SAFE TURKEY STEPS
Help make sure your turkey meal is safe
by following these food-safety tips.
• When thawing, leave turkey in packaging.
• Cook to an internal temperature of 165 F.
• Let stand for 20 minutes before carving.
• Get leftovers in fridge within two hours.
• Reheat or freeze within three to four days.
• Reheat leftovers to 165 F.
— Fight Bac! Partnership for
Food Safety Education ( fightbac.org)
BY JOE YONAN
WHAT IS American food? Well, America
is simply too young and too influenced
by its long history of immigration to be
tradition-bound, and that’s particularly
true for its food scene, which is as good
as, if not better than, anywhere else in the
world. I think what makes American food
American is its sheer diversity.
With just one look through the pages of
America The Great Cookbook you’ll agree.
We asked ;;; chefs and other food heroes
what they make for the people they love,
and they answered with the stories and
recipes that form this collection of awe-inspiring variety: lamb shoulder from an
Israeli chef in Philadelphia, sweet potato
tacos from the son of Mexican immigrants
in Los Angeles, maple-roasted squash
from a Native American chef (he calls
himself the “Sioux Chef,” a play on the
term sous chef) and much, much more.
It’s a virtual tour of American kitchens
perfect for Thanksgiving, when we think
about what America really means, take
stock of our years and offer gratitude for
the people most important to us.
Thanksgiving is also when we, perhaps more than for any other holiday,
think about tradition at the table: roast
Let’s talk turkey
FOR YOUR TABLE
© BOCHKAREV PHOTOGRAPHY / SHUTTERSTOCK
turkey, pumpkin or sweet potato pie,
stuffing, mashed potatoes. But even at
Thanksgiving, there are as many traditions as there are American immigrants.
It might come as a surprise that such
divergent traditions have been the norm
since even before what we think of as the
first Thanksgiving—the one shared by the
Pilgrims and Native Americans in ;;;;
in Massachusetts.
According to Robert Tracy McKenzie,
author of The First Thanksgiving (IVP
Academic, ;;;;; not available at Costco),
Native American tribes, including the
Algonquians and Wampanoag, French
Huguenots in Florida, Spanish colonists
in Texas, and English settlers in Maine
and Virginia all engaged in such celebrations, some of them as early as ;;;;. “The
Pilgrims were hardly the first people to
stop and thank their
creator for a bountiful
harvest,” he wrote in The
Washington Post in ;;;;.
I don’t have menus for all
of those celebrations, but
I’m confident that they
were probably pretty different from one another.
COSTCOCONNEC TION
America The Great Cookbook
;ghts childhood hunger by
helping No Kid Hungry (nokid
hungry.org) connect kids with
at least 200,000 meals. It’s
available in most Costco warehouses (Item #1195311, 10/31).
THE
Tips to help you serve
the best bird ever
