The traditional post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwich

As I write this, it’s only 2 PM on Black Friday, but I’ve already had my traditional post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwich. Two of them, in fact. My family always does our big Thanksgiving meal at lunch time, as it makes gathering together in one place the easiest, so the post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwich is generally what I eat for dinner on Thanksgiving night.

This year’s edition was prepared inbetween the end of the Cowboys/Eagles game and the start of the Seahawks/49ers game. And yeah, before we go on, let me briefly address the American Thanksgiving holiday as a whole. I know a lot of people whose favorite holidays are Halloween, Christmas, the Fourth of July (or whatever analogous day in your non-USA country on which you shoot off fireworks), etc. I tend to be in a small minority when I say Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. But seriously, what’s not to love? It’s a day where everyone gets together with family and/or friends to eat a whole bunch of good food, then sit on the couch and watch sporting events. Seems pretty squarely in the spirit of Sandwich Tribunal to me (even if one of our contributors is Australian).

I know for a lot of people being around your family can be weird, uncomfortable, or even downright dysfunctional–believe me, it is for me too. But two things my family and I can at least agree on are that turkey dinners rule and football is a very entertaining sport to watch on television. (Also that the Redskins should always win and the Cowboys should always lose, though that’s a regionally specific thing that might involve the 49ers and the Seahawks, or the Bears and the Vikings, etc, depending on where you’re from.) So we get through the holiday that way, and it usually turns out all right.

Anyway, making a cold turkey sandwich about six hours after consuming a massive quantity of hot turkey, mashed potatoes, peas, rolls, stuffing, mac & cheese, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie is a great low-key capper to my favorite holiday, and while the football was bittersweet this year (glad the Cowboys lost, not at all glad I decided to start Tony Romo on one of my fantasy football teams), the turkey sandwich, like the meal earlier in the day, was nothing but delicious.

We had two turkeys this year, which is actually standard for my family, because so many relatives come over for the meal that we can go through an entire turkey pretty easily (we had 13 this year). But there was an unusual twist this time; one of the turkeys was a regular grocery store turkey, while the other was an organic grass-fed free-range turkey. My brother has had a really good job for the past couple of years, and these days he’s living pretty cheaply, so he’s gotten into the kind of “ah, the finer things” spending that I imagine I’d also do if I were living significantly below my means. Part of that has involved him buying really expensive bacon on a regular basis at a fancy butcher shop called The Whole Ox in The Plains, VA. (For those unfamiliar with the geography of Virginia, this entire story takes place in Fauquier County, VA, a mostly-rural area about an hour due west of Washington DC).

The deal is that my brother was in The Whole Ox dropping some serious dough on bacon earlier this fall, and a guy from Kelly Bronze, an organic turkey company, was at The Whole Ox pitching his company’s turkeys for Thanksgiving, and handing out sample turkey sandwiches for customers to try. My brother had one, thought it was delicious, and decided to buy one of these turkeys for my family’s Thanksgiving. According to the math my parents and I did based on the weight of the turkey and the per-pound price my brother mentioned, he probably dropped about $200 on this turkey. But he was convinced he’d sell the entire family on having a Kelly Bronze turkey every year, and next year we’d all pitch in and come up with the cash to make sure both of our Thanksgiving turkeys came from them.

Honestly, it didn’t really work. The turkey my brother got was delicious, no doubt–but I ate some of each turkey, and didn’t really taste much of a difference between the two. As we have previously discussed, and will no doubt discuss more in the future, I tend to eat crap, and while I do like things I put in my mouth to taste good, I’ve never been accused of having a discriminating palate. So maybe I’m just too much of a philistine to appreciate the Kelly Bronze turkey in all its glory–pre-emptive apology to my brother for that one. And I think most of the rest of my family is going to have to share in the apology, because pretty much everyone I sat with felt the same way (except my cousin’s baby, son, who can’t talk yet and had a bottle for Thanksgiving dinner anyway).

You can tell this is a different photo of the same sandwiches because the knife I sliced the bread with is in the picture this time.

But the Kelly Bronze turkey did have the advantage of being much easier to slice, which meant it came in very handy for sandwiches later. There was still a tiny bit of sliced meat from both turkeys that hadn’t gotten eaten at lunch, and one good thick slice of Kelly Bronze turkey apiece was perfect for two small sandwiches. The sandwiches were small because my parents, in their old age, have become totally opposed to mass-produced sliced bread of any kind, and I had to improvise in order to find bread to place this leftover turkey upon. What I came up with were ciabatta finger rolls (gluten free, natch), each of which was around half the size of a normal slice of bread. I figured two would combine to equal about the same amount of food as one ordinary sandwich, so I sliced the two ciabatta rolls in half, toasted them in a toaster oven, and laid out one slice of Kelly Bronze turkey on each of them. Spiced them with some pepper, added some tortilla chips, and I was good to go. They were delicious, of course. And they definitely occupied their proper place in the standard holiday ritual, which was just as important in the end.

P.S.: I am planning to take advantage of the long weekend Thanksgiving has provided me and do a bit of Sandwich Tribunal catchup. This has been round one of that plan. Round two should appear tomorrow, and will feature my tale of eating a beef on weck sandwich at a suburban sports bar. If I’m really on the ball, I will hopefully have yet another post for you on Sunday, this one a long-awaited update to my Confessions of a Crap Eater column in which I dine at the fast food restaurant you love to hate–McDonalds. Stay tuned!

Drew

I’m a transgender weirdo who loves music, books, comics, and all kinds of other geeky crap. I edit an arts/music/culture magazine in my hometown of Richmond VA (rvamag.com). But let’s not talk about my day job. Let’s talk about food. I love food.