Thanksgiving

The key to enjoying dense winter squash more often is a time-saving ten or so minutes in the microwave. By cooking them first, you avoid the anxiety and danger of hacking a sturdy squash or your finger in half. Or, look for packages of ready-to-cook precut and peeled squash in the supermarket. After cooking, the other trick is to scoop the flesh into a casserole where it’s easy to char evenly under the broiler in a couple minutes. This way no one has to negotiate an unwieldy squash boat, and everyone gets as much or as little as they want. Make the casserole ahead and you’ll be glad come dinnertime. The trio of squash sauces shows how well squash gets along with a full range of sweet to savory flavors. One sauce is traditional—buttery and sweet with pecans. The second is a sweet-savory exotic beauty blending spicy chutney, dried cranberries, and almonds. The third, a savory tomato, mysteriously brings out the sweetness of the squash without overpowering it. Serve all three sauces with any squash combo and watch everyone duke it out for a favorite.

Min’s Cranberry Fruit Salad is the result of her crusade to bring vibrant colors and crisp textures to those brown winter meals—including plenty of the cheater pulled and chopped meats. Bright cranberries and fall fruits make a drop-dead gorgeous salad with body, color, and crunch. Smoked turkey, chicken, pork loin, and brisket are always better with a bright accessory. Freeze extra cranberries in the fall to whip this up throughout the winter.

One ambitious Thanksgiving eve we gathered family, friends, and neighbors over to the house and deep-fried all their turkeys for the next day. That was fun and exhausting. Of course, keeping with R. B.’s former motto “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing,” we finished the turkey fry with a big batch of catfish. At least we got our money’s worth out of the peanut oil. For other ambitious Thanksgivings, R. B. has stayed up all night (by himself) nursing Tom Turkey’s fire with a formula of wet hickory chips and Tennessee whiskey. Those were the memorable years when R. B. dozed through Thanksgiving dinner and got along particularly well with everyone. Now that R. B. is in cheater recovery, a wet-smoked turkey in an oven bag leaves him with the single challenge of keeping things light and deferential at the dinner table. The cheater turkey is always moist, tender, and smoky and shows off a golden brown sheen.

The best part of Thanksgiving weekend might be a postholiday turkey sandwich when the guests are gone and you’re hanging out at home. When you don’t get that sandwich (because somebody wrapped up all the turkey to go home with somebody’s cousin), it can haunt you. No need to wait another year and another holiday. No need to cook a whole turkey, either. Like Hobo Crock Whole Smoked Chicken (page 90), a whole turkey breast does really well wrapped in foil and cooked in a slow cooker. You can even pull off a handsome skin with melted butter mixed with bottled smoke. If you buy a frozen breast, remember to give it a few days in the fridge to thaw completely before cooking.

The clafoutis was invented in Limousin, France, to showcase that region’s famous cherries. Some compare the eggy consistency of clafoutis to flan, as it’s neither cake nor custard. To me, it’s more like an extra-thick crêpe dotted with fruit. Clafoutis puffs beautifully as it bakes, and hot out of the oven, it’s crisp on the outside and airy in the middle. When chilled, however, it collapses, becoming dense and custardlike. I love it both ways. One of the great aspects of clafoutis is its versatility. Once you know how to make the batter, you can make great desserts with it year-round. At Lucques, we’ve made clafoutis with sautéed apples in the winter and with berries in the summer. For the fall, I like a clafoutis featuring that indigenous American jewel, the cranberry. This dessert is delicious as is, but if you want to gild the lily, serve it with a dollop of bourbon-spiked whipped cream.

This version of the Ginger Smash is the original Employees Only seasonal cocktail. We set out to create a cocktail composed of ingredients that warm you up on a winter day. The result was so tasty and fresh in aroma that it was a “smash” from the start. It remains, to this day, one of our best sellers.

Daniel del Vecchio has been working with me for nearly twenty years. For a long time, he was known as my right-hand man—and for good reason. That’s why I now entrust him with opening and maintaining my restaurants around the world. More important, he’s like family. We’ve celebrated many holidays and milestones together, including, of course, Thanksgiving, when his turkey has often been the star of the show.

This gravy was inspired by my family’s visit to Taste of Life, a wonderful vegan eatery in Tel Aviv. The café is run by the community of Black Hebrews, who also produce most of the tofu and seitan distributed in Israel at their village in the southern part of the country. They serve their own wonderful products at Taste of Life (which is connected to the small chain of Soul Vegetarian Cafés in the United States). When we ate there, their tender seitan was topped with a tasty gravy. The server shared the recipe with me, which I’ve interpreted below. There’s not much to it, honestly, but it’s quick and tasty. Serve it over grains, mashed potatoes, seitan, and tempeh. See a good use for it in Tofu and Seitan Mixed Grill (page 44).

If I had to choose a favorite quinoa dish, it would be this one. With just a few ingredients, it manages to showcase sweet, savory, and nutty flavors all at once.

I don’t know about you, but I take caramel very seriously. Over time, I’ve perfected a recipe that results in a thick, sweet caramel sauce, which perfectly offsets the pecans and flaky crust of this pie. The caramel also intermingles delightfully with melted chocolate and buttery pecans, making for a rich, dense, decadent pie. Serve with a dollop of Whipped Cream (page 193) or a scoop of dulce de leche ice cream

One of the greatest compliments I’ve received in my professional life thus far was being told that I “make pecan pie like a true Southerner.” In this chapter, you’ll find a few variations, but nice as it is to mix things up sometimes, there’s also much to be said for the clean taste and sweet flavor of traditional Pecan Pie. In addition to capping off holiday meals, it is also a great way to end a summer barbecue.

This pie will always have a special meaning to me because it was the centerpiece of the bake-off of my dreams! I remember watching Food Network programs as a teenager, thinking, “I would love to be on these shows!” Well, thanks to Bobby Flay, I got the chance to prove that my pies could compete with the best. In November 2009 he challenged me to a pumpkin pie throwdown on Throwdown! with Bobby Flay. Although Bobby ultimately won the throwdown, he told me my version was “one of the best pumpkin pies I have ever eaten.” I like to serve this pie with a dollop of Maple Whipped Cream (page 194).

This pie packs in all of the traditional pumpkin holiday flavor, but with a much lighter and airier texture than traditional pumpkin pie, making this a great alternative at the end of a heavy, multicourse meal. Serve with a dollop of Whipped Cream (page 193).

Talk about zing! This pie will turn even the most bland and basic of winter dinners into a completely memorable meal. The red color of fresh cranberries mixed in with the pale hues of apples and pears makes for a gorgeous presentation. But that’s just the beginning. This pie also beautifully combines the tartness of cranberries with the sweetness of apples and pears. To really highlight the spectacular color of this pie, use either the Cinnamon Sugar Crumb Topping or the Walnut Crumb Topping (page 14). Or if you want to highlight the tartness of the cranberries, I recommend using the double-crust Traditional Pastry Piecrust (page 5).

Although it’s not the most traditional holiday dessert, this pie pairs well with a Christmas roast. The cranberries add a festive note, while the walnut crumb adds an extra bit of crunchy texture. This pie looks just as delicious as it tastes.

One of the things Michele’s Pies is best known for is our Pumpkin Pie. The secret to our success is simple: Use fresh pumpkins, never canned. I recommend using the sugar pumpkin variety for this recipe because not only do these pumpkins have the most flavor, but their dark orange flesh will make your pie a beautiful, deep, rich orange color. Processing pumpkins does take some extra effort, but it’s worth it when you see everyone’s faces light up as they taste their first bites of this special pie after Thanksgiving dinner. To be honest, when I first opened up the shop, I had to convince my own staff to take the additional step of pumpkin processing in the midst of the Thanksgiving rush. After hearing a few of them make the argument for using a premade canned pumpkin filling, I decided to prove my point. I sat the entire staff down for a blind taste test, during which I served them pumpkin pies made from a variety of canned pumpkin fillings and a pie made from my own freshly processed pumpkins. Unanimously, they chose the freshly processed pumpkin pie as the best of the bunch. Since then, I’ve never heard a single complaint about the extra effort. (For processing instructions, see page 65).

Unlike fresh cranberries, which can be tart, dried cranberries provide an extra layer of sweetness to the classic apple pie. This dessert is a great finale to a pork roast dinner. Try it with the Traditional Pastry double crust (page 5) as an alternative.

Apple pie seems like the perfect place to begin, since it was the first pie I ever made. Despite all of the practice I had making this pie as a kid with my grandma, it took me a very long time to commit this recipe to paper; but, after many tries, I was finally able to get her recipe down! Select your apples based on your own taste preferences. At the shop, we use Cortland apples for their sweetness (Fuji, Gala, Golden Delicious, Honey Crisp or McIntosh are also sweet). You can also get creative and use a combination of both sweet and tart apples, such as Fuji and Granny Smith apples (Jonathan and Rome Beauties are tart as well). You can also try this pie with the Cinnamon Sugar Crumb Topping (page 12) and drizzled with Caramel Sauce (page 189); it earned us two National Pie Championships Award.