Week 9: Thanksgiving Grindset, Part One
You put your mind to the best holiday, you put your grind to the best holiday.
Welcome to Sausage Season, the newsletter for people who want to know how the sausage is made (and are frequently disappointed when other things intervene.
First of all, I need to speak on what’s on my heart. Which is this.
Which is Adversity. I am writing this from Montreal, where I am attending the American Studies Conference. I had a plan, which was to arrive at my hotel, and hit up the 24 hour poutine place around the corner, as a reward for a longass travel day from Clemson to Montreal. Everyone has a plan until Concur, our travel management protocol, hits them in the mouth. Concur canceled my reservation, and notified the Clemson travel agent, Anthony travel, who did not think it worth mentioning to me. After scrambling to find a hotel in Montreal at 830 pm on a Thursday night, I arrived and when I went to check in, I was told I could not, b/c their computers were down, but they would be up in a few minutes. They were not. An hour later, I went in search of food, in the vibrant and exciting Chinatown district of an international city, where, evidently, everyone is home and in bed by nine. The only place open was this. I figured ma po tofu was safe, and they brought me a pie plate full of a cornstarch glop with some hunks of tofu and unspiced scraps of pork. When I got back, the computers were still down, but they found me a vacant room,.
But I digress. This is a magical time of year, where we are poised between the two best holidays, and it is finally safe to go outside in SC, and my birthday is in the middle. Two things I care about are doing Thanksgiving right (Get Sam Sifton’s book) and looking after my people. For some years, we have been doing the big meal on Friday, so folks who have a suboptimal Thanksgiving family experience can come and get their gravy on at Club 217. And! I saw that Melissa Clark had a turkey chili receipt that looked pretty tight, and I knew I needed to start thinking about gravy.
I only got to eat at her restaurant once, but Judy Roger’s Zuni cookbook fell into my hands when I was an impressionable 31 year old. For a Bay Area chef from the Alice Waters coaching tree, it sounds a lot like something Jim Harbaugh would say, but her mantra in that book is “there has to be a harder way to do this.” For instance, any asshole can buy salted cod at the store, but you make it yourself, it turns out nicer. Same with guanciale. And a lot of other stuff.
So! I bought a whole frozen bird. I took it apart. I harvested the meat to grind for the chili, and saved the bones for stock.
You want to let those bones get nice and brown.
The new stove does slow and low real well, so I cleaned some stuff out of the produce drawer, threw in some wing tips from recent wings, and let that go overnight.
Also, as anticipated, the chili was tight.
Is any of this charcuterie, in any sense of the word? No. Is this using the whole animal, in an EXTREMELY spirit-of-charcuterie way? Yes. If you are scoring at home, that’s probably 8 servings of chili + some leftover plain ground turkey for the dog + about 4 quarts of stock, all for a $22.53 investment in a supermarket bird. Now please excuse me while I go fuck up some poutine.