Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. This was the second year in a row in which I was cooking in isolation from my extended family in Michigan since relocating to Minnesota. I miss having my whole family together and all their different contributions to the meal. On the other hand, cooking in Minneapolis for a small crowd, I have complete control over the meal. This satisfies the control-freak in me, and also allows a bit of flexibility about how I cook the bird.

The bird in question arrived from Clancey’s Meats & Fish last Monday. I was wide-grinningly excited when our turkey — which had never seen the inside of a freezer — showed up under Martha’s arm; I immediately set about dismembering it. Originally, my plan was to cook the bird whole, in search of that classic Norman Rockwell moment. But after reading Kenji Lopez Alt’s enlightening “Turkey Stuffed Turkey” article I could not resist taking my turkey apart. It just makes so much sense: the legs and the breasts are two different kinds of meat that demand different treatments — they are done at different temperatures — and, best of all, if you cut the legs and breasts off, you have the whole carcass to make turkey stock in advance, to be held at the ready for all your stuffing/dressing and gravy needs.

After dismantling the turkey, I salted the legs and thighs and refrigerated them overnight. The next day, they were ready to confit in a crockpot with plenty of olive oil, bay leaves, thyme, orange zest, peppercorns and juniper berries. Before removing the breasts, I carefully took the majority of the turkey’s skin off in one piece — I think Hannibal Lecter would have been proud. The breasts and skin were reserved for Thanksgiving day. Meanwhile, I roasted the rest of the carcass and boiled it down into stock. The copious amount of bones made available by cutting the turkey apart meant that I got a thick, gelatinous stock.

For reference, a ten pound free range turkey produces about 2 ½# of white meat. I felt like a mad scientist rolling the two breasts together and wrapping them in their own skin per Lopez Alt’s instructions. The technique worked out really well; the meat cooked very evenly and the skin even managed to adhere to the meat, no Activa required. Go figure.

My quest to use all parts of the turkey resulted in the surprise best dish of the evening, a turkey liver pâté. After soaking the turkey’s liver in milk for two hours to leech out some supposed metallic flavors, I sauteed it in butter along with some shallots. This I ground to a paste in my food processor along with thyme, turkey meat left over from the stock, salt, lots of black pepper, some juniper berries and a bit of heavy cream. After baking this mixture in a water-bath in a 300°F oven for an hour I cooled it and refrigerated it overnight. The result was amazing. I have been dabbling in terrines, pâtés and other potted meats for well over a year now. The results, while always pretty good — how can you go wrong with potted meat? — were always missing something, or featuring too much. Either I have learned enough or the stars were just aligning right for this Thanksgiving: the pâté was creamy, rich, slightly gamy and very peppery. Great with mustard, pickled green beans and olives. Not how I’ve usually started off Thanksgiving, but possibly a new tradition!

One can hardly have Thanksgiving appetizers without Thanksgiving cocktails. Martha found the recipe we used on Apartment Therapy: 1½ oz rye whiskey (Wild Turkey, of course), ½ oz triple sec (substituted for clear curaçao), 2 oz apple cider, 1 tsp simple syrup and a couple of cranberries for garnish. Changing every “oz” to “cup” we successfully octupled the recipe with enough for everyone to enjoy two.

As for the rest of the meal, it was more or less what you would expect. Mashed potatoes, stuffing, fresh cranberry sauce, sauteed green beans with lemon, roasted parnsips, carrots and brussels sprouts, roasted turkey breast and turkey leg confit and plenty of gravy to cover it all.

In some ways Thanksgiving is a stupid meal: nobody can make all these dishes perfectly at the same time. We’d be better off focusing on just a couple and having a really great meal. But it’s Thanksgiving, it happens only once a year, and frankly, nobody expects it to be perfect. That’s why there’s gravy.

True, Halloween hasn’t even happened yet, but Thanksgiving is growing near. The Wedge, the source of the turkey pictured here, has already posted their Thanksgiving hours on their homepage and will begin taking turkey orders on Monday, November 2. Tomorrow will be the last day for the Midtown Farmers’ Market, but as Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine recently noted, if you’re a Mill City shopper:

you should be aware that you can order Wild Acres turkeys from the Mill City Farmers Market. But don’t dawdle, supplies are limited and the deadline is Nov. 13.

This year we’re ordering our turkey from Clancey’s Meats and Fish in Linden Hills, where they just began taking orders. From what I know thus far, Clancey’s turkeys are never frozen: orders are taken, sent to the turkey farm, and the turkeys are slaughtered and delivered for pickup just before the big day. (Also good to know: Clancey’s can connect you with sources for heritage breeds if you’re interested.) The birds start at 10–15 lbs. and go up from there in 5 lb. increments. At this point I’m not sure how many will be joining us for Thanksgiving dinner so it’s hard to estimate how much turkey we’ll need. I’m curious—what size bird are you ordering? Are there any other great sources for turkeys we should know about?

I grew up in a household virtually free of beets. My dad did not, and I think still does not, like beets. In college, I started to experiment with beets and found I didn’t mind them. It’s only in the past year that I’ve started to fully appreciate the glory of the beet. They were big on beets at Blackbird, where I was briefly employed during the past summer, so I became familiar with the process of roasting, slicing, and tossing beets in salad. And then just last week, with beet matchsticks left over from beetza, I put raw beets on a sandwich.

In addition to beets, there was

• Multigrain Bread
• Sprouts
• Turkey
• Mayo

I was really surprised by how much I liked raw beets. They were crunchy, giving a real bite to the sandwich, and still had that characteristic beet sweetness, just less so than if they had been roasted. Less sweetness is almost always a good thing! So, the moral of the story is, beets: not just for roasting!