A halal butcher shop, IKEA, and ChatGPT saved Thanksgiving.
This is the second year in a row that I spent Thanksgiving in Montpellier by myself. Other than missing Kathryn, I don’t really mind the solitude. It’s actually kind of nice to have a day off while everyone around you is working.
Last year, I admit, I got lazy when it came to preparing myself a Thanksgiving feast. On the day itself, I went to an hypermarché at the outskirts of the city and loaded up from their prepared foods section. It wasn’t a bad meal — rotisserie chicken and scalloped potatoes — but I had’t put much thought into it.
This year, I decided to do more planning.
First, I started scoping out a place to get some kind of turkey. I’d recently noticed a halal butcher shop located adjacent to a nearby supermarket. When I checked out their online presence, I noticed an abundance of very positive reviews, but more importantly, I noticed several photos of neatly tied, reasonably sized turkey roasts.
Not wanting Thanksgiving to be ruined by a new butcher, I decided to give them a small test the weekend before Thanksgiving, ordering 500 grams of ground beef. It turned out to be a better test than I expected. The woman in front of me ordered viande hachée, which is made from scraps and cheaper cuts than the steak haché I ordered, so I watched to see how they operated the grinder. They ground the remaining scraps through the grinder and set them aside before they threw in the trimmed sirloin for my order. They passed.
When I went back a few days later for a turkey roast, I was disappointed to see there were none in the display case. One of the butchers asked if he could help, and I told him I was looking for a one-kilo rôti de dinde. He grabbed an enormous breast of turkey out of the case and sliced off a piece to make a roast. I had to wait a few minutes while another butcher tied it, but in the end, I left with exactly what I wanted.
What’s a Thanksgiving dinner without cranberry sauce, right? Well, I don’t often see cranberry anything here in France. Searching online, one can find dried cranberries imported from other countries, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I started thinking about substitutes when it hit me: lingonberry jam from IKEA!
I took the tram to IKEA, arriving just in time to enjoy their one-euro breakfast, and then I went straight to their food shop. I picked up a jar of the lingonberry jam, and while I was there, I also got a packet of their savory sauce. I knew there was no way I was getting enough drippings for gravy from a one-kilo roast, especially when I was planning to cook it over a bed of potatoes and onions.
Adding in a trip to the greengrocer, I had all the food I was going to need for my Thanksgiving dinner, but I wasn’t entirely sure how to prepare it. That’s where ChatGPT came in.
I told ChatGPT how big the roast was, how I was planning to roll it in fine bread crumbs and roast it over a bed of onions and potatoes, and the fact that, other than salt and pepper, the only seasonings I had in my spice rack were sage and cayenne. ChatGPT suggested a cooking temperature in degrees Celsius, a blend of seasonings to prepare for the turkey, how thin to slice the vegetables, and how long to cook it.
In the end, the only thing it really got wrong was the cooking time, which was off by almost a half hour. Fortunately, Kathryn had bought us a meat thermometer on a previous trip, and it was better to return the roast to the oven than to have it overcooked.
Overall, I was quite pleased with the results. The turkey was moist. The potatoes and onions made a nice side, and between the red chili pepper and the dash of cayenne I added, had a nice touch of heat one doesn’t typically expect at Thanksgiving. The savory sauce worked quite well with the meat and vegetables, and the lingonberry jam added a balance of bitter sweetness that rounded out the dish.
