Daylight Savings Time ended in October, and the Big Dark is officially upon us.
Things have slowed down on the farm. The farmers have completed all their big fall projects like the harvesting of the corn and winter squash. The propagation house is full of curing squash and the cellar full of corn, garlic, onions, shallots, beans and potatoes. The larder is at its fullest. They have “put to bed” many of the summer crop plots, tilling them back into the ground, then covering them with tarps so they will be ready for planting in four months or so.
Orphans' Thanksgiving
The restaurant is heading into the holiday season, and our month will be punctuated with holiday parties and Thanksgiving.
Tyla is a Mayflower descendant and grew up on the East Coast, so Thanksgiving was always a big deal for us and our girls. Our Thanksgiving offerings will be in keeping with tradition: turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and cranberry sauce. We put a few twists on it as well. First of all, there is a local cranberry bog about a mile down the road from us, so each year the cooks and I go out and pick berries the week before to use in all of our preparations.
It is cool to have both an East Coast tradition and very local products that allow us to execute it. We also offer a couple of things from my family’s West Coast traditions. For our Thanksgiving service, I like to start with a squash soup with spiced brown butter and toasted squash seeds and follow that with a salad of Dungeness crab and our chicories with a Meyer lemon dressing. Nothing is more of this place than Dungeness crab.
Thanksgiving is a big deal for us personally, partly because of the day itself and the traditions it brings, and partly for the party we throw for our staff.
We call it Orphans’ Thanksgiving, after the party Tyla and I started hosting over 25 years ago in California. The initial inspiration for the party was to thank our staff for having worked on the holiday and missing out on dinner with their families. Having worked in restaurants since I was 16, I have missed almost every family Thanksgiving dinner in the past 40 years, so I understand. Orphans’, as we call it, always takes place the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and we invite our hard-working staff, their significant others, as well as some family friends. We look forward to it all year.r, it has an added benefit in sweeter, more flavorful vegetables. If you’ve never pulled a carrot from the ground after a few good frosts, you’re in for a treat. In my opinion, nothing compares.
