The Situation of Squooshed Stuffing
You can do it! A final Kitchen Shrink before Thanksgiving. I'm taking tomorrow off!
But later today, I’ll be LIVE on Substack with the glorious Clare de Boer of The Best Bit. Tune in at 1pm EST and ask us anything and everything! Get the app, below!
Dear Tamar:
With Thanksgiving fast approaching, how do I make best use of meager oven and fridge space? And related, how many side dishes do we really need? And further related, how do I tell a guest that we’re all set on food (without making them feel left out)?
-Squooshed stuffing
Dear Squooshed,
These are all great questions, and with so little time to spare, I’ll refrain from any anecdotes.
Make best use of meager oven and fridge space by jettisoning the false binary that plagues American cooks. Your options are not limited to: Hot or Cold. I once…(oh, dear, I do have an anecdote simmering) cooked a large pork belly for my then-boss’s 45th birthday dinner. I couldn’t fit it in my little San Francisco fridge, so I left it, in its salty-sweet brine, on my back porch, with heavy weights on top. Have you been to San Francisco? It is colder than the average fridge. But that aside: you have many temperatures available to you, even if you aren’t in the Bay Area. Outside your house, for example, the night almost certainly gets cold enough to store even dairy. Any vegetable but lettuce will be fine left, either cooked or raw, in the kitchen, covered, overnight, unless your kitchen is well-heated all night long. Mine is chilly. It hovers around 60. I would certainly trust stuffing, Brussels sprouts, squashes, and potatoes in it overnight. What if you have the sort of casserole my aunt Liz used to make: pureed sweet potato with marshmallows on top? The sort you keenly made a day ahead, even assembling the marshmallows on top like perky little soldiers? Leave it out on the counter. It will be fine. On Thanksgiving, aka tomorrow, nothing needs to be refrigerated. Even heavy cream will be fine sitting out in the kitchen from 9 am until it’s used. Also: the less chilling you do, the less heating you have to do. If everything is room temperature an hour before dinner, it won’t take much but a little ten-minute-Tetris-per-dish for each to get hot enough to eat. (Fine, some will take fifteen.) Think of what you like room temperature: Brussels sprouts, for example, and maybe turkey. Heat those first and let them sit and temper. Do you have any dishes that can be reheated on the stove? Certainly mashed potatoes or mashed sweet potatoes, which I prescribed to Chicken Little on Monday. Frankly, even turkey in a roasting dish or sauté pan would heat up happily on a burner if it needed to.
The answer to this question is always the same. It is three. Three is a magic number in as many ways as we’ve conceived of magic. The number you need is three. Now, you may want more. You may look at your prep list of turkey, stuffing, roast vegetable, and pureé, and think: Piece of cake. That thought may inspire a yearning for corn bread or biscuits. If the yearning must be sated, make them. Or ride the desire until it disappears. For the record, no one needs a salad on Thanksgiving.
You say: “No, thank you! We’ve got a great plan already. Please bring a wide assortment of bars of chocolate. Fun ones. Oh, and a bottle of Scotch.”
Dear cook, I’m being glib. Your questions are valid. My answers are insufficient, born of what I think and what matters to me. But perhaps they’ll at least give you a bit of relief, and make your fridge and your soul feel less squooshed and stuffed.
