Anybody cooking for Canadian Thanksgiving?

This is perhaps a long shot, but I know I have some fellow country women and men out there in LTHville. Is anybody celebrating Thanksgiving today? It's going to be a modest, improvised affair this year, but I plan to start by making Kennyz's roasted brussel sprouts with raw cranberries and fig-maple gastrique. Any other Thanksgiving meals being made today?

I did mine yesterday :
20 lb turkey with bread stuffing.
Potatoes mashed with garlic and then combined with sauteed bacon and onions, topped with cheese and then baked.
Sweet potatoes casserole with local butter and this spring's maple syrup
Baked onions with sage leaves
Homemade Baklava
a nice rich Grenache

Today - leftovers

I didn't know the Canadians thanksgave. What is the holiday based on? (It can't be Pilgrims & Native Americans . . . )

http://www.thanksgivingnovember.com/canadian-thanksgiving.html

Hope this helps

Canadian Foodie wrote:I did mine yesterday :
20 lb turkey with bread stuffing.
Potatoes mashed with garlic and then combined with sauteed bacon and onions, topped with cheese and then baked.
Sweet potatoes casserole with local butter and this spring's maple syrup
Baked onions with sage leaves
Homemade Baklava
a nice rich Grenache

Today - leftovers

Sounds lovely, Canadian Foodie. Happy Thanksgiving!

aschie30 wrote:I didn't know the Canadians thanksgave. What is the holiday based on? (It can't be Pilgrims & Native Americans . . . )

Oh, you know, happy_stomach's people love to thanksgive.

The date is arbitrary as with all holidays, but it is supposed to be a celebration in thanks of the harvest/growing season. It is a reason to eat.

A little jaunt up to Lake Louise for Canadian Thanksgiving a year ago led to our education in this matter. In a word, we were informed by our concierge: "we stole it."

And yet. Though they may have stolen Thanksgiving, their high tea is to die for. And I still ain't had nuthin' as good south of Banff and I've had me some teas here in the good ol' U S of A.

Canadian Foodie wrote:I did mine yesterday :
20 lb turkey with bread stuffing.
Potatoes mashed with garlic and then combined with sauteed bacon and onions, topped with cheese and then baked.
Sweet potatoes casserole with local butter and this spring's maple syrup
Baked onions with sage leaves
Homemade Baklava
a nice rich Grenache

Today - leftovers

No poutine?

Hi,

I happened to read this thread earlier today. At dinner I was talking about the fast approaching Canadian Thanksgiving. I was relaying the menu as much as I could remember. My friend inquired if turkey was really the centerpiece for their meal like it is for ours? Or is it just as likely to be something else?

I hope someone can advise.

Regards,

Also, if you are roasting a turkey, where are you getting the bird? I want to roast a turkey, but the pickings are mighty slim in early October.

Jen

Pie-love wrote:Also, if you are roasting a turkey, where are you getting the bird? I want to roast a turkey, but the pickings are mighty slim in early October.

Jen

All you have to do is go to your butcher and order one. Turkeys can be had all year around. The butcher usually only need a couple of days notice.

Pie-love wrote:Also, if you are roasting a turkey, where are you getting the bird? I want to roast a turkey, but the pickings are mighty slim in early October.

Jen

I've seen fresh turkeys the last few weeks at Fresh Farms Niles.

Cathy2 wrote:Hi,

I happened to read this thread earlier today. At dinner I was talking about the fast approaching Canadian Thanksgiving. I was relaying the menu as much as I could remember. My friend inquired if turkey was really the centerpiece for their meal like it is for ours? Or is it just as likely to be something else?

I hope someone can advise.

Regards,

Cathy,

I generally am in Canada for Canadian Thanksgiving and, from what I observe in the grocery stores, turkey seems to be the bird of choice.

Jyoti

stevez wrote:

Pie-love wrote:Also, if you are roasting a turkey, where are you getting the bird? I want to roast a turkey, but the pickings are mighty slim in early October.

Jen

All you have to do is go to your butcher and order one. Turkeys can be had all year around. The butcher usually only need a couple of days notice.

Ha, that totally did not occur to me because "my" butcher quit the business about 10 years ago to become a voice actor in commercials. This was Barney's, around 55th and Hyde Park Blvd in Hyde Park. He always had a bit or two of meat hanging off his face or arm (like tiny bits of hamburger), but his lamb chops were the best. I think his name was Steve, not Barney, and I miss him very much-- it is too bad that butchering is becoming a lost trade.

Jen

One thing that I encountered in rural Eastern Ontario is that many communities sponsor a community turkey dinner as opposed to individual families.

My father and I have stumbled into a couple on Thanksgiving weekends. And the locals would never let ys pay.

Turkey is indeed very traditional, but this year, my house in Nova Scotia is having roasted leg of lamb and sweet potato casserole. That, and more of the same granache I mentioned last year ( http://www.klwines.com/detail.asp?sku=1032660 should take us through the long weekend quite well.
Happy Thanksgiving

I was born a Canadian, and the trappings of Thanksgiving in Canada are very similar to what we'd be familiar with at the end of November. This made sense to me growing up, because the buckle-shoes-and-blunderbuss inheritance was every bit as much ours in Canada: like many old-settler-stock Canadians, I'm a Mayflower descendant. While that affair in the 1860s which gave us the last Thursday in November among many other things is called the Civil War--a bit of ideological sleight-of-hand, really, begging the question of whether the United States was one country, or society to begin with--the American Revolution was a real Civil War, from the St. Lawrence to the Okefenokee. My father's family, Massachusetts-born settlers in New Brunswick, ended up on the other side of the border. Parts of my mother's family were already living in the Yarmouth area at the Southern end of Nova Scotia, which for a few months in the 1780s was home to thousands of escaped slaves, whose protection the British did not surrender at Yorktown, before they were resettled in Freetown, which became Sierra Leone.

So the general New England culture from which our style of Thanksgiving descends was split between two countries. Roast Turkey, using a potato-based stuffing whose most prominent spice was summer savory. Rutabaga, boiled with sugar and mashed, which we always called "turnips." (The true turnip was very seldom seen). Cranberry sauce, not the jelly which comes in cans, itself so distinct that we often had it in addition to the homemade, which was a mash boiled, again, with plenty of sugar. Pies: raisin, mincemeat, pumpkin; the first two usually with a basket-weave top, like cherry pies often have, the last without top, of course.

This actually was a general-purpose holiday meal, also eaten at Christmas and Easter in our house. Breadstuffs were the only seasonal elements, a raison bread and homemade fruitcake at Christmas.