Traditional or Not?

Our father, Alma Hofhiens, always had a tradition to eat UN-traditional foods for Thanksgiving. It seems he worked at a turkey farm in Utah as a young man and found them to be the “stupidest birds!” (Apparently domestic turkeys don’t have the wily smarts that wild turkeys possess.) At any rate, Alma was famous for his Thanksgiving pizza, and this year we decided to follow his lead.

A few weeks ago, our grandson mentioned Panera Bread’s bread bowls and soup. I love soup! what could be better than soup?

We already had a good artisan bread recipe and a google search yielded a soup recipe that looked super tasty. It had A LOT of mushrooms. It was going to be perfect!

Thanksgiving day dawned sunny and bright. We had an un-stressful time preparing dinner, which was a lot less complicated than a traditional turkey dinner. As we worked, I sampled all the food – the mushrooms, the apple pie filling, the left over pie crust cinnamon strips, and the bread. Honestly, by the time my soup was done, I really wasn’t all that hungry.

Which turned out to be a good thing:-)

My wonderful Mushroom soup had 3 small tablespoons of balsamic vinegar. Now, if I had been wiser, or maybe had I tried the recipe before Thanksgiving, I would’ve decided to use less – maybe 1 tablespoon. But, as I had no previous experience with this recipe, I followed it blindly. The bacon did soften the flavor somewhat, (the more bacon the better!) but the biting flavor of the vinegar was too strong. We ate our soup, enjoying the bread with minimal broth and maximum mushrooms. It was… okay, but it probably won’t be repeated.

Maybe there really is something to the traditional tried and true flavors of turkey, stuffing, cranberries, potatoes and gravy, rolls, and pumpkin pie? Maybe, just maybe, this old fashioned tradition is a true 300 year old winner-dinner for a reason!

I have a craving for turkey now, and I am not waiting a whole year to have a traditional turkey dinner! Sorry, Alma:-)