Crawfish pot pie.

Crawdads, no. Crayfish, no. Crawfish, yes. Pot pie. © Ryan Schierling

Ten years ago, a friend in Washington who was a Houston-expat would occasionally travel back to Texas for business. Before he went to the airport to return to Seattle, he'd fill up a cooler with dry ice and Hebert's frozen crawfish pies, duct tape everything securely shut, and check it with his luggage. They were like Cajun gold, and he'd rather the airline accidentally send his suitcases to Montreal than misplace his cooler full of crawfish pies.

I didn't really understand the attraction. I mean, I liked pot pies, but I'd never had a seafood pie, let alone tasted one with crawfish in it. When he finally gave me a few to heat up, I figured it out after the first few bites. It was a foreign flavor, but still rich and comforting the way pot pies should be. The golden, flaky puff pastry crust was buttery and almost melted on the tongue. The crawfish itself I could only describe as salty, and a little fishy (sea-gamey?), like shrimp's bad cousin who did some time upstate. But the creamy, cheesiness of the filling countered nicely and balanced things out. I really liked it, but it was a taste that was very specific to a region, and I didn't grow up in that region.

I only had a few of those Hebert's crawfish pies, and as delicious and different as they were, over the years I forgot about them entirely.

Now, we're a day trip away from Louisiana. During crawfish season, from March to June, you can't miss the squirming bins of live mudbugs at the fishmonger and local grocers – waiting to be boiled, pinched, pulled and sucked. We went to our first crawfish boil this summer, and I found out that there are two types of crawfish eaters – those who suck the head and those who do not. I may be a northern transplant, but consider me a head sucker. When it's not crawfish season, you can still find two or three different brands of tail meat in the frozen sections of most decent grocery stores. 

For some reason, this week I decided I wanted crawfish pie. So, I looked up Hebert's Specialty Meats and tried to go back to the beginning. The 8 oz. pies looked like little raviolis and were $5 each (plus shipping). That seemed a bit excessive for nostalgia's sake. I thought about driving to Houston, but then found out that Hebert's is actually in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so I really wasn't sure what to do. Then I remembered the frozen crawfish tails at the grocer.

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.

An essential boule.

Tarragon egg salad sandwich. © Ryan Schierling

Nostalgia… I feel like I've been swimming in it for months. Beginning with the old family recipes from our potato salad series this summer, my personal food-flow has seemed a constant stream of vintage recipe exploration. Lately, I've been feeling stuck in a quagmire of remembrance about food that has stood for more than a generation – however fascinating the narrative, quirky or delicious – and I was just starting to get uncomfortable.

The thing is, I genuinely adore those old recipes! I appreciate them like I appreciate an antique buffet with beautiful panels of quartersawn oak or a mahogany dressing chest with clean art deco curves. I treasure good things well made and believe they should be preserved. It's part of my fabric.

But while I deeply respect the craftsmanship and history of past days, I also can't ignore the innovations of the now, and the impulse to explore my own curious tangents and creative impulses.

And, so, the catalyst for my unsticking... bread. Well, bread and a favorite sandwich made with it.

My springboard was a surprise gift in the form of one of the most divine loaves of bread made in all of North America. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you may have come to take this loaf for granted, as it is almost an "everyday" loaf to those in the know. Available at fine local grocers and at Trader Joe's, it is The Essential Baking Company's beautiful boule which is simply known as the Rosemary Diamante. This is no ordinary rosemary bread. It is an organic loaf that has the most amazing rustic texture with generous bubbles, large visible pieces of rosemary and a salted top that is so good you could cry. It is perfection toasted and buttered or simply mopping up an over-easy egg. With a creamy soft cheese such as brie, it could just be your whole dinner.

But the way I love it most dearly is with my egg salad. 

An evolution of chili.

(Vegetarian) Red #43. © Ryan Schierling

I never really thought about chili much before we moved to Texas. I certainly enjoyed it in every sort of variety, be it homemade or canned, but never considered it or regarded it as I do now – which is to say with the same reverence the French have for their mother sauces, the Italians have for cheese and wine, the Spaniards have for paella and tortilla española. 

I have come to realize my history with chili con carne has three and one-half distinct phases. 

The first phase: Childhood. 

My mother's winter-time chili was a thick tomato-sauce-based vehicle for ground beef and onions. Mildly spiced with dried McCormick chili powder and cumin, it was the chili con carne of my formative years and off only a few herbs and spices (and, sans beans) from her similarly-prepared spaghetti sauce. It is what I sought to recreate when I started learning to cook in my early 20s. 

The second phase: Learning to Cook (or, A Stock Pot and a Wooden Spoon). 

When you move away from home, you are free to eat what you want, when you want, and you will. But there are times when you want the comfort of home, you will make a phone call and you will work to recreate the dishes of your youth. 

For a number of years after I left home, I didn't eat meat. Being a vegetarian wasn't a health-related or a conscience-appeasing meat-is-murder kind of decision, it was a financial one. I made so very little money, and meat was usually the most expensive item on my grocery lists, so I just stopped buying it for a few years. I made a lot of soups and stews, and vegetarian chili was one of the first stock-pot-meals that evolved from my mother's recipe into my own. 

I used cheap dried beans soaked overnight, vegetable broth and fresh jalapeños, lots of onion and diced tomatoes instead of tomato sauce, and the freshest chile powder and cumin I could find. It took some trial and error to get where I wanted with it, but learning how to correct seasonings and temper the heat of the fresh chiles was invaluable. Knowing to let a young chili simmer longer or sit in the fridge overnight, or adjusting a dirty chili that tasted too heavily of chile powder and cumin with additional acid or a sweet component, took longer to figure out, but I got there. 

Learning how my tastes had changed as I'd gotten older and how to satisfy them was even more important. 

The third phase: Texas is the Reason (or, Where Chili Came From).