The Royal Chef At Home: Easy Seasonal Entertaining

N ineteen years ago when I moved to the America I had heard of Thanksgiving but never really knew what it was or why it was celebrated. The first couple of years I enjoyed the holiday by spending the extra day off relaxing with my wife and baby daughter. Once Kelly started pre-K and came home with drawings of her hand decorated to resemble a turkey and began asking, “Why don’t we have turkey today like all of my friends?” I knew it was time to assimilate. My employer, a wealthy Dallas family where I worked as a private chef, had been initially reluctant to foist Thanksgiving cooking duty on me, but there came one October day when I was told, “We want you to cater Thanksgiving for the family this year.” I was given a list of dishes (about fifteen in all) the majority for which I was responsible. Family members were bringing some of the dishes because, “They always do.” This was going to be a Texas Thanksgiving and frankly the list was incomprehensible to me. Why did people want to eat turkey in November when it was rightly served for Christmas lunch? Where was the delicious chestnut stuffing? Cornbread “dressing” instead? So it’s not a stuffing? Cranberry jelly… Jelly? That must be a typo… I’m sure they meant fresh cranberries slowly simmered with grated orange zest and a little Cointreau to finish. Nope. Just open a can of cranberry jelly, slice and fan it onto a plate of butter lettuce. Next up—green bean casserole. Here were green beans cooked to within one inch of their life, strained and stirred into canned mushroom soup and then wait for it… topped with ready made onion rings. It took me fifteen minutes at a busy store the day before Thanksgiving trying to find ready-made onion rings. Where do they store them? Hint: Not with the fresh onions! Also on the list was asparagus, canned asparagus. I had never in thirty years of cooking ever bought a can of asparagus. I opened one end of the can and tipped the asparagus into my hand over the sink to allow the juices to run out. As I did, the heads of the asparagus THANKSGIVING FOR A CROWD

FALL · THANKSGIVING FOR A CROWD

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