What I cooked (and ate) on my Thanksgiving vacation

I haven’t written this year about the 100-mile Thanksgiving challenge, but eating locally was, as usual, on my mind when planning and shopping for this year’s Thanksgiving dinner. Also on my mind? The Thanksgiving menu. You know, those dishes from childhood without which it won’t quite feel like Thanksgiving. The foods I’m not prepared to give up, no matter how far from here the ingredients were grown.

Although we were cooking dinner for only three this year, we still had to trot out the full menu:

• Roast Turkey - a pasture-raised turkey just tastes different, especially the dark meat, which is richer and gamier (in a good way). Running around a pasture is good for those turkeys’ legs!
• Turkey Apple Cider Gravy with Calvados - inspired by Elisson’s menu, and the bottle of fresh, local cider sitting on the counter. This year, the giblets went into the stockpot.
• Cornbread Dressing - for me, it’s just not Thanksgiving dinner without cornbread dressing. You can take the girl out of Texas…
• Mashed Potatoes - purple Vikings, a strikingly white-fleshed, particularly creamy potato, mashed skins-on with milk and butter.
• Sweet Potatoes - another must-have, mashed with ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, cayenne and vanilla. And a touch of honey and butter.
• Green Beans - purchased at the farmers’ market at their prime in September, blanched and frozen. When thawed, these needed nothing more than warming in a skillet with a little butter.
• Cranberry sauce - cranberries, apple cider and honey, plus spices.
• Cranberry-orange relish - from the recipe on the back of the Ocean Spray bag. For years I thought this was an old family recipe.
• Apple pie - remarkably, the first double-crusted fruit pie I’ve ever baked. Vodka-assisted pie crust (recipe in this month’s Cook’s Illustrated) filled with four varieties of apples (Melrose, Bramley Seedling, Karmijn de Sonneville, Spitzenburg) tossed with cinnamon/nutmeg/vanilla/lemon zest/sugar. I’m going to have to bake more pie.

Where’d we get all that food? Here’s more than you probably want to know:

Local foods, bought directly from the producer at the Ballard and U-District Farmers Markets:

• Turkey - Skagit River Ranch, Sedro Woolley, WA - 75 miles
• Duck Eggs - Sea Breeze Farm, Vashon Island, WA - 15 miles
• Dairy products - Smith Brothers Farms, Royal City, WA - 138 miles
• Potatoes (purple Viking) - Olsen Farms, Colville, WA - 216 miles
• Onions - Anselmos, Snohomish, WA - 24 miles
• Celery - Sidhu Farms, Puyallup, WA - 31 miles
• Apples - Jones Creek Farms, Lyman, WA - 75 miles, and Booth Canyon Orchard, Carlton, WA - 112 miles
• Apple cider and honey - Rockridge Orchards, Enumclaw, WA - 34 miles
• Green beans - farmer at Ballard Farmers Market, from Yakima, WA - 112 miles
• Herbs (parsley, sage, thyme) - farmers at U-District Farmers’ Market, from King County, WA - ~20 miles miles

Washington-grown foods from our locally-owned grocery store:

• Cranberries - Ocean Spray is a co-op of growers from MA, WI and WA. I assume our berries are from Washington’s Cranberry Coast, near Grayland, WA - 99 miles

Grown beyond Washington, from our locally-owned grocery store:

• Cornmeal - from Bob’s Red Mill, in Milwaukie, OR. Who knows where the corn was grown.
• Flour - from Fairhaven Organic Flour Mill, in Bellingham, WA. Wheat from Utah.
• Sweet potatoes - One of the farmers at the Queen Anne market had sweet potatoes this summer, and I didn’t think to buy any to store for Thanksgiving. These were probably from Louisiana.
• Orange, lemon - from California.

Already around the house: baking powder, sugar, salt, coffee, spices.

Hey, you made it all the way to here? Are you tired? Hungry? I sure am. Time for a mug of hot tea with lemon and honey (that sore throat is lingering), and perhaps a bit more pie. Mmm… pie.