We’ve been having a family debate about this year’s Thanksgiving. In addition to changing the venue from Nana’s house to our house, we’re thinking of having a different menu for Thanskgiving dinner. Explaining what I’m after when I refer to a “light” dinner has been a challenge.
Every year, we have the traditional turkey dinner. Our meal usually includes stuffing, mashed potatos, cranberry sauce, corn pudding, biscuits/rolls, sweet potatos, perhaps some other vegetable like green beans, and pumpkin pie. All of this is served family-style, and there is often much more food than we really need. I guess that’s the seed of discontent.
Too much food is nearly a hallmark of the holiday season. By the end of January, I’ll have gained 30 pounds from all of the eating. And I really think it has to do with the amount of food on the table.
What I would really like is just a dinner plate. A single plate of food already prepared, rather than a family-style free-for-all food extravaganza.
One nice thing about this would be that you could take time to carefully prepare the dinner. This is not to say that cooking a whole turkey does not require preparation, but a different kind of preparation is required for cooking a lot of food over several individual plates. You could take more time to produce something special rather than making a lot of a few different things.
Everyone who I’ve described this to says that you can’t get away from turkey on Thanksgiving. I’m not suggesting that turkey be excluded. I’m just saying that I don’t want a heaping pile of turkey on the table. I don’t want to eat turkey for weeks after Thanksgiving. And there’s something about turkey, too - I doubt that turkey can be prepared in bulk in any way to taste much better than just plain old roasted turkey.
By producing individual dinners, you get the change to season the turkey specifically. You can cook a little of it and focus on making it taste great. You can make great side dishes with flavor instead of tossing 20 potatos in a bowl and blending them, or otherwise focusing on the bulk.
I want an Iron Chef Thanksgiving “Turkey Battle” where the special ingredient is turkey. I might not like turkey ice cream, but I would love to have four small plates of different well-prepared dishes that are filling but not, well, stuffing.
I need to plan in advance how to reduce the overall consumption at Christmas and New Year’s dinners too, and I’ll be all set.
