Cooking at Home: Thanksgiving in Spain, Part I preparations

Nov 29

Nov 29 Cooking at Home: Thanksgiving in Spain, Part I preparations

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, because it revolves around food. Overseas, I think Thanksgiving takes on even more meaning because it's the most "American" of holidays (besides July 4 I suppose, which is more symbolically American but one doesn't celebrate it in the familial manner of Thanksgiving).

For the second year, I hosted a Thanksgiving dinner at home. Preparing Thanksgiving on a workday makes one very jealous of those back in the US who get the day off! So this of course calls for preparations ahead of time. In fact, my Excel spreadsheet with day-by-day and hour-by-hour (on the day of) schedule showed that I should get started a week before.

First is some supermarket grocery shopping. Lots of butter as always, and since pecans are extremely hard to find in Spain (and outrageously expensive, like $6 for a snack sized portion), I got walnuts instead to make walnut bars instead of my favorite, pecan pie.

I got started ahead with making cornbread, making it in a large cazuela usually reserved for arroz al horno saves a lot of time. Two batches in one go! I also made a bunch of dinner rolls. Here they are already baked, but I froze a couple more batches before the second rise, so that they could defrost and rise the day before Thanksgiving.

Then a couple days before, I went early in the morning before work to pick up my fresh turkey which I had reserved in advance. I went to the same stall that sold me the turkey last year (the only ones in the market who had a whole bird!).

Then I went to my usual vegetable stand and got a couple kilos of the green beans from that big pile in the corner.

The haul from the market, including some lovely fresh herbs on the right.

The boniato is the closes thing to sweet potatoes that I could find - they have a brilliant purplish-red skin and firm orange-yellow interior.

Then I got some nice mushrooms, including the rovellons (Catalan/Valenciano) on the left. They translate as saffron milk caps, and are very seasonal, only appearing at this time of year. They also vary a lot in price, with the larger ones fetching a higher price (and the bits and pieces of broken ones being the cheapest; they are quite fragile).

One thing that I love about buying meat in Spain is that the butchers are excellent. I didn't want to roast the turkey whole, but instead wanted to roast only the breast while I confit the dark meat. So I asked the butcher to cut the parts exactly as I wanted, saving the spine and wing tips to make gravy... in advance!