Cinco de Luna Thanksgiving

They say the moon makes one do crazy things. This might explain why we decided to cook a quasi-Thanksgiving meal of charcoal grilled turkey and autumnal gratin on Cinco de Mayo on a warm, spring day when the moon was proposed to be the brightest it would be all year. Why else would two semi-normal human beings decide to cook outdoors in the sun over a hot BBQ and to turn on the oven for a few hours of roasting and baking all before an hours long billiard-a-thon waiting to see that globe of luminescence hit its high point in a midnight sky while other more sane specimens were sipping cool cocktails, poolside in the sunny afternoon?

A plump sixteen-pound turkey absent of its legs had been brined for two days. It was then put onto a hot grill with hickory briquettes and pepper tree wood, and was covered and smoked until the temperature reached 145 degrees after two hours. This resulted in a flavorful, meat sitting deliciously on the edge between a hospital coma and a delightful, tryptophan nap.

For the side dish, we made an equally crazy-inspired one-pot hot dish of cauliflower gruyere gratin, which turned out so flavorful I have decided to share the recipe below:

CAULIFLOWER GRUYERE GRATIN

1 small head of cauliflower

1 butternut squash

1 medium yellow onion

12 oz. gruyere, cubed

1 tablespoon, chopped, fresh rosemary

1/3 cup walnuts, toasted

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 425.

Cut the head of cauliflower and butternut squash into even chunks. Put into a bowl and add two tablespoons of olive oil, a dash of salt and pepper and mix to coat. Place all on parchment paper on a shallow pan and roast for 40 minutes. When done roasting, decrease the oven heat to 400 degrees.

Meanwhile, cut one medium onion into whole slices. Heat a one-quart sauté pan over low heat and add two tablespoons of olive oil. Place in the onion slices and cover. Heat for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally, until onions are jammy and soft.

Get a 10-inch cast iron pan. Place half the roasted cauliflower and half the roasted squash into it as a bottom layer. Pour in the onions. Place in the rest of the squash and cauliflower as a top layer. Cover that with the cubed cheese. Sprinkle in the rosemary evenly and add the walnuts. Bake for 20 minutes until cheese is bubbling and brown.

The meal was tummy-filling and helped along by a nice Halter Ranch Rhone white blend bought on an earlier sojourn to Paso Robles. 

We can blame the one-eyed singing and pool shooting on nothing else but the moon, which we did manage to catch sight of as the clock turned over into a new day, sitting high above the hills of Southern California.

Thanksgiving Evolution

This past Thanksgiving I decided to chuck convention. It's been a road that I have been heading towards for a few years now. It's become increasingly harder for me to dive into the idea of a big, gluttonous feast of turkey and fixings when my diet has become mostly healthy and vegetarian and my family has become so dispersed and insular. It's also been hard for me to justify the expense of the huge meal, or to expect it from anyone else in these economic times. Really, all that aside, I guess I am just turning into a bah humbug over holidays when the very meaning of holidays has seemed to become one big consumer fest of unnecessary food and money outlay. I mean, I am thankful everyday, I don't need one moment to suddenly allow myself to feel grateful or to hang out with my family or to tell people I love them - I already do that on a daily basis.

So this year, I traveled to San Diego where my friend Ian and I spent the wee hours of the morning inside a church kitchen with about twenty other people heating up food for the homeless we planned to serve at Petco Park later in the day. We had Motown music blaring and aluminum pan after aluminum pan of mashed potatoes, green beans, carrots, turkey and stuffing heating for about four hours until every last pan was hot and laid into the back of a string of volunteer cars. Watching the food go by, I was becoming increasingly hungry.

At PetCo Park we hung around as many homeless people were fed. The faces of the homeless were different this year. There was a young mother with a baby, a twenty-something year old Hispanic man in a poncho with two huge dogs on leashes as his best friends, an older couple in tourist-looking sweatsuits; point being that the homeless were representative of any-man. Any of us at any given time could easily be them.

Afterwards we decided to spend the rest of the day doing nothing as the concept of doing nothing was something both of us were TRULY thankful for in our unusually busy work-filled lives. Exquisiteness and silent bliss and no agenda were the perfect agenda items for my holiday. Driving home we stopped at Evolution Cafe, where I fell in love with the 100% vegan fast food menu. I ordered a bacon cheeseburger and fries. The burger came on a wheat bun with soy cheese, tempeh bacon and veggie burger and tasted exactly like the bacon cheeseburger of my dreams, which is some fine feat. The fries were sweet potatoes and perfectly carmelized and charred on the outside while mushy on the inside. Topped off with a nice cold Yerba Mate, I was completely content. I wish we had an Evolution in Palm Springs. I would eat one of everything on the menu for a month and still some.

I am thankful that I am learning to change the way I eat, to consider the food on my plate, to respect the concepts of energy usage and waste and that now, even in the fast food world, we are gaining some viable options.