Chicken Little's Cry for Help

Surprise! This week you'll get a Kitchen Shrink each day leading up to Thanksgiving. I'll take the holiday off.

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Dear Tamar:

I know, I know, it’s clichéd that I’m even asking this on Thanksgiving week, but I’m hosting my family this year for the first time. I’ve ordered a 15-pound bird from a local farm and haven’t the slightest idea how to cook a turkey! As someone who is hardly a meat eater, I’m anxious to provide this for the 11 people I’ll be feeding. I also have no idea how to manage sequencing of cooking and refrigerating of this main and all the other traditional (and untraditional) dishes we may serve. I’ll have a house full of guests all week with one regular-sized fridge and one oven. Help!

Yours,

Chicken Little

Dear Chicken Little,

I’ve often thought how radically unfair it was that we don’t host at home very much, but seem to expect ourselves to go from zero to sixty painlessly when we do—on Thanksgiving, usually, or more indirectly, our weddings.

If I had a time machine, I would provide you a marathon-type training schedule—the kind that asks runners to start several months ahead, running short distances, taking days to recover, building muscles by lifting weights. You would begin, several months ago, by roasting quails for four guests. On recovery days, you’d read recipes in your recliner while eating pizza. To build muscle, you’d roast vegetables in the morning, leave them out during the day, and reheat them with a drizzle of oil and broth in the oven that evening. Soon, you’d be roasting a whole chicken, serving six to eight. You would add a puree of some kind—maybe rutabaga? squash? potato—to your make-ahead training, and get used to paying close attention to tasting as it reheated. By Thanksgiving, in three days, you’d just be doing what you’d practiced, with extra adrenaline to get you over the finish line.

I don’t have a time machine. We’re stuck in an unfortunate situation where you’re running a marathon you haven’t trained for. That is a bad idea. I think, therefore, that we should find ways to change the nature of the race.

Let’s start with the menu. We need one that is tailored to being made ahead. I’ll propose one below, and then prescribe timing and explain why I’ve made the prescriptions I have:

• Roast turkey

• Stuffing

• Mashed sweet potatoes

• Roasted Brussels sprouts or other*

• Optional canned cranberry sauce

Today is Monday. Time to gather ingredients. First, gather the stale bread for your stuffing. I make mine with cubes of crustless stale bread. If you don’t have bread that’s staling, consider calling a friend who does. If not, buy two good loaves, remove the crusts with a serrated knife, then cut the insides into cubes. Put these on cookie sheets and leave them, uncovered, in the kitchen. They’ll be stale by Wednesday. There are loads of stuffing recipes. I recommend the simplest you can find, but with the omission of dried herbs. This one will be just as good as the most complicated without any fuss. You should make the stuffing on Wednesday and keep it in the fridge or sitting out (more on this below.) If you can, go shopping for the rest of your ingredients today. Even the vegetables will be fine bought today. I promise.

On Tuesday morning, you’ll salt your turkey. You will salt it like you are Father Snow and it’s the first day of winter. You’ll give it a nice snowfall, inside and out, and then place it on a rack over a cookie sheet in your refrigerator. The NY Times just published this spice mix for layering over a turkey before roasting. I think a simpler version of the spice mixture, maybe omitting the birds’ eye chilies for young tongues, is worth doing. The spice mix will be pressed onto the skin tomorrow night, so you can put this out of mind for now.

On Tuesday night, roast sweet potatoes for your mash. Why do I advise sweet potatoes over regular Idahos? Because their different starch and sugar makeup make them much more forgiving. Buy a bunch of sweet potatoes—maybe 10?—wash and prick them with a fork. Bake them on a tray until they’re soft to the touch, let them cool, then scoop out the insides. Now you have most of your puree. Put it into the smallest container it’ll fit in and refrigerate it. On Thursday, you’ll dump it into a food processor, add a cup of melted butter, 1/2 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste, a thought of cinnamon, and a little drizzle of heavy cream. You’ll puree this to smooth, taste for salt and adjust, then remove it to a little pot to sit at room temperature. 5 minutes before eating, you’ll heat it up, stirring, over low heat. You can bang these around as much as you want; they’ll still be good and won’t turn to glue. Also, you don’t need gravy. Plus, they’re healthy and delicious, and you can turn leftovers into great pumpkin muffins or scones if you have my leftovers book.

It’s Wednesday. Have you already made sure you’ve done all the shopping? If not, finish up. Decide if you want cranberry sauce. Canned cranberry sauce is the apex of the category—if you’re going to have any, have it the easy way, which is also the best. If you haven’t already chosen which vegetable to roast, choose, then get a lot of it. *Do not be wooed by the idea of more sides, or more vegetables. Simply cooking one, correctly, in abundance, will feel much more sane, and feel much more luxurious on the table to the eaters. Trust me. I chose Brussels sprouts because you can get a lot of them, halve them—even today if you want—then before roasting, mix them with a lot of olive oil and salt and roast them at 400 until crisp and perfect. Do this an hour before you want to eat, then pull them out and let them stay at room temperature. Whatever you choose, make it one. Today is a good time to make your stuffing. The bread is stale, the day is young, hope springs eternal. Follow the instructions above, then set the stuffing aside. If there’s no room in the fridge, this will be fine room temperature overnight. If that freaks you out, put it, covered, in your mudroom or whatever is coldest. On Wednesday night, pat your turkey very dry then cover it with your own version of the spice mixture. Put it back in the fridge. Go to sleep early.

Thursday morning, remove the turkey from the fridge and put it on the counter, preheat your oven to 425, and make coffee. Get your stuffing back inside if it’s in the mudroom. Remove the sweet potatoes from the fridge and dump them in the food processor—you’ll turn them into mash while the turkey is in the oven. These general instructions for roasting the turkey itself are good. In principle, it’s just: start it high—425—then after 30 minutes, lower it to 325 and let it finish low. It’ll probably take two hours. Start checking at 1 1/2. You can use a thermometer, or use a knife, cut a bit off, and taste it. Now that the turkey is roasting, puree the potatoes, prepare the vegetables for roasting, vacuum, do whatever table setting you want, and go for a jog.

When the turkey is done, remove it from the oven and let it cool. When it is, carve it, put the meat in a roasting pan with high sides or large sauté pan, and let it sit at room temperature. Pour the roasting juice into a little pitcher or bowl.

An hour or so before you want to eat, roast your vegetables. When they’re done, lower the oven to 350 and reheat the stuffing and turkey, with some of its juices poured over it. Heat the sweet potatoes in a pot until bubbling. Tip out the can of cranberry sauce and do what you like.

Dear cook, I’ve told you nothing about appetizers, about serving drinks, about how our local wine shop proprietor swears by Domaine Tempier rosé with turkey. You’ll have to work on all that on your own. Hopefully, my having broken your marathon into stages will leave you room to. And hopefully you no longer feel like the sky is falling.