Monday Night Dinner

My perennial New Year’s Resolution is to stop looking at people like they’re moronic, not because people aren’t frequently stupid but because it seems impolitic and like a wearying way to go through life.  This resolution gets harder and harder to remember the later in the year that it becomes.

In an effort to make it through the end of the year without egregiously transgressing on my own resolution I’d like to request a moratorium on idiotic questions (also on people who don’t understand the serial comma, and end sentences on prepositions).  I mean the kind of questions that you could answer yourself if you spent even a moment to think before you spoke.  Questions like, “The copier says it’s out of paper, what should I do?” And my inevitable least favorite question of the year, which appears without fail in the week before and after Thanksgiving – “do the French/Swiss/Chinese/name any other nationality in the world celebrate Thanksgiving?” No obviously not, seeing as how the entire narrative of Thanksgiving is about coming to America and then unexpectedly managing to survive despite being wildly unprepared.

Other countries have their own long boring stories that foster a sense of national identity through a historical memory of shared suffering and then triumph, and probably end in food.  The Dutch (or at least highly select portions of the Dutch population) have the Relief of Leiden which ends in hutspot.  The Swiss have Swiss National Day which involves roasting sausages and cheese over open fires in August.  More endearingly the Genevois have the Escalade which commemorates the unorthodox but effective use of a stew pot as a weapon of war and is thus celebrated with chocolate marmites filled with marzipan vegetables.  Not to mention the entire Jewish diaspora who are currently gorging themselves on latkes to celebrate Hanukkah (distractingly my Outlook calendar spells it Chunukah which is a variation I’ve never seen before).

Equally, I’m assuming that you’ve never asked yourself why you don’t build bonfires and burn straw men on November 5th because you probably don’t care about remembering the day someone failed to blow up the Houses of Parliament in England.  Nor have you ever considered staging a parade on July 14th to celebrate the storming of the Bastille and founding the modern French nation.  But if you’re going to ask me every year again if they celebrate Thanksgiving in Paris, I’m going to start responding by asking these questions.  Or possibly I’ll direct you to David Lebovitz’s recent post on the subject because it made me laugh.

Stupid questions notwithstanding I enjoyed Thanksgiving last week, not the least of which because I took Wednesday off and spent five glorious days going to museum exhibits, shopping and eating.  Now I’m back and I’m doing what everyone does the week after Thanksgiving, which is to say mildly panicking about all the stuff that needs to get done before Christmas, and trying to come up with creative ways to dispose of Thanksgiving leftovers.

Jes has a tasty solution for leftover mashed sweet potatoes.  I’m mildly boggled by the idea that you’d have leftover sweet potatoes – in my experience they’re like leftover mashed potatoes (mythical and only ever encountered in stories) but the soup sounds good even if you had to roast potatoes deliberately to achieve it.  I’m offering up a solution for what to do with leftover turkey before you throw the bones into a soup pot and boil them up for stock.  You can, obviously, make Turkey Tetrazzini with them and I highly encourage you to do so.  But, if you had Thanksgiving Dinner on Thursday and then proceeded to eat your way through the rest of the weekend and were looking for something a little lighter, Butternut Squash Chili is also a good way to go.

Butternut Squash Chili
Corn Bread
Salad

Butternut Squash Chili
I substitute about 2-3 cups of chopped leftover meat for the 1lb of ground turkey that the recipe calls for.  That actually probably makes it a little meatier than it would be ordinarily, but that’s not a bad thing and I needed something to do with the meat I stripped off the turkey carcass.  If you wanted to make this with meat instead of ground turkey but didn’t have a spare roasted bird lying around your fridge just roast 1-2lb of bone-in dark meat (legs, thighs, leg quarters) until done and strip the meat off the bone and then proceed as normal.

Recipe previously given:  Same Bat Place

Corn Bread

Recipe previously given:  Chili Take II