A Singer's Journal: Thanksgiving

Have a good Thanksgiving? Who doesn't. Even a good fight makes for a good Thanksgiving. I suppose it's a more meaningful holiday when you take the time to explain its significance to young children, or you think about it yourself. But if you find yourself at the table with extended family, wordlessly packing in the carbs, it's a bizarre exercise.

I do generally like the food at Thanksgiving though, and I suppose like everyone else I've gotten used to the way my family does it, and that's the way I like it best. Aunt Mimi's stuffed mushrooms, Aunt Nancy's yams with pears and ginger, mom's pies. The feast strongly resembles the Christmas dinner, with maybe a swapping out of the turkey for a ham or some other roast animal. I even like the turkey, the low-fat carob of meats, which I otherwise experience during the year as an inoffensive protein source in my sandwich. On Thanksgiving day the roast turkey is a time sensitive issue: the skin stays crispy for so long, the dark meat is only good while it's warm, and even the leftovers for sandwiches just have a couple of days before you have to give them to the dog.

But the past couple of years I have left my family manse to feast with my husband and his family (well, I guess it's my family too). Every trip to Virginia, holiday or otherwise, involves a plummeting of my intake of vegetables. While Korean cooking involves vegetables, they are usually mixed up with lots of meat. Fortunately I am one of the few white people around who likes kimchi, the smelly staple dish of cabbage fermented with ground shrimp and fish sauce. It's a side dish at nearly every meal, even the Thanksgiving one, where the table will also include a deep-fried bird and sweet potato casserole with marhsmallows.

This year the meal was not made by my mother-in-law but by another relative who is also a home-cook extraordinaire. I longed for food from my aunties. I think the issue is that while my new family likes to cook an American-style Thanksgiving dinner, they do not use recipes for their Korean cooking, so they stalwartly do not use recipes for anything else either. Mashed potatoes were just that, no butter, no cream, minimal seasoning. A salad was served for a vegetable, which was nice but functional, and I am no fan of bottled dressing. We did have a deep-fried turkey, are rare treat for us Yankees, but the gravy was forgotten, and the tougher parts of the bird cried out for moisture. No cranberries in sight.

Korean dessert is usually fruit, often the enormous Korean pears that manage to be very crunchy and sweet and juicy. To contribute to the meal I made a sweet potato pie with some Asian twists, thanks to a fortuitous new recipe from everyone's favorite Mark Bittman. The graham cracker crust calls for coconut flakes, and he adds coconut milk to the pie, along with the expected seasonings.

My mother-in-law and I went shopping for the ingredients she didn't have at home, the graham crackers - which I was surprised to find in an Asian market - and the coconut milk, which does not regularly fit into Korean cooking. (She does advise it for a soak for squid though.) We came home and were surprised to discover that she did not have ginger in the fridge, one of the three in the holy trinity of Asian cooking (garlic ginger and soy sauce). We luckily found some pieces floating around in her turnip pickle mix, which although it was fermented at least wasn't covered in hot sauce. We washed off a few probiotic slices and mashed them up for the pie. It was a hit, and no one knew the difference.