Season’s eatings
Thanksgiving serves up solace amid a frightful year
By Michael Edwards
For the TODAY
Thanksgiving in America is traditionally the season when family and friends step off life’s treadmill and come together to watch dad attempting to carve up a dried-out turkey with a steak knife, mom dusting off the Monopoly board and grandparents coming to terms with their granddaughter’s Celtic tattoo and nose ring.
This year’s gatherings will be smaller, and many of our awkward family conversations will be filtered through Zoom. Some of our neighbors will be cobbling together their Thanksgiving meals in the dim light of temporary housing while others lack homes at all.
To put it bluntly, Thanksgiving 2020 might be one to remember for very somber reasons, but fortunately for residents of the Oregon Coast there are good people, churches, nonprofits and businesses that will be working diligently to ensure that the light of Thanksgiving breaks through the dark clouds of late November.
Even with the headwinds of COVID-19 putting a damper on in-person dining, Chinook Winds Casino Resort lead chef Michael Durham and his team of cooks will be preparing a $15 Thanksgiving meal for pick-up. The meals will include turkey with all of the traditional fixings along with a green salad and a slice of pie.
Chef Durham’s culinary inspiration came early:
“My grandmother in Illinois was a great cook,” he said. “Her gravy was the best.”
The talented chef is also a visual artist and sees his culinary creations as a way to share his art with the wider community. With the confluence of the virus and the Echo Mountain Wildfire, his creative work and the labor of his staff are more important than ever.
On Tuesday, Nov. 24, Chef Durham and his team will deliver 300 meals to Taft High School for distribution to local North Lincoln County families in need who have been pre-identified by the school district.
Although turkey and pie are the headliners of most Thanksgiving dinners, a poll from ThePilotNews.com suggests that it’s stuffing that makes Americans’ mouths water. According to author Matt Jaeger, people around the globe have fancied stuffing for centuries. The oldest known stuffing recipe was scribbled in Apicius, a Roman cookbook in 300 AD The recipe calls for stuffing a dormouse with “forcemeat pork and small pieces of dormouse meat trimmings, all pounded with pepper, nuts, garlic and broth.”
An ancient Bedouin stuffing involves stuffing a camel with a lamb, then stuffing the lamb with chickens which are stuffed with fish, and then, if there isn't quite enough protein yet, stuffing the fish with eggs. If the idea of eating stuffed dormouse makes your insides churn and your smoke pit is too full of rain water to slow cook the Bedouin recipe, there are plenty of practical and tasty American stuffing recipes available.
Traditional Pacific Northwest stuffing includes mushrooms and hazelnuts. New Englanders love their oysters, San Franciscans go heavy on the sourdough and southerners prepare their “dressing” with cornbread. Not surprisingly, Midwesterners pack their stuffing with sausage and butter; lots of butter. Chef Durham is an Indiana native, so I’m betting that his stuffing is a hearty fare.
Want to bring something made from scratch and easy reheat to a Thanksgiving gathering but don’t have full confidence in your cooking skills? Head out to Toledo on Wednesday, Nov. 25 and pick up an order of house-made soup from J & J’s Soup Bowl.
Call ahead, order a very large container of soup for only $10 and Jennifer, Joseph and Rocky, the couple’s 17-year-old basset hound/beagle/pit mix, will meet you at the curbside with a smile, a wag of the tail and the best non-clam chowder soup on the Central Oregon Coast.
“We’ll be here all day on Wednesday,” Jennifer said. “I’ll be cooking up extra-large batches.”
If you are craving something meatier with a spicy kick to put into the crock pot, ask about the Cowboy Chili. The recipe comes from the pages of ‘The John Wayne Survival Book’ and will no doubt make the Texans vs. Lions Thanksgiving game easier to stomach.
J & J’s Soup Bowl is located at 235 S Main Street. Call 541-635-0215 to place an order.
The way things have gone in 2020, this year’s Thanksgiving turkey seems destined for the same fate of Rocky and Adrian's 1976 bird: yanked from the oven and tossed into the cold, damp night. Remember though, brother Paulie’s heartless turkey toss led to Rocky and Adrian going ice skating, and 30 minutes later, marriage.