Every single diet I ever fell off of was because of potatoes and gravy of some sort.
My mother very rarely skipped a Thanksgiving turkey. And yet, none of them ever tasted quite the same, landing somewhere on a sliding scale of succulence. She'd try new methods.
The entrée wasn't tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn't have been primordial soup because morphogenesis was already taking place.
No more turkey, but I'd like some more of the bread it ate.
Don't make a big to-do about the turkey; brine it, put it in the oven, and don't think about it again.
For me, the act of telling the story and showing it to somebody is almost gravy.
Most turkeys taste better the day after, my mother's tasted better the day before.
What tends to happen is that people will go - they've got hot broth, you know, they've added some liquid to their drippings, they've brought that up to heat. And then they try to add in a big clump of just kind of a handful of flour, and of course, it turns into library paste.
Being Irish, I grew up eating a Sunday roast.
We don't yet call it 'Thxgvng,' because any holiday whose centerpiece sits in an oven for four to six hours, after having sat out for as long to reach room temperature, must be spelled all the way out. Cook a turkey. You'll see. This is to say that you're not just roasting a turkey, obviously.
Now the look of the book dictates the sale. In my day you could still buy a good cookbook in paperback with no pictures at all. I doubt if that would sell today. But those books were much used: they lived in the kitchen and got splattered with custard and gravy.
My favorite was always smothered pork chops. Smothered pork chops. That would be my request if I ever had one, and it was pretty consistent.
The most important thing with turkey is to let it rest - most people don't let it rest long enough. It will get juicier the longer you let it rest.
I don't know if I'd call it a favorite, but there was an entree in the rotation at my grade school cafeteria called 'Salisbury Steak' that was some kind of freestanding spongiform potage covered in a sauce that would probably have to be spelled 'grayvee' for legal reasons.
I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
A week before Thanksgiving, my mother bought the turkey, frozen. Then she froze it some more. Then she let it thaw and cleaned it - and I mean really cleaned it, because nobody wanted a 'dirty bird.' She salt-and-peppered the turkey, buttered, paprika-ed, and nominally stuffed it.
Get me a gun. If I don't go into labor soon, I'm going to shoot myself. And pass the gravy. Pass it now." Valerie - To the Nines
You can't have a good Thanksgiving meal without a little bit of ketchup on the side.
And roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is my personal signature dish.
Gravy is the simplest, tastiest, most memory-laden dish I know how to make: a little flour, salt and pepper, crispy bits of whatever meat anchored the meal, a couple of cups of water or milk and slow stirring to break up lumps.
If you think about a Thanksgiving dinner, it's really like making a large chicken.
She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." -- Willing
Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with gravy of political patronage.
Pyp had stabbed a turnip with his knife. "The night is dark and full of turnips," he announced in a solemn voice. "Let us all pray for venison, my children, with some onions and a bit of tasty gravy.
All we try and do is make the best films we can. If you do that then hopefully the audiences will come, and they have. Everything else is gravy.
