Signal Boost

Dad: "You look much more chill this year. Fewer rebellious menu elements?"
Me: "AHAHAHAHAHA."
Mom: "I still remember the year you did the Peking duck. That was stressful."
Me: "We learned our lesson. Outsource cooking the bird.*"

* unless it's roasting a chicken, something either of us could do in our sleep

Happy Asian American Thanksgiving, year ... uh, whatever it is since we've been doing this formally, composing our Thanksgiving banquet menus to be primarily if not entirely recipes by Asian American cooks and chefs. Year 8? But we've been perfectly happy to give up on the turkey and just eat something yummy and celebratory, along with a bounty of sides.

- Main: Knowing both that Leonard and Sara were doing their own experimental turkey roast and planning on sharing if it worked out, and that there would be at least one additional meat sauce option on the table, we went with pork belly again. This time, we did Kristina Cho's Chop Shop Pork Belly, from her Chinese Enough cookbook. Lovely crispy skin on top, succulent meaty bottom, served over jade pearl rice (which was pretty and interesting and just a little sweet to balance; I'd be curious about making a horchata out of it!), and it paired incredibly well with ...

- Cranberry Sauce: Kay Chun's Cranberry-Asian Pear Chutney, always and forever. (Forgot to pick up mandarins to make another version I've been meaning to try, but I'll probably do that later this week.) This year's amusing highlight, though, was that the last time I bought raisins, they were "giant" ones from the bulk bin at Berkeley Bowl. Leonard: "Um, Lynne, are those grapes in your cranberry sauce?" Me: "No, they're raisins, I swear!" Said giant raisins rehydrated enough in the cranberry sauce to look like full-on grapes.

- Stuffing: Mandy Lee's Red Hot Oyster Kimchi Dressing has been on my bucket list bakes forever, and now I'm mad at myself for waiting so long. "Oh, but I have to get oysters, and I really want to do it with the gochujang bread, and what if some people think it's too spicy?" Everybody loved it. We will be repeating this before next Thanksgiving, maybe as soon as Christmas. Maybe even with oyster kimchi to make it extra oyster-y. If you haven't had oyster dressing/stuffing, with or without kimchi, this recipe has completely convinced me of its deliciousness. Even the Chron had an oyster stuffing recipe this year. Time to bring it back!

- Orange Veg: After several years in a row of squash soups, it was time to shake things up; we called on our old fave, kaddo bourani. Sweet pumpkin echoing the sweet potato casseroles of our younger days, tempered with a meat sauce full of warming spices and a garlic-mint-yogurt topper.

- Potatoes: Likewise, with the potatoes, I wanted "not cheesy scallion, not maple miso, make something up, we're both Asian American, it'll still count for Asian American Thanksgiving!" hyounpark took that decision off my plate, thank you dear, and made mashed potatoes with toasted ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, soy sauce, and sesame oil. It tasted good, but note to our future selves: when you run out of regular soy sauce, substituting dark soy sauce is going to result in mashed potatoes the color of gravy, just be warned. :)

- Green Veg, Cooked: Made Andrea Nguyen's Sesame Salt Greens again (from her cookbook Ever Green Vietnamese). This time, with collard greens; probably should've cooked them a little longer, but that's okay.

- Green Veg, Raw: Leonard and Sara brought a salad with pomegranates and persimmons from their tree and it was exactly the right balance to all the other heavy stuff on the table.

- Dessert: the triumphant return of Alana Kysar's Liliko'i Chiffon Pie (from her cookbook Aloha Kitchen) to the table. We get our arm workout in every year making the passionfruit curd, but the results are well worth it. Even when yours truly realizes at 3:30 pm Thanksgiving Eve that actually, we *are* out of gelatin powder, and I'm going to have to go Brave The Grocery Store. Didn't find gelatin powder, but did find gelatin sheets, and learned a new thing, so it worked out!

*

Things that did not make it to the table this year, but hopefully will next year:

- Cornbread. I really did want to solve the custard cornbread problem. I was trying to de-dairify the custard-filled cornbread that used to be on our Thanksgiving table every year until our collective lactose intolerance got to be too much for even Lactaid to help with. But having talked to ladyjax's professional chef spouse, there may not be an alternative milk out there that's going to behave the same way heavy cream does from a chemistry perspective, alas.

I made two batches and both were big enough fails we weren't going to inflict the results on anyone. One used coconut cream, the other used A2 cow milk cream. In both cases, the cream that was supposed to sink below the top layer chocoflan/impossible cake style, forming its own transverse plane surrounded by two layers of cornbread in the vertical center of the cake? Pooled in the center of the pan like creamy lava in the horizontal center of the cake, with a ring of perfectly normal cornbread around the outside. It tasted fine, but the texture was obviously wrong.

I'm going to go back to basics and try making the original recipe with bog-standard commercial heavy cream to make sure even the original still works, sigh. Maybe in a few weeks. When I can stand to look at cornbread again.

The cornbread part itself came out just fine, though! I've wanted to make a cornbread with the same flavors as Betty Liu's lemongrass corn soup; I added lemongrass and shallots and scallions and used coconut milk as a base for our cornbread, and that part was great.

- Deviled eggs. I forgot I was going to use up most of the eggs on the chiffon pie, so didn't follow through. But I want to put chicharones on my deviled eggs the next time I make them! Just trying to decide what else should go into the filling or as a topping.

- Cheesecake. Following up on my successes with burnt Basque cheesecakes, I wanted to try to make one with the truffle cream cheese from one of our local bagel bakeries. I will in fact do that, and probably bring it to coffee ride this week! But the pie was enough for everybody.

*

Ten days out from Break Bread, trying to cram the Bach Magnificat into my brain, somehow having never performed any part of it before in four decades of choral singing. This is a CRAPTON of trills, peeps. At least I already have one of the Whitney Houston songs we're singing down flat (I can absolutely get up on stage right now and sing I Wanna Dance With Somebody from memory, and could have done so any time from 1987 on), and the same with the Hallelujah Chorus. Which leaves three other newer songs to learn quickly. Tis the season!

(We survived Verdi, but that's another post entirely!)