Nine people are coming to our house on Thursday, and this morning I walked the yard with the harvest basket to see what the garden could still put on the table. The answer, after the hard freeze on November 2, is not much. But it's enough to build the side dishes around.
The headcount: the three of us, my parents driving up from Yonkers, and Nate's sister Erin with Mike and their two girls, who are 8 and 12 and have very firm feelings about anything green. That's nine people at a table that seats six, so the card table is coming up from the basement again. The kids will eat at it and be happy about it.
What's actually left out there
Less than you'd think from the size of my notebook. Here's the real inventory:
- Three butternut squash, cut off the chain-link fence in September and curing on a shelf in the dining room ever since. Together they weighed 9 pounds when I logged them.
- Lacinato kale, a short row I sowed in August at the end of the west bed after the onions came out. Not the ornamental kale in the rail box. That one is for looking at.
- Sage and thyme in terra cotta on the porch bench. Both came through the freeze a little leathery but fine.
- Parsley, which I complained about all summer and which now refuses to die.
- The last storage onions from the basement, about a dozen, and a jar of green tomato salsa from October.
The rosemary is inside in the cool window, and I'm not cutting it this year. It needs every needle it has to get to spring. The spinach in the cold frame is staying put too. Those little plants are for March, and if I start picking now there won't be anything to pick then.
The plan for Thursday
Nate is doing the turkey on the grill, which he announced in October and has been reading about ever since. My mother is bringing arroz con gandules, because Thanksgiving without it would be unthinkable in her house and therefore in mine. Erin is bringing pies. That leaves me the sides, and I'm keeping them simple enough that I can still sit down.
Roasted butternut with brown butter and sage. Two of the squash, peeled and cut into one-inch cubes, roasted at 425 on two sheet pans so they brown instead of steaming. While they roast I'll brown a stick of butter and fry about twenty sage leaves in it until they go crisp, then crumble them over the top. The flesh is the deep orange of a marigold, and I love seeing a full pan of it come out of the oven.
Butternut soup in mugs. The third squash, which has a pale scar where it rested against a fence post, gets roasted on Wednesday with an onion and blended with stock and a little cream. I'll serve it in mugs while the turkey rests, so nobody hovers over the carving board.
Kale with garlic and lemon. Kale picked after a few hard frosts tastes sweeter, and ours has had several. I'll strip the leaves off the ribs, slice them thin and wilt them in olive oil with store-bought garlic. Our own garlic, all 48 cloves, went into the east bed on October 25 and won't be ready until next July. I'm guessing the girls will skip this one. That's fine. It's for the grownups.
Stuffing with thyme, sage and our onions. Plain bread stuffing, nothing fancy, but with a big handful of thyme, more sage and three of the storage onions.
The green tomato salsa goes out with chips before dinner, and the parsley gets chopped over everything, because I have a lot of it and it's still alive.
Keeping it doable for nine
My honest mistake in past years has been planning too many garden dishes and spending the whole afternoon at the stove while everyone else watched the parade and then football. This year I wrote a timeline on an index card, the way I'd plan a class period, and anything that didn't fit got cut. Cranberry sauce comes from a can, because my father insists on the ridges, and I've stopped arguing.
Wednesday night: roast the soup squash, make the stuffing up to the baking step, wash and slice the kale. Thursday morning: cube and roast the butternut, reheat the soup. The kale takes six minutes right before we sit down. Mateo is on parsley duty, which is just cilantro duty with a different herb, and he has been told it's a promotion.
I did the math for the notebook, the way I always do. Nine pounds of butternut at $1.79 a pound is about $16 of squash. Add the kale, herbs and onions, and maybe $25 of Thursday came out of a backyard you can cross in a dozen steps. All three squash grew on one vine on the fence, a vine I almost pulled out in August because it was swallowing the cucumbers.
Tonight I'm checking the three squash one more time for soft spots. So far, so good.
