Six Thanksgivings This Year
I’m officially over the holiday season this year, and it’s not even Christmas yet.
We just spent the last three weeks with family, and the two before that trying to see friends before the end of the year. It’s truly a blessing to be able to celebrate so much, but all of the nonstop action on top of the usual end of year work craziness has really worn me down.
We have one more holiday to go, spending with my family for Christmas. After that I am going to relish in a sleepy week followed quickly by a relaxing weekend in Cancun.
And nothing else whatsoever in January. Except Baldur’s Gate 3.
We did eat a ton of good food this holiday season though, and in a few months I will be able to look at the 2023 holiday season fondly as the year we had celebrated six Thanksgivings :’)
This is a full recap of all the delicious food we ate, because it’s already blurring together a bit.
Saturday November 11 — Friendsgiving 1: Our TG season started a little early, but I wanted to make sure we could celebrate with this group for the third year in a row before holiday schedule conflicts. This year, both couples of our St. Louis crew (2 of Noah’s med school classmates and their partners) got engaged! So this was a combo TG+ engagement celebration. We ate a LOT of food. A festive spread of:
Cheese & crackers with home made ramp pickles
Andrew Carmellini’s Roast Chicken x2; always a hit
Miso black cod with the full 3-day marinade (kinda underwhelming ngl)
Dilly bean stew with Rancho Gordo beans
Vegetarian stuffed mini-pumpkin (more cute than tasty, more complicated than it’s worth imo)
Mashed potatoes, just classic
Our friends brought mac and cheese, green bean casserole, brie & meat wreath bake, roasted brussel sprouts
Wine, lots and lots of wine
Desserts (not pictured) were maple pie + two mini celebration cakes for their engagements
Tuesday November 21 — Friendsgiving 2: Noah’s co-resident friendsgiving. Our neighbor hosted down the street from us, and it felt so fun to be able to run back and forth to our place to get stuff, and lend them our plates for the party. I didn’t take that many pictures of the food, but the menu as I remember it:
Brown-sugar & citrus marinated roast chicken
Shaved brussel sprout salad
We brought green bean salad with anchovy & pickled peppers & mashed potatoes
??? there was at least one more thing. It’s all blurring together!
Fruit pie and gingerbread blondies
It had been a while since I saw them all together. It was so nice to see everyone again.
Thursday, November 23 — Thanksgiving day duck takeout: We spent Thanksgiving day playing Gloomhaven with friends, and decided to order some duck for dinner, because it was a holiday after all. Noah’s brother’s train got in that evening too, just in time for us to all eat together:
A half “Peking” duck dinner w/ all the fixins - never get Peking duck from a Cantonese place, lesson learned
A whole soy sauce chicken - delicious
Salt & pepper squid
Bok choy stirfry
Garlic eggplant
Our actual Thanksgiving day meal was the least fussy of them all. It was more symbolic than anything, to commemorate the actual day alongside all our other celebratory meals.
Saturday, November 28 — Thanksgiving day weekend with my parents: Noah’s parents were supposed to spend this weekend with us initially, but this was the first of several reschedules (more on that debacle later). It was just the five of us - my mom, dad, noah, me, and BIL:
Kabocha soup
Amish free-range turkey, marinated with seasoned salt & served with fixins Peking duck style. Noah and I roasted it perfectly!
Pancake wrappers, hand rolled by me, and cooked in stacks of 6 in the microwave. Surprised this method worked, and it was much faster than frying individually on the stove.
Steamed black cod, the classic ginger scallion preparation
Pepper beef
Wosun stirfry, because it’s Noah’s favorite
Mushroom stirfry, because it’s Joe’s favorite
We helped a lot to prep this meal in the kitchen. It looked relatively simple compared to what my mom normally cooks, but that’s okay. This is not our big holiday, just an excuse to get together and eat.
Thursday, December 7 — Fake Thanksgiving with Noah’s parents: Thanksgiving is actually Noah’s favorite holiday, or at least the one that means the most to his family. It’s special to me too now — I met his entire family for the first time on Thanksgiving 2014! It was hard for everyone to spend the last three TGs apart because of COVID.
This year was supposed to be our first Thanksgiving together in years. We wanted to do it on the actual Thanksgiving day, but because of a bunch of logistical incompatibilities (we’ll just leave it at that…) Noah’s parents delayed their trip by a couple of weeks. We agreed to do a “make up” Thanksgiving day and just pretend like it’s November 23, and just enjoy the week together.
Noah took the lead on planning and executing this entire meal and coordinating his parents visiting:
Turkey from D’artagnan, marinated with seasoned salt from my mom
Gravy - better than bouillon fortified with a jiggly reduced turkey bone stock, so flavorful
Green bean salad (the same one as Friendsgiving 2, one of our favorite TG preparations)
Mashed potatoes
No sugar added cranberry relish, Noah’s aunt’s creation
Corn pudding (gluten, dairy, and sugar free)
brussel sprouts (86’d for time)
Apple pie by me (the Tartine dough, Bravetart filling) - not super successful this time; I’m not convinced the dough works well with this filling but maybe I’m just rusty, I dunno.
Even though the meal turned out well, the mood was completely dampened by my FIL being very sick with flu/covid-like symptoms. He spent the entire week in their Airbnb sleeping and missing the entire week of family time, including the main event of their long journey to visit us.
This was the day he felt the worst. Everyone was worried and just going through the motions because we already had the food. A little sad and not festive at all. And Noah thought the spread was too sparse to truly feel like Thanksgiving anyway.
Tuesday, December 12 — Latke Night: Because my FIL didn’t feel well enough to travel by the weekend, they extended their stay in Philly by a week to rest up and also spend some more time with Noah. Luckily eventually he felt well enough to join us for dinners at our place.
During the second week we FINALLY, after saying we would every year for the last nine years, made latkes for Hannukah! My very first homemade latkes. I’m surprised by how well they went with apple sauce. I also learned we aren’t supposed to eat anything else with a meal of latkes. Just latkes and only latkes. I did convince them to allow a salad for nutrients.
Latkes are quite a labor of love when you have to shred everything by hand and babysit them in the pan lovingly, four at a time. But the fussiness felt appropriate for the occasion, like the right amount of extreme lengths to go to for the sake of celebrating. I think we need to reinvigorate this tradition.
Thursday, December 14 — FIL’s Birthday Dinner: There was one silver lining to all of this chaos: everyone would be together for my FIL’s birthday. I can’t remember the last time we were all able to celebrate a family birthday together. The closest we came was in 2020 when we dropped off a chocolate cake and exchanged pleasantries with masks on, outside in the cold, so this was a rare chance to do something special..
Noah happened to have impulse bought a duck at Costco the Sunday prior, so I decided to build and plan an entire meal around that:
Crab cake appetizer
Roast duck with gravy (pivoted to cherry port wine sauce)
Cabbage & turnips roasted underneath the duck
Persimmon, pomegranate, bitter greens salad
Warm lentil salad, from Southwestern France
Pan seared black cod
Tomatoes in anchovy-fennel oil to go with the seafood
Mushrooms in thyme
Chocolate cherry cake!
I planned and orchestrated this meal, but Noah to his credit did a lot of the cooking. Making a huge table of food is our ultimate love language obviously, and I think he was happy to see such a large spread to make it feel festive and celebratory. Everyone gushed over the food, and this was a really nice evening across the board. I hope others will also look back on this day fondly.
As my own very special souvenir from this year… the honor of making birthday cakes for all three of these chocolate cake-loving men in my family… and getting pictures of them wearing the same birthday crown.
If the outer two cakes look similar, it’s because they are the exact same cake — Bravetart’s chocolate cake with some undertones of cherry. I replaced coffee with cherry juice, and add a cherry compote and cherry syrup soak. It doesn’t necessarily read cherry like a black forest cake would, but provides a bit of a fruity undertone to an otherwise CHOCOLATEINYORUFACE chocolate cake.
And to pile on top of a hectic month… we were supposed to have a week of peace before heading to my parents house to help receive a full house of guests. Instead, I went alone so Noah could stay with his parents. I haven’t seen these aunties and uncles for almost 10+ years, and even though it was worth all the stress in the world to go spend a day with them, I was running on fumes before I even got there. I was thoroughly worn out by the time the weekend was over.
After my in laws safely made it back home earlier this week, I felt a huge exhale, like all of the month’s fight/flight keeping me going all drained from my body, and I’m now just a puddle of mud in my living room unable to prop myself up.
If you need us, Rosie and I will be hibernating until our vacation in January. Absolutely nothing asked of us until then goodbye and goodnight!!