From the "At least it makes a Good Story" files. Thanksgiving at our house 2021.

 

My wife Carol and I have always been contrarians regarding menu planning for Thanksgiving, being intermittently vegetarian all our adult lives and almost always featuring menus not including turkey on Turkey Day.  Carol has supreme confidence in whatever she gets involved with, I have supreme anxiety about achieving success in whatever I do. You know how they say “just get out there, you’ll be fine”.  Well, I have gotten out there numerous times where I have experienced it being Not Fine, which seems to confirm my fears.  I am fairly certain that this is a circular logic bullshit loop, but I digress…

WARNING: the following includes details of a disturbing culinary misadventure.  But hey, I say read on because this is how we learn!  Take the path less traveled!  OK, enough of that. But I do feel better now.

Living in New Orleans inspired me to learn how to make a Cajun-style gumbo. I use skills learned from a cooking class at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum combined with a recipe I got from a Tacoma friend.  It always turns out good, and my wife and son agreed that Rob’s gumbo would be an excellent dish for Thanksgiving.  I felt that something different and maybe a bit more challenging would be more exciting and interesting, so I chose Pan-Roasted Salmon with Warm French Lentil Salad, from Salmon, a cookbook by Diane Morgan.  I’ve fallen in love with pan-frying everything in cast iron, and with this choice I would have an excuse expand our kitchen tool shed by     adding a 12-inch skillet to the 10-inch we use at home and the 8-inch that lives in our travel trailer.  Finding a large lid was another part of the project, and I am happy to report that no extra packaging was required, since I found everything in local shops. Ace Hardware had Lodge skillets and I got the lid at the Willamette Valley Kitchen Company, downtown.  On a related note, I had been on a search for a shrimp deveiner before nixing the gumbo.  I’d learned of a good fresh seafood place in Salem and had bought the shrimp I used for my most recent gumbo there. The clerk was very confident that he knew of the best tool to facilitate deveining, but they were sold out and only had their in-shop tool.  The manager said they’d not been able to get more.  Supply Chain.  I tried 3 or 4 other shops in town, same story.  Defeated, I signed into Amazon and sure enough they had them, but it would be a couple weeks before it would arrive. (It’s out for delivery, arriving today.)  But I wouldn’t need it, since the plan was to beat a new path in the kitchen.

The author with his new toys. The garlic was last seen somewhere around here. 

I don’t have a signature Salmon dish and have found it a bit challenging to cook the fish to the correct point where it’s cooked but still moist.  Trader Joe’s sells previously frozen but thawed Atlantic salmon, both farmed and fresh, and it's been delicious the three or four times I've pan fried it.  I may have been a bit distracted when purchasing in the past, not noting if I bought farmed or wild.  Not sure, I guessed and bought the wild, hoping that it would be the correct choice both for environmental and personal health as well as, most importantly, flavor.

Are you a cook-takes-control-of-the-kitchen person or do you just allow others to work in the kitchen as you cook, and perhaps also let socializers in on the action?  Me, I cook best alone. Nevertheless, when in a group I often defer to the desires of others.  Yesterday, this turned out to be Bad decision number 1. I’m pretty sure I’d have been fine cooking solo.  In our new home, everything is on the small side including the kitchen.  Note to self: New rule. I set the rules when it’s my turn.  Never again.  Or at least, be super on guard for goofy things.  No, keep the rule.  Don’t waffle!

Bad decision number 2: buying the TJ salmon and not fish from the fresh market.  Bad decision number 3: having Rice Pilaf on the menu when you’ve already got the fish sitting on top of a mound of Warm French Lentil Salad.  Unnecessary grain.  

My wife Carol with our son and his wife at their place, just NW of Salem, a few days before Thanksgiving. We got back to the house just before dark (they have 20 acres)

On Thanksgiving day, we had until 2 pm when our son and daughter-in-law would arrive, so I did food prep, preparing the vinaigrette (olive oil, grated lemon zest, lemon juice, garlic, tarragon, sugar, salt, pepper) and diced veggies to be added to the cooked lentils. I was very happy with the performance of my new microplane grater that I picked up at Ace Hardware, easily producing a tsp of glorious lemon zest.  I’d tried out a regular cheese grater for preparing orange zest recently and ended up with a coating of fine orange oil all over my face, with no zest. 

It was time to prepare the meal.  The Instant Pot pressure cooker was retrieved from the garage pantry (our kitchen is short on storage space), and I got both my 12-inch and 10-inch skillets deployed, one for pan-frying the 4 salmon fillets and the other for sautéing the veggies for the Lentil Salad.  As I was assembling the ingredients for the rice pilaf, I couldn’t find the 2 cloves of chopped garlic that I remembered setting aside earlier that morning.  I searched everywhere, looking at least 3 times in every place it could possibly be before giving up, since it was PAST TIME to close the lid on the cooker as the onions were looking a bit brown (the Instant Pot allows sautéing right in the pot prior to cooking). My wife was feeling a vague sense of blame coming from me (what’d you do with my GARLIC!!) So no garlic, oh well.  A more masterful cook would have just chopped up a couple cloves in seconds, but there were too many cooks in the kitchen and no counter space, and I was feeling spooked by the mysterious disappearance of the garlic. 

I rinsed the salmon (suspicious fishy smell), and got the veggies cooking.  Now the heat was on and I found myself (gasp)- multi-tasking!  Anxiety heightened as I struggled to make sure the fillets weren’t sticking to the pan (I’d neglected to trim them to size and they were crowding).  I got them flipped, having decided to pan-fry both sides rather than finishing them off in the oven for 4 minutes as called for in the recipe.  My rationale: I am smarter than Diane Morgan.  No, really it was based on my previous experience with the TJ salmon, it turned out so moist and tasty cooked  that way and my fear of failure with the new method.  My mind was boiling over with thoughts of what could go wrong.  Not helpful. 

As suggested in the recipe, I plated a  mound of lentil salad on each plate and topped it with salmon.  Garlic-free pilaf was added along with bacon-wrapped green beans (that’s what Carol had been up to while all the above was going on).  And I probably would have had trouble getting into the oven even if I had wanted to, since Heather’s sweet potatoes were heating up in there along with the beans (they need to be finished in the oven, since the bacon is under-cooked first, to allow wrapping). 

As I am winding down from my high perch of failure fear, and just before we carried our plates to the festive holiday table, Tyler wedged in a request for each of our recitations of what we’re thankful for.  I’ll have to ask the other three if they remember what I said.  We sat and together enjoyed a meal of pretty wonderful bacon-wrapped green beans, delicious caramelized sweet potatoes, under-garlicked pilaf, and slightly dry and somewhat tasteless salmon on a pretty boring pile of lentils (it turns out that all other things being equal, farm-raised salmon might be tastier, having as it does about 20% more saturated fat, which is unhealthy and so of course is the best tasting part). We lingered, Tyler and I needing time to finish as we are both members of the clean-plate club, and as mentioned previously the chunks of fish were on the large side.  Clearing the table and stacking the dishes for washing, I noticed a jar of vinaigrette on the counter!  Holy shit, no wonder the lentils were bland.  All that wonderful flavor (see ingredients above) was missing.  I’d remembered chopping the garlic but had forgotten that I’d added it to the vinaigrette and forgot that both the lentils and the pilaf called for chopped garlic. I was relieved to solve the Mystery of the Missing Garlic but chagrinned at the missed opportunity to savor a tasty preparation of Lentilles de Puy, since no doubt their earthy, robust flavor would have been nicely complimented by that garlicky vinaigrette.

So it goes.  Which leads me to mention our after-meal event: we watched Robert Weide’s wonderful new documentary about Kurt Vonnegut. From Mr. Vonnegut’s 1998 Rice University commencement speech: “When things are going sweetly, please pause and then say, If this isn’t nice, what is?” Despite the culinary confusions catalogued here, I did manage to pause and reflect, “I’m here with these people, in this place… how sweet is that!?”

Happy Holidays!

Does the pilaf look out of place to you?