Thanksgiving

I adore Thanksgiving.  Great care goes into planning the menu, selecting the guests, organizing the house, charting seating arrangements, and choosing table settings.  The decorations are retrieved from the attic and carefully placed .  Last year, I sewed new table cloths and napkins using my new Babylock serger.  A birthday gift which I am still mastering.  Thanksgiving is how I show  the people who matter to me  that I really love them.  It is the Mt. Everest of my annual self actualization.  It is the way I prove to myself that I am a real girl, and not a sociopath, faking my way through life using my big brain to filter every emotion, and  mirror real feelings when I might not actually care at all.

Besides Christmas chocolates, that’s about it.  There are a few people too far away to participate in either ritual, and they know who they are.  They know me in ways that words, or food, or time, or geography transcend.  I like that.

As I contemplate the 2014 Thanksgiving, here is the 2013 Feast.  I had just inherited my mother-in-law’s cookbooks.  She was an intellectual woman.  I think she would have liked me mostly.  We met socially, but I hardly think it was memorable.  I was just a friend of the bride in her son’s first wedding at the time.  Anyway, I combed through the Williamsburg, Jamestown, Monticello and James River cookbooks.  And I researched every family recipe.  I interviewed  my chef brothers.  I interviewed other chefs I know.  I did what I do.

Hairston Family 2013

A Virginia Thanksgiving Dinner Menu

Rosemary Parmesan coins

Smoked Trout

Steel Head Trout roe with crème fraiche and assorted crackers

Pan fried oysters

Dan Hendrix’s Clear Tomato Saffron and leek consomme

Orange Cranberry mold

Orange Date Mint Salad

Cherry  tomatoes stuffed with baby langoustine tails

Carter Mountain Apple Butter Spread with Old Dominion Cinnamon Raisin Bread

James Chiles Sally Lunn Rolls

Patrick O’Connell’s Swiss Chard with Lardons, shallots and sweet balsamic vinegar – The Inn at Little Washington

Roasted Melange of Root Vegetables

Truffle Shallot Mashed Potatoes

Venison Tenderloin Roast {compliments of Laura Kelly}, Chester, VA

Smoked Capicola Roast (smoked by Greg and compliments of the Allen family}, Burkeville, VA

Deep Fried Turkey – Richmond, Virginia

Creamy Turkey Giblet Gravy

Williamsburg Coconut Cream Pie

Vanilla Bean Ice Cream

Chocolate Pots de Crème

Satsuma Pots de Crème

Hairston Family Maple Pecan  and Pumpkin  “Schizophrenic” Pie – Springfield, Virginia

Assorted Still and Sparkling Drinks