Thanksgiving pies
My Uncle Denny may be best known both here and in my mind for his superlative smoked salmon, a fish he catches, cleans, and smokes himself. It is actually smoked, not cold-cured or salt-cured, but set in a smoke house filled with smoke from a hot fire, a process known as hot smoked to some, kippered to others, or, simply, smoked. Instead of transforming the salmon into the silken slabs of gravlax, the smokes dried the fish a bit, highlighting the oils which remain free-flowing in even the coldest of waters and that make salmon so delicious, and makes it easy to flake into salty bites.
Yet it is from him that I first learned a) pumpkin pie need not come from a can, and b) you need not confine yourself to pumpkin when making what he calls “gourd pie.” It takes no discernible effort for me to picture him in the kitchen of their old house – the one with a giant hand-cranked coffee grinder built into the kitchen wall, with baskets and pan hanging over the counters, and a wood-burning stove in the living room – manning the blender on a Thanksgiving morning, whipping up a half dozen of his gourd pies to bring to the Thanksgiving potluck and soccer game while my cousin, who is now finishing up law school, pulled at my hand hoping I’d read the stack of picture books he’d assembled to him.
So when Denny and my Aunt Nancy as well as my parents were in town the weekend before my dad’s birthday, we had a little dinner to celebrate. I took extreme advantage of my guests and made a range of pies to fill in my Thanksgiving offerings over at Local Foods. Pumpkin pie, chile pumpkin pie (seriously, that bit of ground dried chile is awesome in pumpkin pie!), and a bourbon pecan pie (made with maple syrup) were all on offer. Following my fine uncle’s example, the pumpkin pies were made with freshly roasted winter squash, with something labelled a “red kabocha” at the market. It looked suspiciously like a red kuri pumpkin to me. Check out that gorgeous color.
Whether you roast your own squash to make your own pie or not, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving and hope you spend it with people who make you laugh and who slowly but surely, without too much fuss and without distracting from the animated conversation already in the works, pay you the ultimate compliment and finish all the pie.
(Still menu planning? Find a gaggle of my Thanksgiving desserts recipes over at Local Foods.)
