Give thanks for the unlikeliest of seven-layer dips.

Seven layers of Thanksgiving classics, served on toast points. © Ryan Schierling

It's the last day of November and your Thanksgiving leftovers, if there are any left over, are languishing. 

Every turkey-day legacy recipe has already been searched for and modified. There's nothing new or interesting under the waning Fall sun, and you're about to dig the remains out of the fridge and drop them into a pet dish. It's the feast he/she/it has been waiting for all along – so many hours of preparation and work, the vestiges dumped into your dog's bowl on the floor and devoured in large, breathless, indiscriminate gulps in a matter of seconds. 

Though sometimes disturbed, I am not weak and/or unimaginative in the kitchen (see this, this or this.) Chez nous, these pets, our cats, are absolutely not getting my leftovers, my legacy. Cranberries and dressing probably aren't even good for them.

If you're lucky, you should have at least a wee bit of six of these seven layers already. There is dressing, mashed potatoes, turkey gravy, sweet potatoes in some form or fashion (this year we had sweet potato gratin in poblano cream), green bean casserole and cranberry sauce. The odd man out is turkey liver pate, which both utilizes some of the giblets and provides the backbone for this spread. 

Grandma's turkey and noodles.

(L) Grandma in the kitchen. (R) Turkey & noodles, center stage. © Ryan Schierling

When the time to taste-test the noodles comes, Grandma Dot is curt, and slightly critical. "They're tough," she says immediately. "They need more time." For those noodles, we will gladly, patiently, reverently wait, year after year.

In this age of ever-faster food there is one ingredient often unavailable – one that not everyone can afford, and that ingredient is time.

This recipe is a legacy, going back more than 100 years and at least four generations in our family. It may predate my Great Grandma Carpenter, but hers was the first turkey and noodles I remember having as a young child. When I was a bit older, Grandma Dot's holiday meals weren't complete without turkey and noodles. My mom's been making them for years as well, and I've finally gotten a hand on the family egg noodle recipe to go with my own turkey stock.

If you like chicken and dumplings, you'll love these noodles, simple and swaddled in a velvety turkey stock thickened by the flour-dusted noodles themselves. Served over mashed potatoes, they are the holiday side that everyone in our family looks forward to more than the main course itself. But, they take time.

A turkey Hajj (or "pilgrimage to Mecca").

Open-faced hot turkey sandwich. © Ryan Schierling

I'm totally with you, internets! We don't need 400 new recipes to create from Thanksgiving leftovers. We know that the best way to eat them is just to eat them. Sometimes, it's only a matter of reconfiguring them on the plate. This particular arrangement happens to be my favorite.

My story begins in a wonderfully gritty little dive bar/café – Mecca Cafe. It is this establishment that I have to thank for my sincere appreciation of turkey. Located in the heart of Seattle's Lower Queen Anne neighborhood, it is a stone's throw from the Space Needle and was walking distance from our old place. It is every bit as unpretentious and personable as its motto, which reads, "Alcoholics serving alcoholics since 1929." Split into two separate spaces, they serve stiff drinks on one side and offer rock-solid comfort food on the other, in true old-diner style.

And I know I am not the only one to have found delicious respite in their particular style of open-faced hot turkey sandwich.

"On a bad day, one of their good greasy breakfasts or the hot open-faced turkey sandwich might just save your life." - The Stranger, Dec 13, 2007

Most Thanksgivings I have had the opportunity to eat turkey, but most of those years I took a pass on the bird. My general opinion was that eating turkey just wasted stomach space for the really yummy things on the holiday menu, like mashed potatoes with dressing and gravy. And pie.

But one fateful day nine years ago, months away from any gratitude-based festivities, I made the acquaintance of the open-faced hot turkey sandwich at Mecca. I was smitten. Thick slices of egg bread, 1/8" cuts of turkey breast that pulled apart easily with a fork, and a fluffy heap of mashed potatoes all generously drenched in warm delicious gravy… sigh… a revelation.

I don't recall if someone recommended it to me that day, or if I ordered it on a whim. I'm not even sure if I was alone or with a friend. All I remember is that it was a turning-point. I was eating the most amazing turkey plate I had ever eaten in my life and realizing that this was what a holiday meal involving turkey aspired to be. Oh, the gratitude!

There's nothing fancy at all about a hot turkey sandwich. It's a straightforward layering of sliced turkey over bread, snugged up to a pile of mashed potatoes, then all topped with turkey gravy and served with a big spoonful of cranberry sauce. But each element is important; flimsy honey-wheat bread, dried out Butterball®, rehydrated Idaho® Spuds™ and generic gravy from a jar are NOT going to give you the same sandwich. Also, the cranberry sauce had better be fresh because the gelatinous kind from a can will never deliver that wonderful sweet-tart sensation of a whole cranberry bursting between your teeth.

This year we planned for having adequate leftovers. All the extra home-cooked goodies for this meal were waiting in the refrigerator: roasted turkey, mashed potatoes with butter and cream, and cranberry sauce made with fruity cabernet. Bread was the only additional item we had to buy to make this – which actually worked out perfectly for us since we'd already gobbled down the sourdough dressing. Now that we're living in Texas, we decided to try it with a loaf of Texas Toast instead of egg bread. Because of its similarly-thick slices and light texture, it was a satisfying facsimile of the real deal. 

There are a thousand ways to dress up, dress down, and devour those Thanksgiving leftovers, but few more simple than this – unless you're eating things cold right out of the fridge. It is also the most turkey this quasi-vegetarian will probably ever eat off of one plate at a meal. Spicy pumpkin and smoked turkey risotto be damned. This weekend I'm going to have to insist on a hot turkey sandwich.

Stuffing, well-dressed.

Dressing. © Ryan Schierling

I have a confession to make.

I like Stove Top stuffing. What's more, the enjoyment of it makes me feel guilty. It makes me feel… dirty. I mean, I know how to make damn good scratch stuffing. Or, dressing. Or, whatever. But I like it. I like that hot, engineered-moist, melt-in-your-mouth processed-and-preserved-then-rehydrated bread product. I like the heavy-handed salt and powdered sage and MSG, seasoned as only a chain-smoking veteran corporate chef could do it. I love that all you have to add is a little water and a 1/4 cup "53% vegetable oil spread stick," (though we just used butter) and in five minutes you have stuffing (dressing).

I've kept this under wraps for a while, ever since Food TV became Food Network, and even more since the term "foodie" became so sickeningly ubiquitous. I've been embarrassed to buy guilty-pleasure box crap at the grocery store – hiding the occasional Totino's Party Pizza under a head of lettuce, tucking Kraft Macaroni & Cheese behind actual cheese and if I can't get the Slim Jims folded into the issue of Bon Appetit, I just take them out of the box and stick them in my shorts.

For what I like to call Thanksgiving "research," we bought a box of Stove Top Stuffing Mix (For Turkey with Real Turkey Broth) a few days ago. It cost $1.25. It was prepared and we ate it. We ate it all, right out of the pan, and we didn't really talk for a while after that.

Tonight, we made two different types of Thanksgiving dressing, each unrehearsed. By "unrehearsed," I mean that these are not really recipes we've cooked before, or have written down anywhere, or came from family members. It was sort of a "freestyle" stuffing night, starting with the basics - bread, onions and celery, savory liquid, and herbs.

I made homemade Stove Top. I was still a little enamored with the previous day's box, and so I used a mix of cubed and dried French and sourdough bread, sauteed onion and celery, chicken stock, fresh sage, flat-leaf parsley, thyme, and a bit of rosemary. I also used enough kosher salt to make that chain-smoking corporate chef proud. It was moist and delicious, and I didn't feel guilty at all afterward.

Julie bought acorn squash, and she put together some no-fooling-around proper stuffing that felt like Thanksgiving and tasted like Fall, with French bread, dried fruit and nuts, a little green apple, and some mandarin orange juice and brown sugar in the bottom of the halved squash. It was like no stuffing I'd ever eaten, and it made me feel like I'd really been slumming it with the Stove Top.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Ahem… fancy acorn squash stuffing recipe follows.

But I'm in the backyard burning leaves in a barrel / for the prettiest girl in all of the motor court*

Green bean casserole. © Ryan Schierling

*Unbunny - Casserole

I had no idea how important and influential Dorcas Reilly was in the gastronomic genome.

As it turns out, in 1955 she penned the most popular recipe to come out of the Campbell's® Soup Company corporate kitchen, ever. Coincientally, or not, it might be the most popular Thanksgiving recipe, ever.

Green Bean Casserole.

That's right. Dorcas' soup-label recipe for green bean casserole would become a classic dish, and Campbell's® would go on to sell more than $20 million worth of cream of mushroom soup each year just for making her green bean casserole.

$20 million. It boggles my bean. Really.

The traditional Campbell's® recipe calls for a can of Campbell's® Condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup, milk, soy sauce, cooked cut greens beans and French's® French Fried Onions. So, there could be freshly-picked, right-from-Grandma's-garden, honest-to-goodness green beans in there. But more likely, a can of cooked, cut green beans is going to be used, probably because now they're on the same supermarket endcap with the soup and french-fried onions.

I don't hold a grudge against this recipe or anyone who prepares it. It is simple, convenient, quick to fix and to the majority of us who grew up with it, flavored with nostalgia. (And MSG. Sorry… sorry. It's right there on the soup can before the soy protein concentrate and right after the dried whey).

Now, I'm not saying you need to fabricate some fancy-schmancy hot dish, made with old-world-French-heirloom haricots verts, $1,000-a-pound Japanese first-harvest matsutake mushrooms, cream from albino Florida Cracker cows and hand-rescued-orphaned-baby-shallots briefly-crisped in hot truffle oil.

But consider that this could be even more delicious when constructed from ingredients that didn't come in a can. Two pounds of fresh green beans, cut and cooked until just past squeaky to the tooth. Half a pound of chopped mushrooms and minced garlic sauteed in butter, then sprinkled with flour to begin a roux. Chicken or turkey stock whisked into the glue and a matching portion of heavy cream for your "cream of mushroom." Thin-sliced onions dusted with flour and quickly fried in hot oil.

This is a green bean casserole that is a little more effort than simply opening three cans and dumping them into a dish, but that whole half-hour of preparation just might make you a believer in the fresh and the real.

If not, no worries. Nostalgia occasionally trumps all, and I get that. Come Thanksgiving time, there's an endcap at the supermarket just for you.

Root to leaf.

Stuffed beets with greens. © Ryan Schierling

Ryan didn't grow up eating beets quite the way I did. What he remembers was more of the canned or pickled variety, which (unsurprisingly) didn't put beets on his "must have more of this" list. Although I'm not sure he'll ever recover entirely from this early aversion, it has been my great pleasure to share my appreciation of beets with him. So far, as long as I'm not asking him to eat a whole, roasted beet plain and keeping some goat cheese on hand, he's very much enjoying them.

We grew beets in our garden when I was little, and I loved them. There were a great many things from that garden that were canned or frozen every year in our home, but I don't remember beets being among them. It's a pretty good bet that it was limited, primarily-seasonal fair, which may have added to my attraction, as it was a pretty special deal to get beets and greens for dinner.

I was a picky enough eater as a kid. I hated fresh tomatoes (yes, even those sweet, perfect ones straight from the garden), fresh mushrooms, and green beens (unless they were either raw or canned French cut – go figure). But a few of the common culprits kids get picky about were on my favorites list. I loved broccoli, cauliflower and – to my mother's great astonishment – even brussel sprouts. Thanks to my parents' big garden and the mysteries of taste bud genetics, I enjoyed a lot of pretty delicious things straight from the earth as a child, beets among them. Beets were also my first introduction to cooked greens, and beet tops remain my favorite green to this day.

My mom was blessedly straightforward with the beet preparation. She usually cooked/steamed the beets on the stovetop with a little water. Or maybe she roasted them. I only remember them being deeply purple, tender and sweet. She never missed an opportunity to use the greens, either. She would simmer up those tops, add a little salt and finish them with a good squeeze of lemon juice (or more likely in those days, ReaLemon®). They were delicious eaten with the beets.

And so, the inspiration for these stuffed beets – using the whole beet. Simple flavors with pairs of compliments: goat cheese for the beets, lemon for the greens. Together, an earthy, sweet and tangy kind of pleasure. We prefer more vs. less goat cheese because it is just so delicious with the sweetness of the beets, but the truth is that you could omit it entirely and still have a very delicious beet.

Large beets are a side dish so fantastic that they could very well steal the show from your entree. Small beets make a perfect 'knife and fork' appetizer and the tiniest are a single, simple amuse bouche.

Fishnet stuffings.

Birth of an American Pop Star. © Ryan Schierling

Imagine your holiday dinner ruined by a precocious little girl who stuffed her Barbie doll into the Tom turkey – along with the onions and apples and rosemary – mid-way through the roasting process. This is a true story, some 30 odd years ago. This is Kim's story.


Happy Thanksgiving.