Welcome to Perfectly Fine Dinner Party Club, a cooking and hosting column from Libby Watson, who likes to throw dinner parties but is normal about it.
A quick thank-you to people who emailed me about bo ssam! I would especially like to shout out Jerry, who said the post inspired him to invite new neighbors over for dinner, which is just the most lovely thing I've ever heard. He also shared a really great recipe for a cucumber kimchi, which his Korean mom calls "quick kimchi," that I will be making myself. I'll share it at the bottom of this post. I also received a great email from Samuel, telling me to do as the Times recipe suggested and serve the pork with raw oysters. I am unfortunately a little chicken-nuggies-and-chips baby who doesn't like seafood, but I will share his suggestion with you all so that it wasn't in vain. He correctly advises that "if you want to impress people, sit them down in front of a big table of all the bo ssam fixins and then start shucking oysters next to them like you run an ice bar on the bayou." Do the voice too. Say stuff about gators. It'll be fun.
And now, to today's topic: Thanksgiving II.
I know there are people out there who don't care for Thanksgiving food. I know that some of those people have even had good versions of the familiar Thanksgiving dishes, and they still hold that opinion. I know that the enjoyment of food is all tied up with context—your emotions, expectations, and memories affect your taste in food just as they do music or art—and maybe I've just had a particularly good time with these foods. I hold this cognitive knowledge in my ever-shrinking frontal lobe, and yet the rest of my brain rebels, screaming at me: What is their fucking problem?
I adore Thanksgiving. I didn't grow up with it, being British (and I am sorry about that): My first two Thanksgivings were celebrated with people I met as an exchange student here, first in Los Angeles and then back in London. I spent the next few bouncing between various friends' family Thanksgivings, each time humbled by how nice it was of them to include a stray, lonely wretch like me. Twelve years into living here, it is still one of my favorite things that Americans do.
Since we moved to L.A., Thanksgiving has been quite untraditional, because we are 3,000 miles from my husband's New England family and tend to go back for Christmas instead. In 2022, we went with some friends to Joshua Tree and made Thanksgiving dinner at the Airbnb. It was a lovely occasion, exactly what you want from Thanksgiving: the collective efforts of cooking (and washing up; I only do the cooking to avoid doing this) culminating in a delicious meal, lots of wine, and an awful Netflix show.
But the meal was vegetarian, and I found myself pining for a turkey dinner. I spotted a cheap turkey breast at the store a couple days later, and pounced. That day, Thanksgiving II was born. We invited a couple friends over, who had also missed their Thanksgiving dinner from illness. I made turkey and mashed potatoes, and they made stuffing and an outrageous cranberry-lime tart. It was just what a Perfectly Fine Dinner Party should be, and I will remember it forever.
Last year, we had an equally lovely not-quite-Thanksgiving, in Sydney with friends who were about to be married. It was the same wonderful thing, everyone cooking and helping and laughing (I know it sounds like I am really trying to emphasize that I HAVE LOTS OF FRIENDS; I don’t, it's just the time of year when you do stuff like this), but I knew I wanted turkey, sage, and stuffing when I got home. My friend The Store provided a cheap turkey breast once more, so I made that with a big dish of stuffing, cranberry sauce, and Brussels sprouts. Simple as. Job done. Now that I had done something two years in a row, I had to make it a thing. And now, it's your thing too.
This edition of Perfectly Fine Dinner Party Club is a little different than usual: I haven't yet made this meal, but I wanted to get it out before Thanksgiving so you can prepare. I am also pre-making some of these recipes for Thanksgiving I, but they are perfect for Thanksgiving II as well. I've carefully chosen this menu based on what I think is casual enough to be Perfectly Fine and what I think you might want for Thanksgiving II, but I encourage you to swap these out for other recipes if you like, based on what you had for Thanksgiving I and simply what you fancy. (If you want suggestions for other recipes based on your tastes, feel free to email me! I'll do my best.)
Here is my Thanksgiving II menu:
- Buttermilk-brined turkey breast
- Braised red cabbage
- "Simple Is Best" stuffing
- Cranberry sauce (buy this if you can't be arsed to make it)
- Biscuits
- Apple crumble
And here is your shopping list:
- Turkey breast (my supermarket always seems to sell a small-ish turkey breast for about $4 the week after Thanksgiving)
- Buttermilk (if you live somewhere where you can get non-reduced fat, do; I can't seem to find that in California)
- A big loaf of nice-but-not-too-expensive bread or bag of plain stuffing cubes
- Eggs
- Chicken broth (low sodium, nicest you can afford)
- A red cabbage, about 2 lbs
- About 10 apples, a mix of different kinds
- Two or three onions
- Bunch o' celery
- Whole nutmeg, ground cloves and cinnamon if you don't have those or yours are old (mine are)
- All-purpose flour
- Baking powder
- At least two pounds of butter
- Oats
- Chopped pecans
- Brown sugar
- Bag of cranberries and a single orange, or some cranberry sauce
- Vanilla ice cream
Again, feel free to pare down or scale up depending on how many lucky guests get to enjoy Thanksgiving II. And while you're at the store, pick up a piece of brie, because it is a valuable ingredient in the best leftover sandwiches.
The centerpiece is the turkey breast, which has been available cheap at my supermarket for the last few years. If you don't see one, you can make a chicken or whatever, or just treat the stuffing as the main dish. Thanksgiving II is half about making use of the turkey breast deals, and half about the excuse to eat more stuffing. Every year, I say the same thing: Why don't we eat stuffing all year? I never manage to remember it exists in April, and I think perhaps this is the way to do it: Keep it special, a ridiculous comfort food to usher in the emotionally fraught holiday season, but do eat more of it in December. This Bon Appetit stuffing recipe was chosen for this reason: It is just what you want from the dish, which is savory, sagey, moist bread.
Apart from the turkey and the apple crumble, everything here can be made quite far in advance and chilled or frozen. Use this to your advantage. Spend an hour making a double batch of biscuits to freeze one evening while you watch a YouTube essay about why chips aren't as good as they used to be, and you will have not only biscuits for Thanksgiving II, but for the whole rest of the year.
The recipe is for a 2.5-pound turkey breast, so scale up the amount of salt appropriately if you have a bigger one. The day before your Thanksgiving II, weigh out 33 grams of salt (which is about two tablespoons, but I do encourage you to spend the 10 bucks on a kitchen scale if you cook anything more complicated than breakfast). I would whisk this into the buttermilk in a big bowl, and then pop the turkey breast in there. The recipe tells you to put it in a bag so you can squish it around, but I don't really feel this is necessary for just a breast; it's not like cooking a whole turkey, where you need to massage it and make sure the liquid gets into all its crevices. I would just make sure the breast is submerged in the bowl, weighing it down with a plate and a pan or something if you need to, and turn it once if you want to.
Let's make our cranberry sauce, for which I'm not even going to give you a recipe: Put a bag of cranberries and about half a cup of sugar into a pan and cook 'n' stir on medium-low until the cranberries have popped and become cranberry sauce, adding more sugar as you need to to sweeten it to your liking. (You will need more than half a cup!) Then grate the zest of an orange in there and put a pinch of salt in. Job done. I've added booze in the past—bourbon or Grand Marnier—and my husband hated it, so I'm keeping it Mormon this year. If you want to fancy it up, be my guest, but I don't think it's worth it, really. If you're making the cranberry sauce more than a few days in advance, freeze it; it freezes well.
I would normally make rolls for Thanksgiving, but they're not quite as casual for the non-baker to attempt, so I'm voting biscuits for Thanksgiving II. The recipe I have linked, from my queen Claire Saffitz, can be made whenever you like. I highly recommend watching her video if you haven't made them before. The unbaked biscuits freeze beautifully. You should probably make them in advance, actually, because it's a messy and floury job, and I strongly suggest you double the recipe if they're going in the freezer anyway.
I don't have a food processor, so I just rub the butter into the flour as you would for pie crust. Keep it cold, and smash the little cubes of butter into smaller pieces without letting them melt too much, or use a pastry cutter or a couple butter knives to chop them up and help you along. Instead of adding the whole cup of buttermilk at once, add a bit less than that, then squeeze together the bits that are sticking and put them on your countertop, and add dribbles of buttermilk to the dry parts. (This is also a good technique for pie dough!) Once the dough is coming together with a firm smoosh, put it on the countertop and pat it down into roughly a square. The next step is optional but does make for the best biscuits: Cut the square into four pieces, stack them on top of each other (in a way that seems improbably high, but it's OK!) and then smoosh and pat them down into a rectangle.
At first, your dough might seem really dry, but as you shape and pat and knead the scraps together, ideally using a bench scraper, it will become more cohesive. But, and this is maybe my wisest advice: If you are sick of marshaling scraps of dough that seem really dry, just fuckin' add a bit more buttermilk. You're trying to enjoy your life, not win a biscuit contest. It should absolutely not be sticky, but if you keep squishing and stacking and everything keeps falling apart, dribble more buttermilk until you can work with it. Cut the edges of the square off if you want perfect biscuits, then cut the rectangle into even squares, and you're done. Freeze them on a parchment-lined baking sheet until they're frozen hard, then put them in a freezer bag or tupperware or whatever. Brush the tops with melted butter before you bake them.
Or, just buy a tube of biscuits. Those will be really good, too.
The stuffing can be made and chilled up to a few days before, or frozen and reheated: Just don't do the final step, the browning, until you're ready to serve. Now, here I must confess that I tried to make this stuffing in advance of Thanksgiving I, in order to take pictures for this article, and fucked it up—yes, the one called "Simple Is Best"—so I don't have as many pictures as I want. The recipe calls for one pound of bread "or about 10 cups," and I freaked out about how my one-pound loaf of bread was more than 10 cups, and went with the smaller amount. I should not have done this. The stuffing came out insanely wet, puffy and eggy like some sort of mad omelet. That's OK! I just threw that sucker in the freezer for a day when I'm happy to eat slop, and I'll try again soon.
Last time I made this recipe for Thanksgiving II, I actually just bought a bag of those dry-ass stuffing cubes from the store, the ones that are 40 percent crumbs. And you know what? It was great. Better than my egg disaster, anyway, and it saved the drying out in the oven stage. Either do that, and sieve the crumbs out, or get a loaf of regular (but not sliced/sandwich) bread and cut and tear it into one-inch-ish pieces, then dry the pieces out in a 250-degree oven until they're really, really dry.
While that's drying, chop up your fresh herbs. You need a lot. Half a cup of parsley! Two tablespoons of sage! A tablespoon each of thyme and rosemary! And don't skimp, because the herbs are the star here. It's a lot of fiddly chopping, but you gotta do it. Get your diced onion (I found that I had slightly less than I needed from one big onion, so maybe … two smaller?) and celery, and sauté them in what looks like an insane amount of butter. And it is, but if you have enough bread, like I didn't, it will be fine.
I had slightly less onion and celery than I should have had, so it looked a bit crazy even after I added the vegetables.
The recipe tells you to add this to the bread cubes in a big bowl and then fold in the herbs, which I thought seemed silly. Instead, I added the herbs to the vegetables and stirred them through, then added that to the bread, to avoid breaking up the bread too much with extra stirring. And then it turned out terribly, so what the fuck do I know. Salt and pepper go here.
Dump into a buttered 13-by-9–inch baking dish (a size smaller would work), and cover the top tightly with foil. Bake it until the stuffing is cooked through, about 40 minutes. Then, if you are making this in advance, cool it to room temperature and either chill or freeze it. If freezing, I would press a layer of foil or plastic wrap to the top to minimize oxygen contact.
This is a meatless stuffing, and we have a vegetarian guest coming for Thanksgiving I, so I won't be adding sausage. If you want to, please go ahead, because it'll be great. Here's a photo of what mine looked like last year, when I did add sausage. Looks a bit burnt and dry on the edges, which can be remedied with careful attention to your oven and a bit of liquid.
Last thing we're making in advance is the cabbage. This cabbage is very special to me—which sounds like a sentence you would hear only in a bad improv comedy scene or on some sort of closed ward—because my aunt made it most years for Christmas. It is touched by spices, comforting and wintery, and scents the whole house not with cabbage but with buttery spice and warmth, tinged with sweet vinegar. To me, it smells of waking up from a nap when it's already dark out, your sense of smell preceding sight or thought, and blearily following the soft light to the kitchen, where someone is tipsy and singing "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing."
Get your red cabbage and cut it into quarters, and then cut the hard middle bit out from the center of each wedge. Slice it thinly crosswise, but don't worry about making it uniform. Put all that in a bowl. Peel two Granny Smith apples, and dice them small. Put that in its own bowl with a diced onion. In a THIRD bowl (how many bowls does this bitch have?), stir together three tablespoons of brown sugar with your spices. The recipe calls for a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon and a quarter teaspoon of cloves; take my aunt's advice and don't add any more clove than that, because cloves take over fast.
In a big dutch oven, start layering: Alternate cabbage (seasoned with salt and pepper), onion-apple mix, and spices, until you're all done. It doesn't matter what ends up on top. Dot with butter and pour three tablespoons of red wine vinegar on top. Put the lid on and bake it at 300 for about two to two-and-a-half hours, stirring it once or twice.
Here is how it transforms from raw cabbage:
To cooked:
Oourgh! Look at how it's all melted into itself. The tiny pieces of apple dissolve into pinky purply soft lovely cabbage. I like keeping a couple bigger pieces of cabbage in there to add some bite. This dish also freezes well.
Which brings us to the day itself, Thanksgiving II. The turkey should have been brining in the salty buttermilk for a day or so. Take it out of the fridge and let the buttermilk drain off, scraping it a bit too—I love Samin Nosrat for telling you to remove as much buttermilk as you can "without being obsessive," which is very much the energy we're trying to bring to this column. Let the breast come to room temperature for an hour or two, then preheat the oven to 425 and put the breast on either a wire rack or a baking sheet. I think I just did it on a foil-lined sheet and it was fine. The breast should take about 40-50 minutes to cook depending on whether yours has a bone; I use my meat thermometer to take the guesswork out. It's ready when the deepest part has reached 150 degrees. Take your cranberry sauce out of the fridge when you put the turkey in, too.
You probably don't have room in your oven to both reheat stuffing and cabbage and bake biscuits and cook turkey. The biscuits bake at the same temperature as the turkey, so you can put them in about 10 minutes before the turkey is done, since the turkey needs to rest for 15 minutes or so after coming out. (Frozen biscuits will take 25-30 minutes.) The cabbage could be reheated in a tightly covered pot on the stove, adding a tiny bit of liquid if you need to; you could even heat it in the oven before you cook the turkey, then keep it warm on the stove. The stuffing should be crisped at 350, uncovered, for about 40 minutes from chilled.
How to solve this temperature conundrum? You could do some clever stuff with an air fryer, which I don't have. You could cover the stuffing and chance it at 425 for about 20 minutes, then take the cover off for the last 10 minutes. Or, bring it to temperature in the oven, covered, before you cook the turkey, then cover it with a few tea towels until you’re almost done, then uncover it and bung it back in the oven with the turkey for 20 minutes to get it crispy.
Whatever! The turkey is ready! Look how beautifully it comes out, with basically no work: no basting, no butter under the skin, no fussing.
Ough. You don’t get much pan liquid with this, so if you're gravy mad, I would just … buy some or something, I'm not roasting a bunch of turkey necks just for Thanksgiving II.
Cut it like this, so everyone gets a lovely bit of burnished skin. Put butter (for the biscuits) and cranberry sauce on the table.
I haven't even mentioned dessert yet, because this apple crumble was chosen for its simplicity. I even made a single-serving version of this recipe the other night when I had half an apple leftover from a salad and I wanted something sweet, for which I didn't really measure anything, and it turned out pretty good. That's how easy it is!
A full serving of this would take a touch more effort just because of the number of apples you have to peel, so if you make it in advance and reheat it, I support that. Or, get one of your guests to work with a peeler after dinner, because peeling an apple is easy.
Core your peeled apples by putting them stalk-up on the cutting board and cutting along roughly where you think the edge of the core is on all four sides. Slice them into wedges and put them in a bowl, adding the lemon juice, cinnamon, and 100 grams of the brown sugar, and give them a good tossy-stir. Stir the flour, the remaining 200 grams of brown sugar, oats, pecans and salt together in another bowl, then add melted butter and stir; it should be a clumpable texture. In the apples go to their buttered baking dish, then sprinkle and clump the topping over the top, evenly but haphazardly and with little care. Bake, then serve it with an enormous scoop of vanilla ice cream.
And you are done. Your friends are grateful and fed. You have biscuits for days, and maybe even more leftover turkey to layer with stuffing, cranberry sauce, and brie in a biscuit sandwich. You have made Thanksgiving II, and it might even have been better than the first one, because you didn't try as hard and you only invited a couple of your favorite people.
Jerry's Cucumber Kimchi:
- 1 lb Persian Cucumbers, cut into coins
- 1 – 2 tsp red pepper flakes (Gochugaru, not the kind you shake onto pizza)
- 1 tsp garlic (finely chopped)
- 2 green onion shoots (chopped)
- 1/2 tsp kosher or sea salt (more to taste)
- 1/4 tsp sugar
- 1/2 tsp toasted sesame seeds
- 1/4 tsp black pepper
- 1 tsp rice vinegar (more to taste)
- Splash of sesame oil
Put everything in a big bowl and stir up. Add more seasoning to taste (usually a little more rice vinegar, salt, and/or red pepper flakes).
