A Presidential Thanksgiving

We’ve hit crunch time, as far as Thanksgiving is concerned, so rather than leave you with a recipe that you no longer have time to make, I thought I’d give you a peak at the President’s Thanksgiving menu this year.  Of all the press releases I receive from the White House, I always take the most pleasure in reading the menus for heads of state and holidays. 

So what do you think?  Is it me, or does the gazpacho seem a little out of place with what otherwise is a pretty traditional menu?  How does your Thanksgiving menu compare??

THANKSGIVING MENU AT CAMP DAVID

Free-Range Roast Turkey

Cornbread Dressing

Cranberry Sauce

Sautéed Green Beans

Morelia Style Gazpacho with Spinach Salad

Zucchini Gratin

Whipped Maple Sweet Potatoes

Buttered Mashed Potatoes

Giblet Gravy

Fresh Clover Rolls with Honey Butter

Pumpkin Pie with Whipped Topping

Apple Pie

Pumpkin Mousse Trifle

Fresh Fruit Platter

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High and Dry

In my family, Thanksgiving is a Big Deal — the sort of holiday that I and about two dozen family members and friends look forward to for months. I’ve been known to start thinking about it as early as July.

Traditionally held by my mother, the holiday involves 30lb turkeys and massive crocks of sweet potatoes and vegetables, all eaten on tables decorated with dried leaves and votive candles. Mom doesn’t mess around.

And just like a football coach wouldn’t run a new play at the Super Bowl, my mother doesn’t serve a dish at Thanksgiving unless it has been tested and tweaked and tested again. It’s serious stuff, this Thanksgiving business.

So a few years ago, my mom decided to experiment with a new turkey recipe that claimed you could cook your turkey in about 2 hours at a very high and dry heat and yield the most succulent bird you’ve ever tasted. No basting, no turning, no stuffing. Just bake the bird at 450°F for a couple of hours. The claim sounded improbable, but she figured if it didn’t work out, she’d only wasted 2 hours of her time. She could always fall back on her stand-by recipe.

The turkey turned out fantastically and has since become our Thanksgiving standard. But I started wondering if the same method could be applied to other meats and poultry, particularly chicken. After looking into it, I found that Barbara Kafka has been touting this method of roasting for decades, often to the skepticism of cooks like Julia Child (who was quoted as saying she “hates” this method).

I was a little fearful of jacking my oven up to 500°F to roast a chicken, so I found another, similar recipe by Thomas Keller that roasts the chicken at 450°F for about an hour and is positively fantastic. The high, dry heat caramelizes the surface of the skin and melts excess fat and water out of the chicken, which bastes the bird as it cooks.

Thanksgiving is a special day, where I’m surrounded by loved ones and eat holiday fare that I look forward to all year. But this chicken recipe is something special that I can eat all year round, making even an average Monday night something to look forward to.

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A Root Most Sweet

What’s in a name? Well, if you’re a sweet potato, not much.

Sometimes called a yam, sometimes called a sweet potato, the sweet potato is actually neither a yam nor a potato.

What what?

Yes, it’s true. All three are basically underground organs where plants store their starch. But that’s about where the relationship ends.

Yams are tropical “tubers,” the place where tropical grass and lily plants hold their starch, and are native to Africa, South America and the Pacific. They come in varying textures, colors, sizes and flavors and have been know to grow up to 6 feet (yes, 6 feet) in length.

Potatoes, on the other hand, are tubers of a stem plant that bears yellow or silver flowers and are native to moist, cool regions of Central and South America.

So then what is a sweet potato, that wonderfully syrupy starch that so many of us eat at holiday dinners, often adulterated with a hefty dose of marshmallows and brown sugar?

Sweet potatoes are actually root vegetables — which are similar to but different than tubers — and are the storage root of the Ipomoea batatas plant (helloooo botany). They are native to northern South America, but today China is the sweet potato’s biggest consumer and producer.

There are a slew of different varieties: some dry and starchy, others moist, some deep orange or purple and others pale yellow. The “garnet” and “jewel” variety are the kinds you find most often in the supermarket, usually labeled as “yams,” which — as we have just established — they are not.

So…why do we call them yams?

There are a couple of theories. The prevailing one seems to be that yam is a derivative of a Western African word meaning “to eat” as well as the word for true yams (“nyami” and “anyinam”). African slaves brought to America started calling sweet potatoes “yams,” the term spread and then in the 1930s, food marketers ran with it, promoting sweet potatoes as yams in their advertising campaigns. To me, that’s sort of like saying, “Hey, let’s promote turnips by calling them parsnips!” But whatever, clearly I don’t think like a food marketer…

Happily, they got the “sweet” part of the sweet potato’s name right. There’s an enzyme in sweet potatoes that, when heated, breaks down all that starch into a sugar that’s about a third as sweet as table sugar. So the longer you cook those babies, the sweeter and lovelier they will taste.

Boiling or steaming will cook them too fast and you will lose some of the sweetness. But if you roast them…mmm. You will be rewarded with a delicious, soft and mouth-watering accompaniment to any fall meal, no sugar required. And if you whiz them in a food processor with some vanilla-infused half-and-half, butter, salt and pepper? Sweet heaven.

So whatever you call them, if cook them right, you’ll be in for a treat.

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