Good Food Thanksgiving

Planning for Thanksgiving—a favorite holiday of foodies across the nation—can be, well, downright frustrating for the meal planners.  One guest is watching their cholesterol intake, another their glycemic load, one hates veggies, and one is a vegetarian….  I recognize that to add to this potentially divisive list of demands the esoteric concepts of environmental and social responsibility might seem mad to some, but I believe this holiday devoted to giving thanks should be based on these concepts.

In my book, delicious, healthy, and ethical food is worth any extra effort for the deeply honest pleasures it can provide.  And with some planning, it might not seem extra at all.  Slow Food USA is trying to make it easy on meal planners trying to please both palate and conscience with a Thanksgiving Guide, replete with recipes, tips for easy meal planning, and thoughts on the origins of the holiday (the story of which was explored here in 2009.) 

Top 5 tips to have a Slow Food Thanksgiving:

1. Shop for fresh, seasonal, and local foods at a farmers market;
2. Take the time to learn about where your food comes from and how it was raised;
3. Give thanks for the labor that brought your food to your table and the earth that grew it;
4. Get all hands on deck in the kitchen. Teach others what you know and learn from them;
5. And then sit back and savor the meal with family and friends.

When I plan Thanksgiving, there are a few key ingredients—delicious, nutritious, place based ingredients—that I consider the stars of the table.  What follows is a bit of musing on some of these fine foods:

Apple varietals, once numbered in the thousands across this land, are now quite limited, with industrial foodways leaving room for only a few varieties in the grocery stores.  But a trip to the Milwaukee County Winter’s Farmers Market, or one of our local antique apple orchards, will yield many varieties such as the Wolf River, Autumn Berry, Willow Twig, Lady Apple, Golden Russet, Northern Spy, Black Giliflower, Arkansas Black, Northwest Greening, Snow, Winesap, etc....all autumn varietals in our region.  On my table, I might feature local apples on a cheese plate or in an apple cranberry sauce, in an apple crisp, as an ingredient in the stuffing or by serving an artisanal apple cider with dinner.

Pumpkin or winter squash, a truly American food, is a must at Thanksgiving, and need not be limited to the realm of pie.  The bright orange flesh (due to all that beta carotene) is a reminder that they sat in the field all season, soaking up sun.   Unique varieties of squash, like Sibley, Boston Marrow, Amish Pie, Galeux d'Eysines, Buttercup, Marina di Chioggia, each have their own unique flavors and textures and stories though they are, for the most part but with many caveats, interchangeable.  My all time favorite, the Marina di Chioggia, comes from Italy and has dense flesh, and a rich, nutty flavor that finds a good home in biscuits and breads, pies and purees. This year I’m likely to use the Long Pie Pumpkin (otherwise known by the name Nantucket) or Fairy Squash grown by my friends at Pinehold Gardens for a pumpkin and sage bisque.  In years past, squash has been served up simply; halved, brushed with real maple syrup, roasted and sliced or diced large and roasted along with root vegetables or baked and stuffed with the next key ingredient, wild rice.

True Wild Rice is precious—an important traditional food of the Ojibwe and Menominee people of this region, it is still hand harvested each year by “knocking” the rice into canoes as they glide through the wetland stands in which the rice grows wild.  This tradition is at risk, due to polluted waters, changing land use, and shifting foodways, which is likely why real wild rice has gone up in price in the past couple of years, making it unaffordable to many Native people who don’t harvest it themselves.   To seek out  and serve wild rice at the table not only supports people continuing an important traditional foodway, but is a truly nutritious and delicious regional food.  Always nutty and aromatic, real wild rice flavor will vary from rice bed to rice bed.  It’s hard to compare the real thing with the much more common cultivated “paddy rice” which takes much longer to cook and has a very different taste and texture.  Wild rice is wonderful served on its own, but I often like to serve it as a dressing/stuffing; mixed with ingredients like cranberries, celery, hazelnuts and apples.  Learn more and find distributors of real wild rice here

And then there’s the turkey.  Heritage turkey breeds, like Narragansett, White Holland , Bourbon Red, Bronze, are uniquely American and very, very unique. Today 99% of turkeys are the same industrialized breed; the Broad Breasted White is raised to grow so fast, that they’ve no ability to forage, fly, or mate naturally.  To serve a heritage turkey supports small family farms and it also yields a much richer, more flavorful meat due to the slow growth rates.  The Slow Food Thanksgiving guide has more information on heritage turkeys and through my local Slow Food WiSE chapter, we compile an annual local heritage buying guide to promote the restoration of heritage breed turkeys within our region by pairing farmers with eaters.  

“Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”         ― Wendell Berry

 Happy Thanksgiving