Thanksgiving 2025

Yet another Thanksgiving is in the books, a quiet one involving just us and Rob and Dyce, an affair that ran from just after noon until well after dark, not that dark comes particularly late at this time of year. We had thought that we would celebrate at our house this year, but the guys just finished renovating the kitchen in their new house. They wanted us to come over for Thanksgiving to christen the kitchen, and so we did.

Post-Thanksgiving Scrabble with Willamette Pinot
Ed and Dyce Getting Killed by the Pros

I had already made plans to make my Thanksgiving Lasagne yet again this year (for details and recipes, click through the link). By this, I mean that Ann asked me to make it again as Thanksgiving is her show. As a perfectly portable dish, the pan of lasagne was easy to assemble in our kitchen (over 5 days) and bake in their kitchen. Turkey neck rillettes are always a happy by-product of making the lasagne, so we brought those along too as well as a container of cranberry-orange relish.

Rob and Dyce contributed a green bean casserole, deviled eggs, a warm artichoke dip, and a delightful charcuterie board. It seems hard to believe that Ann made it this far in life without ever having green bean casserole, de rigueur at every potluck! I also have to mention that they opened their final bottle of 2015 Cristom Pinot Noir Hirschy Vineyard, a spectacular wine that is drinking so phenomenally right now.

Way Too Many Appetizers

Rob's Spinach-Artichoke Dip

Turkey Rillettes with Cranberry Relish

You Had Me at Speck!

Dyce's Deviled Eggs

Tukey Lasagna and Green Bean Casserole Finished Baking

Tukey Lasagna, Cranberry Relish, Green Bean Casserole

One Food Porn Shot: Roasted Turkey Thighs for the Lasagna

Turkey Neck Rillettes

Turkey neck rillettes are pretty common as an appetizer before our Thanksgiving feast and are a happy side product of making stock for the gravy and dressing to accompany our turkey.

Turkey Neck Rillettes on Crostini with Cornichons

Rillettes are a type of charcuterie, essentially a rustic form of pâté in which shredded cooked meat is mixed with fat to form a spreadable paste. I used to make all manner of rillettes for our charcuterie program at the restaurant, but mainly from pork, salmon, and duck, animals that have a really high fat content such that you can cook the meat and let it congeal in its own fat to make a great spread. Alas, turkey has no such fat, especially on the necks so you have to add fat to make the spread.

Making Stock
Roasted Turkey Necks and Aromatics

To make my Thanksgiving stock, I use turkey necks because they are cheap and also delicious. First, I rub the necks with oil and roast them in the oven until they are brown and caramelized all over. Then the necks go into the stock pot with aromatics, in this case, carrots, celery leaves, parsley stems, shallot peels, and leek leaves. They cook until tender at which point, I separate the stock for use later to make gravy and to moisten stuffing. The necks, I let cool to touch before picking the meat from them. It is far easier to pick the meat from the bones when the necks are warm rather than cold.

Picked Turkey Neck Meat, Roughly Chopped

Because turkey neck meat is naturally long and stringy, really long pieces can be difficult to chew. To avoid this, I give the meat a rough chop to shorten the pieces, but as you can see in the photo above, I still leave a decent amount of texture.

At this point, it is time to mix in the fat and seasonings. I like to keep the seasonings really simple, so I seasoned to taste with fresh thyme leaves, salt, and a few scrapings of nutmeg. Next, I mixed in enough softened fat to make a smooth, spreadable paste. In the best of all worlds, I would have used duck fat to make the rillettes, but I'm no longer running a restaurant with gallons of duck fat on hand. (This is why our sweet-and-sour brussels sprouts were so good: seared good and hard in duck fat with pork belly scraps and shallots before being finished with caramelized sugar and white balsamic vinegar!). So I used a mixture of bacon grease leftover from some other meal and softened butter. Lard would have worked great too, especially lard leftover from making carnitas.

Turkey Neck Rillettes Packed Into a Bowl

If I were making rillettes for long-term storage, I would have packed them into jars and sealed the tops with additional molten fat to keep them from the air. In this case, I was serving them two days hence, so I packed them into the bowl in which I wanted to serve them and covered it with plastic wrap before putting it in the refrigerator. On Thanksgiving morning, I gently rewarmed the bowl in front of the fireplace to restore its unctuous texture.

Out on the Town, Asheville NC

After our late lunch at HomeGrown at which I only ate a fun watercress salad to save room for dinner, we went back to the B&B to rest, shower, and get ready for Happy Hour on the front porch. Back to the swing, we stayed for a serenade by the Song Sparrows and a glass of wine before heading downtown to celebrate our final night in Asheville and our final true night of vacation before heading to Virginia Beach to watch Carter perform in his concert.

The night before, Neil had suggested to us that before we went to Rhubarb for dinner, we should go to the Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar in the Grove Arcade for a little pre-game. It sounded kind of strange and he mentioned nothing about dogs (dogs?) but he seemed rather insistent that we would like it. Being a sucker for Champagne, I figured it might be worth a stop to have a glass of bubbly before dinner, but I was wholly unprepared for the ridiculously eclectically cool experience that is this bastion of hip urbanity in downtown Asheville.

I was kind of stunned (Screw that. I was totally stunned) when I walked in the door. Think upscale smoking room meets library meets swank bar meets hipster coffee shop with gay queen over-the-top attitude. Blacks, reds, luxurious leatherclad furnishings, warm and eclectic lighting, nooks and crannies, marble and brass: it's all way, way too much to take in at a glance. Think exposed industrial hip-warehouse HVAC, throwback schoolhouse lighting, red railinged mezzanine overlooking oriental-motif carpets, moosehead on the wall, leatherbound books, heavy drapes, grandfather clock, espresso bar, and dogs, dogs, dogs. Can you even wrap your head around all this?

Ever Seen This in a Bookstore?

This Explains it All. Not Really.

As I was standing in the entry trying to take things in, letting my eyes adjust from being outside in the sunlight, and generally trying to avoid Mary Poppins scolding me ("Close your mouth please, Ed. We are not a codfish."), Ann spied dogs, abruptly left me, and made a bee-line directly for the dogs. You now know where I rank on Ann's hierarchy, somewhere way south of dogs.

Dogs in a Bookstore?

Meanwhile, I spied this lovely collection of sparklers on the bar counter and made my way to a stool where I started to go through the wonderfully curated list of Champagnes and other wines.

So Many Choices

After her dog fix, Annie finally joined me at the bar for what turned out to be two glasses each of Jacques Copinet brut. I didn't know Copinet, but I do now. It's really good grower Champagne.

Dogs and Champagne? Annie's in Love!

Marble Bar, Engraved Stemware, $$$$

Really Nice Champagne

We reluctantly had to get going to make our 8:00 reservation at Rhubarb a couple blocks away. When we got there, Ann asked the hostess if we could sit outside and she predicted a 15-20 minute wait for a table, so we sat at the bar until about 8:25 waiting for a table to clear. The first thing that I noticed was real fruit, real eggs, and a collection of bitters on the bar, a clear indicator that this was a serious bar making serious cocktails.

Ann was looking for something different and not sweet so the bartender suggested a Rhubarb Collins made from vodka and house-made strawberry-rhubarb soda. I took a chance on the bartender and ordered a Crusta, an old cocktail that is the forerunner of the modern-day Sidecar. The bartender had never heard of it before so I ran him through it. Aside from the garnish, which should be a wide strip of lemon rind, it was perfect and so superbly balanced. I complimented him on the fine work and tipped accordingly. It is so hard to find a quality bar where we live. Rhubarb has an excellent bar.

Crusta Cocktail

We finally got seated outside in perfect weather and watched the street performers on Biltmore Avenue while we were waiting for our menus and the wine list.

Enjoying the Street Show

Chef John Fleer is widely known for doing creative food and we were really looking forward to sampling his menu. As we like to do, when we don't do tastings, we like to sample several small plates to get a broader perspective on a chef and the kitchen.

The Rhubarb Menu

Some of the Street Performers

My first order of business, while Ann decided what we were going to order, was to find a bottle of wine. The list is quite a bit smaller than I might have imagined a list for a restaurant of this caliber would be, but it seemed to be fairly carefully curated with some interesting wines, though it seemed weighted to French wines especially on the red side. I didn't spend much time on the list because almost immediately I spotted a Barbaresco from a producer with a good reputation. The only question in my mind was that it was a 2001 vintage, and though Barbaresco certainly wants and can take that kind of age, it's always a crapshoot about how it has been stored. I needn't have worried about that: from first whiff of it's lavish perfume of raspberries, tea, tar, roses, violets, and dried leaves to the final sip with it's lip-smacking acidity, the bottle was stellar.

2001 Sori Paitin Barbaresco, So Good!

Fried hominy with chile and lime was outstanding. I want more, more, more. Think ancho-lime Doritos for grown ups.

Fried Hominy! Amazing!

The goat cheese burrata was tender and really well made. The beet, strawberry, and basil garnishes didn't do a lot for me, however. Some Benton's ham and ramp pesto (to put a Southern drawl on prosciutto and pesto) would have been awesome.

Goat Cheese Burrata

The rabbit-leek rillettes sounded better than they actually were, being melted to the point where they were runny as you can see in the photo. The house-made "sel-tines" were outstanding.

Rabbit Leek Rillettes

Beef belly! What a great concept! I look forward to trying it myself. The result was really beefy and intense in flavor, though a bit lean for me. I would have loved a slice with more fat. The farrotto on which it sat was a loser, being overcooked to mushy blandness.

Beef Belly with Saffron Farrotto

We ordered a cheese plate and asked our server to pick some of her local favorites. Since the cheese plate ended up coming last, it made a great dessert and accompaniment to the last drops of Barbaresco. I couldn't really tell you the names now, but the plainest looking of the bunch on the far right turned out to be the most awesome. I think it was Castanet from Three Graces Dairy in Marshall NC.

Local Cheeses for Dessert

After dinner, as we walked back through downtown to the B&B across I-240, we got to further experience the street life of this eclectic and vibrant town, taking in the various street musicians, artists, and characters. And sadly our arrival back at the B&B pretty much concludes the story of our stay in Asheville. It's wonderful place to visit though it's a little too big for us to want to live there.

Tuscarora Mill, Leesburg VA

Friday of vacation week came way too soon. I knew we wanted to go out to lunch somewhere and I knew we wanted to stay far, far away from Winchester and the madness of the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival, so I suggested going to Leesburg for lunch. I had in mind one of the small ethnic restaurants there, but Ann insisted she wanted to go some place with a good wine list and she chose Tuskies. I haven't eaten there in 20 years.

Cheers!

We arrived for a late lunch around 1:30 and started with a glass of sparkling wine while I looked over the wine list. I really wanted a nice Pinot for lunch but their Pinot list is not good. I did spy a bottle of Vietti Perbacco Nebbiolo which is always a nice buy. Vietti always chooses some of its precocious barrels of Barolo Castiglione and bottles them early as Perbacco. Baby read-to-drink Barolo at a great price, what is not to like?

Vietti Perbacco, Always a Great Buy

While I looked at the wine list, Ann picked a bunch of small plates from the menu for us to eat, five appetizers and an entrée.


Flatbread with Chorizo, Spinach, Provolone and Balsamic Glaze

The most successful dish of the day was this flatbread which with its super thin crust was really outstanding pizza. I was a little leery of the balsamic reduction on the pizza, but it worked really well. This is the best pizza I've had in a long time and is better than anything we've had at their sister restaurant next door, Fireworks Pizza.



Tuna, Seaweed Salad, Daikon



Country Pâté and Duck Rillettes with Onion Jam

The tuna was OK for the price, but it is not something I would have chosen for myself. Anybody can scoop seaweed salad out of a container and on to a plate. The pâté was pretty good, but I wonder if it was made in house. The rillettes needed some seasoning. We always make ours from duck confit with copious amounts of nutmeg and thyme. The smoked onion jam was delicious, but really super (i.e., too) smoky as if the onions weren't smoked at all and were flavored with smoked salt after being caramelized.


Crispy Pork Belly Tacos, Scallion Pancakes, Korean Slaw

And last was this plate. It looks a mess and unfortunately tasted a mess and we were highly disappointed. The scallion pancake and crispy pork belly tacos were put into a mini taco stand and then buried in a heap of overly sweet slaw. As a result, the pancakes were soggy and the pork belly no longer crispy. Our restaurant has some acclaim on the East Coast for our pork belly and I have yet to find a restaurant that does it even half as well as we do. Pity. We also got a crab dip that was pretty mediocre, so mediocre that I didn't feel the need to waste storage on a photo of it.

We are used to food not being up to our admittedly exceedingly high standards, so that didn't really dampen our day. In all, the experience was pleasant and we had a great time.

After lunch, I suggested that we pick up a couple of pizzas next door to take home for dinner. And we did. Not remembering that we ordered the Barcelona pizza on our previous visit and found that it wasn't as delicious as it sounded on paper, Ann ordered another. And we had the same experience. The roasted red peppers dominated all the other toppings. Blah.

Thanksgiving 2014

And another Thanksgiving is in the books, for Ann and me, our 6th, this one a good bit smaller than in years past. But though it was smaller, it is always a pleasure to gather with friends and family at the table to celebrate another year. It was really easy this year. With it snowing on Wednesday, there wasn't any business at the restaurant and I was able to prep most of the meal at work, letting us go slow and relax on Thanksgiving itself.

Ann and her Parents

Who is That Photo Bombing the Girls?

Appetizers: Turkey Rillettes, Galantine, and Cornichons

A Really Nice Right Bank Bordeaux

Ann Always Sets a Beautiful Table



Apple Cider-Brined Turkey Thighs Only This Year; No White Meat for Us

Ann's Bread and Saltine Cracker Dressing

Ann's Bistro Mash: Half Sweet Potatoes, Half Red Skin Potatoes

Sweet and Sour Brussels Sprouts with Pork Belly

The Obligatory Cranberry-Orange Sauce

Sweet Potato Tart with Cassis Cream and Black Walnut Streusel

And a 1991 Port to Finish off the Meal