The joy in girls’ laughter The certainty of tradition The comfort of family Embracing new friends:
Local celebs and food and wine experts offer a sampler of their reasons to give thanks.
Jorge de la Torre
LAST MONTH in New York City I ate skewered chicken butts, skewered grilled chicken sternums and beef liver sashimi at Sake Bar Hagi; fried quail, banana tartar and nasturtium, and a fried butterscotch pudding with mango, taro and smoked macadamias at WD-50; bacon and orange marmalade on rye at Prune, and finally, a tres leches and peanut butter doughnut glazed with blueberry jelly at the Doughnut Plant.
That was day one. I had only two days in NYC, and I had to get it all in.
My favorite shows on TV right now are “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” and “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” (both on the Travel Channel). I am so jealous of those two! There is not one thing I would not try on their shows.
For most holiday family meals, we can have anything anyone wants. We can eat Chinese at Christmas. We can even eat rabbit at Easter. We can even play on the traditional with a turkey roulade and a dried fruit stuffing, truffled whipped potatoes with crème fraiche, cranberry foam and a pumpkin crème brulée.
I’m a first-generation American, and my parents are from Bolivia where Thanksgiving is not celebrated. They made sure that we assimilated as best we could, and with the help of my American godparents, the Thanksgiving meal was as traditional as a Norman Rockwell portrait. And that’s the way I like it. There is no room for interpretations of the necessary dishes.
The green bean casserole has to have Durkee’s French onions on top and some sort of cream of something soup in it.
The whipped sweet potatoes have to have marshmallows baked on top.
The cranberry sauce has to make that special sound coming from the can and still have the ridge marks to prove it came from a can.
The turkey is stuffed with the Pepperidge farm stuffing that I have always had, no homemade cornbread stuffing here.
The mashed potatoes have plenty of butter and cream, the gravy made from the turkey giblets.
The ham has a brown sugar glaze and the pumpkin pie is store-bought.
The only deviation allowed is that since we lived in New Mexico, I’ll have a bowl of red chile.
I am a pretty reasonable guy the rest of the year but that’s it – there is no discussion on this meal, and please know that this is what you are going to find if you come to my house on Thanksgiving. It embodies the beautiful memories of many wonderful Thanksgivings, and I do not want to mess with that.
Jorge de la Torre is dean of culinary education at the Denver campus of Johnson & Wales University. He lives in Denver with his wife and two young children.
Rubi Nicholas
I’M THINKING about what makes me thankful: laughter.
The sound of little girls laughing is one of the most beautiful, carefree and pure sounds that I hear. I’m thankful that I get to hear that sound almost on command. I love laughing, and making them laugh.
True, tomorrow marks the beginning of the end of every diet victory earned since April, but it’s the beginning of staying in and playing Uno, of hot chocolate and snowman season. It’s this time of year that reminds me how much I love sweatshirts and leggings, scarves and ear muffs.
The Thanksgiving cornucopia is an American version of the Jewish shofar, signaling to all that the season of family, food and friendship has begun. This year I asked my family to tell me what made them thankful about this day, here’s what we all think:
My kids are thankful that:
Turkey tastes like chicken.
Cranberry sauce counts as a “fruit.”
They can eat as much pie and ice cream as they want on Thanksgiving.
They don’t have to behave to get the pie, like Christmas when the promise of Santa makes you “be good” – it’s not like Tom Turkey’s bringing presents.
It’s the beginning of the Christmas movie parade (eight open today!). The girls are 8 and 5, so if I take them together, they can hit a PG-13 movie!
My husband is thankful that:
He doesn’t have to cook on Thanksgiving.
I can admit that he’s funnier than I am.
Football is on during the day.
Turkey makes you sleepy – it’s science – so napping in front of the game can’t be helped.
I am thankful that:
On this holiday, there is only food shopping and cooking, and not gift giving.
I don’t have to send “Happy Thanksgiving” cards.
Family naps spontaneously take place right when I want them to.
Everyone overeats on Thanksgiving – and so begins the season of diet rationalizations. (You know, the “The 10-pound season” that starts with Halloween and ends with Easter? That’s right about the time you think about a crash diet for the summer, lose 4 pounds and turn to that “Swimuits for Every Body Type” issue of Cosmopolitan.)
So, cheers to you and your family: Put on that winter fat, wear huge fleece sweats, play a game of Uno or dos, and enjoy each other this season. Happy Thanksgiving.
Castle Rock resident Rubi Nicholas, a first-generation Muslim woman of Pakistani descent, won the title of “Funniest Mom in America” on the 2006 Nick at Nite show. By day, she works as an assistant vice president at an insurance company. Tonight and next Wednesday, she performs at Denver Improv (8246 E. 49th Ave., Northfield at Stapleton, 303-307-1777) – mention this story, and you won’t have to pay a cover. She also appears the third Saturday every month at the Java Guru in Castle Rock (4284 Trail Boss Drive, 303-660-4878). Hear Rubi 8:30-10:30 p.m. Thursdays on Rock Topics, .
John Broening
MY UNCLE and aunt’s Thanksgiving was the opposite of your ordinary gathering. They were a childless, unconventional family. Around the folding tables set up in their converted garage, a strange collection of people would gather.
There were artists, journalists, hairdressers, expatriates, and men who had been in prison with my uncle as fellow conscientious objectors.
There was the occasional wild-eyed man with his shirt buttoned to the top, and a woman, I remember, with waist-length gray hair whose name nobody ever knew.
These people would pass around platters of steaming sauerkraut – Baltimore Thanksgiving tradition. On one occasion a Swedish couple nobody ever saw again helped themselves to the remains of the massive turkey and spirited it out the door.
To this child, more than a few of the guests seemed like charity cases. But my aunt and uncle didn’t see their Thanksgiving as an act of charity, but as a more inclusive form of hospitality.
I grew up and moved away. For a few years, nothing seemed sweeter than spending Thanksgiving by myself, finding one of the few open restaurants in town, usually a place with ESPN and fake Tiffany lamps, reading a good book, eating a hamburger and drinking a beer.
As I grew older, I began to miss Thanksgiving again, but by that time I had embraced the itinerant life of a chef and I was usually too far from home.
At some point, I started to accept invitations from people I barely knew. One Thanksgiving, I spent with a born-again couple (yams with miniature marshmallows, sports and devotional programs on the biggest screen TV I’d ever seen).
Another with a rowdy group of recovering alcoholics (lots of black coffee and instead of football after dinner, a game of Truth or Dare). As a chef, it was my pleasure to carve their turkeys with my Japanese knives, to brighten their gravies with fresh sage and aged sherry vinegar (no sherry for the alcoholics), and finally to give out the judicious, prized compliment of a professional to the non-professional cook (“wow, is that orange zest in your cranberry relish?”).
The last time I accepted one of these invitations, I found myself at a doctor’s home in a gated community. Everything about the house was on a grand scale. The pantry was as big as a bodega, the dining room the size of a mess hall.
I could see the doctor’s 6-year-old boy observing me. I let him hold my carving knife, and explained to him that it was a single piece of forged steel with a very special beveled blade. I wondered if he took in my unplaceable accent and vintage clothes, noticed my battered car parked next his family’s immaculate SUV. And I realized that I too would probably become one of those strange, stray figures who inhabit a child’s memory of Thanksgiving.
Duo chef John Broening and his fiancée, Yasmin Lozada-Hissom, Duo’s pastry chef, will spend Thanskgiving with their good friends Stefan and Susie in the usual way: good wines, greens from Red Wagon Farms, lots of dogs underfoot, and tawny port and board games after dinner.
Jane Hilberry
Cooking was not my mother’s greatest passion. She didn’t subscribe to the role of the 1950s aproned housewife who loved nothing better than baking brownies and keeping the appliances sparkling clean. She had better things to think about.
When we came home from school, my mother would likely be doing what she loved best: reading. She could whip through novels in a flash. And not trashy novels – not Harlequin romances or cheap detective fiction. My mother loved – and still loves – E.M. Forster, Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton.
Not as old-fashioned as my Grandmother Hilberry – who always insisted that stories must have a beginning, a middle, and an end – my mother did nonetheless like a protagonist who had some principles.
Those 1970s novelists who chronicled wife swapping and alcoholic rages were not to her taste. She’d put the book down in disgust: “I don’t like any of these characters!”
The characters my mother did like, in real life, came from all over the world. At Thanksgiving, my sisters and I would be ranged around the table among the college exchange students who couldn’t fly home to Africa or Japan over the short break.
After the fall of Saigon in April 1975, we ate Thanksgiving dinner with the Vietnamese refugees to whom my mother taught English. They told vivid stories of the helicopters landing on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon while families scrambled to get on board.
One of these students, Phap, fell in love with Maria, a Mexican woman, while they were taking my mother’s classes. They decided to marry. Her family violently opposed the marriage because, as Phap explained, he didn’t know “the Bible book.”
One evening my mother got wind of the fact that Maria’s brother might be coming to class – with a gun – to set the young lovers straight. My mother instructed Maria and Phap to leave the building. Eventually, Maria’s parents reconciled themselves to the union, and her whole family attended the ceremony, as did my parents. Later, Maria and Phap attended my older sister’s wedding.
This year my parents, now in their late 70s and early 80s, will again hold the traditional Thanksgiving at their house. The fare will include the standard green-bean casserole and cranberry jelly from a can. My younger sister will be there with the Mexican son she adopted eight years ago with her Jordanian husband. Very likely they’ll be joined by friends or friends-to-be from France or Iran or Korea.
I won’t be there – I’m teaching in Canada this Thanksgiving. Since Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving on their own schedule, the meal I eat on Thursday won’t involve pumpkin pie. Instead of observing the holiday with food, I’ll be celebrating in my mother’s style, celebrating my mother’s values, by dining at an international table. I’ll be learning how Canadian elections work and enjoying the way Canadians end their sentences with “eh?”
And on the airplane I’ll be reading Edith Wharton.
Jane Hilberry, professor of English at Colorado College, was awarded the 2006 Colorado Book Award for Poetry for her collection, “Body Painting.” Her newest book is “Get Smart! How E-Mail Can Make or Break Your Career and Your Organization.”
Tara Q. Thomas
The best Thanksgiving of my life I wouldn’t wish on anyone, ever.
Three weeks before the holiday, I got a call while on vacation in California. My apartment had been broken into, and my sister had been inside. I flew home to New York. She was shellshocked, lucky to be alive; the apartment had been ransacked, wires cut, everything of any value taken, the cats covered in the sooty black dust the detectives used to capture the evil man’s fingerprints.
There was no question: I couldn’t live here again, and I had to find my sister a safe space.
I took time off from work and pounded the sidewalks of Queens, looking for a space big enough for both of us that we could afford. After a couple of weeks, my landlord, in an unheard of gesture of generosity, made available a two-bedroom apartment in a different building at a cut-rate price. We both raced to move in and get back to work, trying to make up for lost time and lost things.
Any extra moments were spent with the detectives, who pointed out infamous crime spots as they tooled us around the neighborhood in a black Lincoln with smoked windows and shared tips on where to get great Italian ices.
As life felt like it was normalizing, a fracas in a nearby building resulted in a bevy of emergency vehicles, the sounds and lights of which sent us into a relapse. We hid in our new apartment, dining on takeout rotisserie chicken from the Peruvian joint, afraid to wonder out loud if life would ever return to something like normal.
Suddenly, it was nearly Thanksgiving. We hadn’t even ordered a turkey. Our parents were coming to town, so we went to the market, found a farmer who hadn’t reserved every last bird, and rounded up our supplies. Thursday we all gathered in our place and fell into the duties we’d always had back when we’d celebrated Thanksgiving at my parents house — mom on the bird and stuffing, me on pie duty, my sis on sides plus ambiance and décor, and dad on providing support via emergency trips to the bodega and a constant stream of praise for the tastes he stole here and there. There was comfort in the familiarity of the actions, a warmth reflected in the heat from the stove.
Finally, dinner was ready. We put a table in the middle of the living room and made a sideboard out of various extra chairs. My sis lit the candles while Dad carved the turkey; my mom fixed the cats some extra bits of meat. We sat down, looked around the table, and thanked our lucky stars (and that landlord).
Tara Q. Thomas, senior editor of Wine & Spirits, has a lot to be thankful for again this Thanksgiving: her 5-month-old daughter, Laila, who isn’t quite ready for turkey.
