Thanksgiving Bliss

It's the end of the semester, and I should be grading. I've been grading non-stop for the last month, or at least it feels that way, which is why I am a month behind in blog posts and over a week tardy in singing the praises of my father's Thanksgiving. My dad can cook. He is largely hampered by having to cook for my mother, who does not have an adventurous palette. Things she doesn't like include: any cheese with noticeable funk, mushrooms, and salt. My father, who is a generous soul, believes my mother is a super-taster, and thus is overwhelmed by strong flavors. Me, I'm far less generous, so I just think she has an aversion to flavor. I remember her response when I asked her what the food had been like during a month long trip to New Zealand. "It was good," she said, "I suppose. If you like fresh herbs." Fortunately, my mother has a large list of good attributes to offset her gustatory shortcomings.

One of the results of the mother's food preferences is that my father has become a master of the basics. His vegetables are never mushy, his fish is always just the perfect side of flakey, and he can roast a mean bird. This year's fowl of choice was a ginormous fresh turkey from Costco. He stuffed the neck cavity but not the body cavity with my mother's traditional stuffing: pork sausage, seasoned bread crumbs, and diced apples. The rest of the dressing he roasted in a casserole, spooning some of the fatted drippings from the bird over the top during the last half hour of baking so that it tasted like turkey and had a glorious crunchy top. The bird he roasted almost entirely breast down. We took it out to flip it, only to discover that it was done early. Incidently, flipping a fully hot, twenty-three pound, partially stuffed turkey is difficult. We had clean towels and giant utensils, but we forget the most important equipment of all: safety glasses. A little bit of hot, fatty stuffing hit me in the eyebrow. Don't worry, it wasn't my scorning eyebrow, so I can still teach. But still, Norm Abrams would be so disappointed. Other than having to sacrifice my face for the meal, the meat was sublime. Dad worked a double thermometer, one in the dark meat and one in the breast meat. Both turned out beautifully, and the dark meat skin was dark and crispy. The picture does credit only to the frenzy this turkey caused on its arrival at the table.

The other result of my mother's palette peccadilloes is that when my dad and I get together, we feast ourselves on all that is strong, funky, and makes life good. When he visited Spokane in October, we went to Saunders for a cheese plate. I picked out a goat cheese that tasted like the inside of a none too clean barn, and Dad found a soft, fragrant blue. Mom got some sort of cheddar. In keeping with this tradition, I picked up a couple of fresh Oregon black truffles for Dad and I to play with for Thanksgiving. (I bought them at the Whole Foods in downtown Portland, but Huckleberry's also carries them during the season, which is right about now. I've even seen them at Rocket in the past, but I haven't seen there this year yet.)

Truffles taste like sweet earth. They are not exactly mushroomy, at least not the way criminis or even porcinis are. You feel the flavor as much as you taste it and smell it. They can overwhelm other flavors, and it is hard to think "delicate" and "truffles" in the same sentence. We knew that we wanted to do something with these nuggets of goodness that would showcase their flavor without killing the turkeyness of the star attraction. Dad and I hit the cookbooks while Mom went to the internet. We came up with a variation of the classic french Sauce Perigeaux. We grated about a third of the truffles into a cup or so of good Madeira and reduced it to a syrup. We added that to about half of the gravy, grating in the rest of the truffles. The result was rich, a little sweet, with a good hit of truffle balanced with the richness of the homemade turkey stock and pan drippings. Plus, the less adventurous eaters at the table still had half of the gravy.

At the end of the feasting, there was plenty of plain gravy left, but only about two tablespoons of the truffle gravy. Mom asked Dad if it was worth saving it, and he just grabbed a spoon and ate it like soup. I was jealous he got to it first.

I have a wonderful life, and I am thankful for more things than I can list. I want to add to that list that truffles grow in the Northwest. And that I will be done with this semester's grading in a few short weeks.