomme with hand-made tortellini, a cauliflower and broccoli concoction that was molded into the shape of an inverted hub cap and presented on freshly baked bread crumbs which had been pulsed into submission by my trusty Kitchen-Aid blender.  (He still hasn't spoken to me in a civil tone since he discovered, to his abject horror, that I don't own a food processor.) He also had gravy going and three different kinds of stock plus the noodles and the turkey in the oven along with dinner rolls, potatoes dauphinoise and my green bean casserole (I had buried the empty tin cans out back by the workshop earlier in the day so he wouldn't know I hadn't grown the legumes in my own organic vegetable garden) so he was understandably in turbo chef mode and started barking out requests for arcane kitchen implements which he had to have in 4 seconds or less or else the entire meal would be totally ruined.

At first, it was kind of fun to be washing up dishes for the 43rd time that day and suddenly hear "David, I need a 4-inch strainer with an ivory, rune-inscribed handle" and I'd rush to my odd utensils drawer and toss it across the room to him, feeling triumphant and smug.  As he caught it he yelled "Parchment Paper!" which I giddily supplied. "Micro Planer!" Check. "Garlic Press!" Um, got it. "Virgin Twine!"  Okay, already.  By the time he screamed "Surgical Steel Pincers" I almost stabbed him with them.  I wondered if he was actually just punishing me since I'd so miserably failed the Cuisinart test, but quickly wiped it from my mind as an uncharitable thought unworthy of my loyalty and true friendship.  Sort of.

Finally, everything was done at the same time and extraordinarily delicious.  Of course the kitchen was a wreck and I was exhausted from the everlasting, supersonic scavenger hunt, but I suddenly knew the perfect thing to make for next Friendsgiving:

Reservations.