On the Eleventh Day of Thanksiving….

My family likes Thanksgiving, and we have our own set of traditions, like every family does. Generally we go to my Mom’s house and eat the big turkey dinner with stuffing (my favorite! just a simple sage dressing, baked crisp separately from the turkey, even though we still call it stuffing), mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, cranberry sauce, a relish tray, rolls, sweet potatoes, etc., etc. The past couple of years, we’ve started a new tradition of Friendsgiving on the Saturday immediately following Thanksgiving. I smoke a turkey (and make my Mom’s stuffing recipe), my neighbor cooks a ham or a roast or some other primary protein, a small circle of our close friends bring side dishes, and we get all our families together for a feast, drink wine, be merry, and generally all go home by midnight (tryptophan, yo! Or maybe just all that good food and wine). Our Friendsgiving tradition is hardly unique, but I think the idea of celebrating a holiday feast with the family you choose is great. (Not everybody agrees though)

Throwing a wrench into the works; this year, Mindy’s parents, her brother and his family, and her 94-year-old grandmother were going to be visiting Mindy’s aunt Vickie in southeastern Kansas. Vickie has a farm and a big extended family and invites students from a nearby college and has built a pretty incredible Thanksgiving tradition of her own. We couldn’t miss that with Mindy’s whole family being there as well. But my Mom hates missing out on hosting Thanksgiving for us, especially now that we’ve moved and my family is so spread out–my brother lives in North Carolina, one sister lives in Nashville, and while the other still lives in Quincy, IL, where I grew up, she’s moved out of Mom’s house recently and into her own. So I’d feel bad having her miss that this year. But due to a strange quirk of work schedules, Friendsgiving got moved back a week, and Mom was content to push her Thanksgiving dinner back to Saturday so that we could be there.

Additionally, I generally cook a warm-up turkey before Friendsgiving so I have a carcass to make stock from. That made our Thanksgiving holiday schedule look like this:

11/27: Thanksgiving in Kansas with Aunt Vickie
11/29: Thanksviging at Mom’s house in Quincy
12/3: Warm-up turkey dinner at home
12/6: Smoked turkey & ham for Friendsgiving

We arrived at Aunt Vickie’s house on Wednesday, giving us plenty of time to visit with family and help out around the farm. Aunt Vickie’s Thanksgivings generally offer opportunities to help gather and chop wood for the winter, to help with the livestock (I chose to help out by petting the dogs frequently), to help maintain and build outbuildings at the farm, for the kids to jump up and down on giant bales of hay and go exploring in the woods. I also managed to make the acquaintance of a pair of turkeys, one of which tried to bite everything that came near its face. The other one was much more photogenic.

This turkey was not harmed in the writing of this post

Neither of these turkeys were our dinner though. Dinner was held in a big heated tent outside, with 70 or more people in attendance. There were platters of turkey and ham, sides without count, baskets of bread on every table, and a general air of family and fellowship, just the way you want a Thanksgiving dinner to be. And pies. So many pies. I stopped myself after sampling banana creme and pumpkin and a few different variants on pecan pie. But not before I had my first sandwich of the Thanksgiving season.

Turkey and Ham with cranberry sauce on French bread

I took some of the bread from the table, a good sized slab each of turkey and ham, and some of the cranberry sauce. It was a good sandwich, but only the beginning.

Leftover turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce on sliced French bread

For breakfast the next day, I added stuffing and gravy to the same basic sandwich, removing the ham. This may be the classic Thanksgiving leftover combination, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s all the basic flavors of the feast in a single package.

That day, we drove from Kansas back to Quincy, trading this:

The view from Aunt Vickie’s house

For this:

The view from my Mom’s house

Though truth be told, there’s plenty of the former around Quincy as well.

Our spread at Mom’s Thanksgiving dinner could likely have fed a substantial portion of the people at Aunt Vickie’s, despite the mere 8 people seated at table. I was glad she agreed to hold off until Saturday for us, as this was the Thanksgiving dinner I would lovingly recreate in wax and present in the imaginary museum of All Things Jim. Also, more turkey sandwiches.

Leftover turkey, cranberry sauce, and Old English cheese on rolls, with leftover stuffing on the side

One of the familiar items on all of Mom’s holiday tables is the relish tray, containing pickles, olives, and the best thing of all, celery stuffed with Kraft brand Old English Cheese spread. One of my great innovations to the classic leftover Thanksgiving turkey sandwich is adding some of this cheese to the sandwich. Also, though not quite as unique, fried eggs.

Turkey, eggs, and Old English cheese on dinner rolls

With 2 Thanksgiving meals under our belts, and with 2 frozen turkeys the Farmers Co-op gave my stepfather Ronnie tucked into the stow-n-go compartments of our van (helping to keep the 7 gallons of Edgewood apple cider I’d bought cool), we headed back to Chicago. One of those turkeys would be our warm-up turkey, and the other would be our Friendsgiving turkey.

Wednesday night was our turkey dinner night, which made Thursday’s lunch a leftover turkey sandwich. This time I went for a basic sandwich of turkey and bacon with mayonnaise on the simple oat bran bread that’s our staple. It was a very tasty sandwich, and an excellent lunch with some kettle-cooked chips and a Braeburn apple (also from Edgewood).

Bacon and leftover turkey for lunch

And while I wasn’t sure we’d have leftovers from the Friendsgiving turkey, when it turned out that we did I looked forward to having many great leftover turkey sandwiches from it as well. But my 17 year old son showed me a sandwich earlier today that I must acknowledge as superior. He has perfected the form of the Thanksgiving leftover sandwich, and none of us should bother making one ever again.

Ultimate Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich?

He cut two slabs of stuffing into vaguely sliced-bread-like shapes, toasted them, and made a sandwich of leftover smoked turkey with gravy and cranberry sauce. I did not eat this sandwich; I could only gaze at its beauty in envy. I will eat turkey sandwiches again; I may even eat another one yet today. But whenever I do, I will be reminded of this staggering work of genius. If you are a believer in Whitney Houston lyrics and coffee mug slogans then rest easy, for our future will contain sandwiches of such beauty.

As a family, we generally have more than our share of Thanksgiving feasts, and this year we had even more than usual. We have taken part in 4 turkey dinners over the past eleven days and I have personally eaten more turkey sandwiches than a sensible man probably should. I need to stop, if only because there are 3 sandwiches from the List waiting for me to tackle them yet this month. Since we will soon be running out of leftover turkey, I will have to move on before long. But when it comes to late November/early December it’s like this, and I’ve said this I don’t know how many times in the past few weeks–I will eat every damn turkey you let me.

Jim Behymer

I like sandwiches.

I like a lot of other things too but sandwiches are pretty great