This year was just the two of us for Thanksgiving, so we decided to do things differently, using traditional ingredients and flavors with non-Thanksgiving preparations.
Taco: smoked confit turkey thigh -sweet potato hash - cranberry BBQ sauce - cranberry pickled shallots - radish - spicy turkey skin cracklins
I dry-brined turkey thighs with salt and sugar, and cooked them SV in duck fat with herbs, and finished them on the smoker for an hour with a bit of applewood. We served the tacos with deep fried parsnip chips and tempura green beans. Used the ChefSteps siphon tempura recipe and it worked great.
Also had some cocktails made with gin, barrel-aged maple syrup, club soda, and the cranberry "consomme" recipe from Modernist Cuisine. (Toss frozen cranberries with 11% of their weight in sugar, seal, and cook at 88C for 3 hours). That recipe is great. The yield is pretty low, but the juice is powerful. You can find lots of uses for liquid cranberry essence this time of year. I bet the technique would work great on cherries as well.
Everything was good.
