A Slightly More Elegant Dinner Than Aunt Sue's Thanksgiving Dinner

Selection of Hors d'Oeuvres
Meat Pastry Stuffed with Pork, Mushrooms, Cream and Pepper
Soft Boiled Eggs Beauharnais, Soft Boiled Eggs Served on Artichokes with Béarnaise Sauce
Asparagus Polonaise, Sprinkled with Hard Boiled Egg and Parsley
Tabbboulé à La Française, Crushed Wheat with Tomatoes, Onions and Mint
Spinach Tart Decorated with Anchovy Fillets

Soups
Tapioca and Basil Tomato Soup
Cream Agnès Sorrel, Chicken Velouté of Mushrooms
Bisque of Shell Fish
Sole Velouté Garnished with Fish Quenelles
Fish Velouté with Lobster Coulis Garnished with Lobster Royale Shaped Into Crosses

Fish Course
Smelts Baked in Breadcrumbs with Sauce Colbert
Poached Sole Polignac White Sauce of Creamed Julienned Mushrooms and Truffles
Poached Sole Walewska, Encased in Lobster Slices and Truffles with Mornay Sauce
Salmon in Genovese Sauce
Sturgeon in Provençale Sauce

Sorbet of Tangerines

Tomato Aspic

Meat Courses
Chicken Montmorency, Garnished with Artichoke Hearts, Carrots and Potato Croquettes
Medallions of Pepper Steak
Medallions of Beef Périgueux of White Truffles
Fillets of Beef Wellington in Périgourdine Truffle and Vegetable Pâté
Stuffed Quails with Bread Sauce
Braised Leg of Ham

Vegetables
Petits Pois Parisienne, Fried and Tossed in Meat Glaze with Potato Balls and Artichoke Hearts and Lettuce
Spinach Ragout with Young Green Peas
Glazed Carrots and Turnips in Ramekins
Cauliflower in Mayonnaise
Onion and Arborio Rice Tartlets
Vol-auVents with Mushroom Medley and Broccoli
Baked Ramekins of Potato and Onions

Salads
Danicheff, Asparagus Tips, Celeriac, Potatoes Artichoke Hearts and Mushrooms Decorated with Crayfish, Truffles and Hard-boiled Eggs
Monte Cristo, Diced Pineapple with Truffles, Potatoes and Hard-boiled Eggs on Romaine Lettuce
Salade Nicoise
Roasted Leek and Potatoes
Zucchini Carpaccio

The Desserts
Charlotte à la Parisienne
Bavarian Cream au Parfait d'Amour
Bavarian Cream with Pistachios
Bavarian Cream with Rose Petals
Blanc Mange
Individual Fresh Fruit Baskets
Cassis Tartlets with Rum Sauce
Pêches Bordelaise, Peaches Poached in Bordeaux Wine
Pêches à la Duchesse, Peach Tartlets with Vanilla Ice Cream, Kirsch Covered in Zabaglione

Champagne for All Courses Above, Dom Pérignon

Cheese Course
Abondance Cheese Souflé
Wine: Roussette de Savoie
Cheese Platter with Tomme Crayeuse, Bleu de Sassenage, Tomette de Yennet, Reblochon and Abondance
Wine: Rhône-Aples
Cheese Plate: Bleu de Gex
Wine: Savoie Gamay

Fresh Fruit

If you took a nap before beginning your dinner preparations, you should be able to put this wonderful Thanksgiving Dinner together and still keep your equanimity. And imagine, you'll be able to serve something sure to please everybody, not to mention the abundance of doggie bags!
Just kidding!

No Kyoto Treaty, No Food Soon
Warm tinge to the evening, so we gathered out on the porch again, lighting two of the smaller braziers, and enjoyed the glory of the cloudless sky with its myriad stars, along with enjoying Schuyler's Caribbean-inspired Petite Fleur, made with good Bacardi white rum and Cointreau.

Terry and Art talked a bit about how Fall meant the end of the growing season for many plants and the beginning of dormancy for others. But, they explained to us, that is as it should be. That's nature at her best. Imagine though, they asked, if we continued to rape the earth, our animals, our air, our skies and our oceans. Where, Terry wondered out loud, would we get the myriad ingredients we traditionally gather for our Thanksgiving dinners? What if the end of growing seasons occurred at times of the year when they shouldn't? What if dormancy occurred when nature did not intend it to occur? What if animals began reproducing at times guaranteed to produce only still-births?

Alex was afraid that if we relayed our fears to the outside world we could be laughed at, but his wife Jane allayed his fears by immediately stating forcefully that it is we, who work the land and raise the food and breed and raise the animals, who know how to listen to the threats on mother nature. It is also we who recognize the importance of the Kyoto Treaty.

Our brethren, the Innuits, are already facing almost insurmountable difficulties fishing and hunting and stocking provisions to tide them over their difficult seasons. Where once they could hunt and store their food deep in the ground to keep it frozen until needed, that no longer works: the ground is becoming too warm. The ice they depend on to be frozen solid enough for them to hunt on safely is becoming mushy, threatening not only the Innuit but also the polar bears, who depend on firmly frozen ice to be able to do their hunting.

Bob and Judy told us they heard that glaciers are melting everywhere, meaning that the oceans are warming precipitously, endangering nature's food chain. And Judy said, sweet pea, we depend on that food chain far more than you would think when you're walking around those fancy halls in Washington.

Judy reminded us that we eat very small portions of beef and lamb, and supplement our dinners with fish, but she said that the warming pacific was causing the numbers of fish in the pacific to plummet. This endangers not only fish, and of course, us, but also the bird populations: cormorants, auklets and murres are dying off, as are salmon and rockfish. Rising water temperatures are also killing off plankton, on which so many sea animals depend for sustenance. In other words, birds are dying of starvation, washing up on the pacific coast. There aren't enough fish for them to feed. And baby, Judy reminded us, we're next: while the dandies in D.C. eat, smooch and corrupt.

The "prissy rancher Shrub" doesn't understand how the air affects the earth; he doesn't understand how the air affects the temperature in the oceans. In a nutshell Bob said, he does not understand how the earth can begin to die and go into an early and permanent dormancy, and not over a period of a million years, it's happening now, it's beginning to worsen today.
Jane thought, aloud, that it was beginning to affect us faster than D.C. understands, and we might have to start marking Thanksgivings the way prisoners used to mark their dungeons, one mark (less food), two marks (even less food), three marks (hardly any food), four marks (food only for the rich), five marks (no food, period.)

Max and Charlotte wanted to inject at least a small note of comfort into our day before Thanksgiving. They reminded us that we were mostly vegetarian, and that the flesh we would be eating came from animals that were raised humanely and slaughtered without any need for fear, so carefully do we conduct that necessary task. Our chickens actually live like chickens: they live in and out of doors, at their pleasure, as do our pigs. We have no animals confined unnaturally and unspeakably cruelly. And Charlotte asked that we please, please, beg you to watch a very short video on the Internet called The Meatrix, which points out the cruelty of factory-raised animals, for which there is no need. There are a myriad humane farms out there from which you can get your beef, turkeys and hams for the holidays.

Finally, Charlotte mentioned, it made our children that much more happy, to know that when they ate well, they did not eat well because some animal had led a miserable life and a death full of pain and fear, which just isn't, isn't necessary. You probably have noticed, Charlotte reminded us, that our menus never have veal on them, nor do they have pâté, unless it's vegetarian or from livers of humanely treated animals other than ducks. Also, we are making plans to be ever more vigilant of what fish we eat.

We know, Alex said, that the Republicans and the extreme religious right don't give a damn what happens to our earth, our plants and our animals, but we, as Democrats, liberals and progressives have to care: we have to leave our children a better world, not a more corrupted and polluted world, and we need to teach them spiritual animal husbandry and spiritual agricultural methods, not for us, not even for them, but for their grandchildren.

Sorry about the Menu of a Myriad Dishes printed above, it was just a joke, but also a small history lesson: that was a typical menu back when there was really an Upstairs Downstairs, scullery maids really worked in the scullery and parlor maids really kept the fireplaces clean and stoked. Today, we are the scullery maids, parlor maids, footmen, cooks, etc., but we enjoy it because have the best neighbors you could ever wish for! No Republicans!

The Gang Cooks a Simple Dinner
Knowing that in a few hours we'll be sitting down to a rather large banquet, we thought the days preceding Thanksgiving we would eat sparsely. We all pitched in because after our gathering, conversing and dining, most of us will still have dinner preparations to attend to in preparation for the Thanksgiving dinner.

Beatrix prepared a delicious Parmentier, the hot version of cold Vichyssoise, the delicious leek and potato soup. Breaking with our pattern of having sherry with our soup, Beatrix wanted to have an Italian Sangiovese, and poured us an Antinori Santa Cristina, a wine with plenty of body and heft.

Jeremy and Max paired up to prepare us a simple dish of roast chicken and grilled vegetables, consisting of Portobello mushrooms basted with olive oil, wild mushrooms, beets, parsnips and carrots. They paired it with an American sparkling wine, a Roederer Estate. We promised you simple and sparse, so this was our dinner tonight. We were satisfied, but the youngsters were allowed seconds if they wanted them.

End of Day Before Thanksgiving
All in all, this was a good evening. We just hope we can get the message across to those people who put business profits before human and animal life. Out teenagers have an advantage, since they live in an environment in which they live day to day with Mother Nature, and how we take care of her or abuse her.

Summary:
Thanksgiving is here, but it should be a day of reflection; a day during which we have to understand that the bounty placed before us will only be there next year if we begin to take care of our air, our earth, our oceans and our animals. We run the risk of having no food to celebrate Thanksgiving with if we don't force our government to develop better practices, the least of which is signing on to the Kyoto Treaty.