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Good morning. I have a lot of Thanksgiving rules. One of them is no appetizers.
Why? I’ve been preparing food for the feast for days, and there’s still plenty left to do today. I don’t want you showing up at my house this afternoon, eating a half pound of nuts and a quarter of a cheese ball, then taking a small dinner portion of turkey and sides and declining seconds. That devalues my work! (He said, sniffily.) Also, I don’t have enough plates.
That doesn’t mean I’m not going to make lunch. I am, and it’s going to be out of the Thanksgiving larder, leftovers sandwiches made with food I haven’t yet served. To wit, cranberry grilled cheese sandwiches (above), which require only a few spoonfuls of your homemade cranberry sauce (or a few slabs of the canned variety), a handful of grated Cheddar, some decent sandwich bread, mayonnaise and butter. Salty and sweet and acidic and creamy and soft and crisp. Perfection. Give it a try. Keep that blood sugar up.
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Cranberry Grilled CheeseView Recipe →
While I have you, here are some answers to the questions that invariably ping into my inbox on this day.
First: 165. That’s the temperature, measured at the deepest part of the thigh, at which your turkey is safe to consume, according to the smarties at the United States Department of Agriculture. Does that “rule” mean you should keep your turkey in the oven until its internal temperature is 165? It does not! The turkey’s internal temperature will continue to rise for many minutes after you’ve removed it from the oven and set it to rest, tented loosely under foil, on a countertop or sideboard, in advance of carving it. My target is 162 or so when it comes out of the oven; it’ll be 165 soon enough.
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