Golubtzi!

Terrific step-by-step by Sofya Hundt here.

If these got any more delicious, you'd have to eat them with a soundtrack.

Thanksgiving 2000: dawn and dusk

That year Peter Jennings was with us. His charm was like a force of nature. I got to spend several hours with him over the weekend, and he was among the most interesting men I have ever met. Early in the morning, I was in the kitchen and since there was an oven available, threw in coffee muffins while I fiddled with some dough.

After two bites of steaming muffin, Peter came into the kitchen to say, "Madame, these are outstanding muffins!"

"Madame?" someone whispered. Every student in the room burst out laughing.

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So glorious had that turkey feast been that I let the procession of pies pass me by. There were a lot of guests, mostly students' families, but with my husband gone to a funeral I found myself alone in the cottage that evening. I loaded up a tea ball with loose leaves and headed for the Boarding House in search of pie, expecting to find it deserted.

It wasn't. A single student was puttering in the kitchen, a friend since his application interview.

A student by himself is honest in an entirely different way than he's honest while another student is in the room. I saw this over and over again. Getting to talk to a student alone was always terribly precious time.

He was trying not to cry. I listened while the tea steeped in subtle clouds, and said,

"The trouble is that you change a lot in a short time. But your parents don't seem to have changed at all. And that's sad, because it's like you're free and they're trapped, and they don't have to be."

"Yeah. That's it."

"Yeah. I just got off the phone with mine. I'm only ten years older than you."

I don't remember what else we said over pie. I'd like to think I told him it wasn't inevitable or permanent. Did I tell him my mother had had cancer while I was in the Valley and told no one? Probably not. It matters more, I think, that I listened and I was there. We finished our pie dry-eyed, turned off the lights in the boarding house, and went home. He went to the residence, still aglow with visiting parents and siblings. I walked to the stone cottage in the middle and turned on the porch light in case anyone's mother wanted to talk to me. Mostly, I missed all the men who were not there: my husband, my father, my best friend who had left at first snowfall, alumni scattered. Gratitude for everything in that Valley that I wasn't responsible for, gratitude for the beautiful desert and thundering ice.

Thanksgiving 2000: sacrifice

About a decade before coming to Deep Springs, I sometimes spent time with a teaching elder of the Indian Tribe on whose ancestral land my college was built. They had no reservation; the language and especially traditional dance as a form of prayer was how they had maintained their identity. New Agers were not welcome; I was welcome precisely because I was a practicing Catholic and not looking to co-opt their traditions to escape the demands of my own.

There was a small pow-wow every year, essentially a religious event of strictly traditional drumming and no prizes. We honored the flag of the U.S. and the Eagle Feather Staff, honored veterans, did mourning dances with the bereaved and healing dances for the sick. Some were humorous. And at every pow-wow, there were dances to honor the animals who had died and been eaten that day. Everyone who had eaten meat was expected to dance.

At Deep Springs I attended most of the slaughters that took place, often to help in minor ways. Slaughter is very intimate. The first cow I helped skin shocked me with the warmth of its shining, reeking fat. It's naturally honest to call a rectum at such close range an asshole, but I never saw disrespect toward the animal. A couple of slaughters went grievously wrong by accident rather than callousness.

Before coming to the Valley, I had sacrificed plenty of bait fish, little eels, impaled plenty of living shrimp behind their yellow brains. I'd sacrificed some game fish as a result, always with my father. My father's father had been a subsistence hunter and 'though he never explained it, the only acceptable word for making meat was sacrifice; only vermin and roadkill got killed. I pray the Mass in Latin today and study the Old Testament, and even so it's almost impossible to convey the habit of reverence sacrifice carries from the hunters of my family.

And I did want to convey it at slaughter. Whether a mammal or fowl was made our meat, one or two students obviously wanted a larger framework than dinner. That framework wasn't quite big enough to acknowledge that a unique creature became an anonymous pile of meat when it hit the ground. Some of them would have been relieved to dance to sacred drums, which I could not offer. There was only how I behaved myself, when I helped and when I taught.

I learned to draw birds mid-summer from the farm parents of a graduate. It was a terrific learning experience, largely because my friend's father was a natural born teacher, like my father. I knew I'd be teaching others the next time I did it, so I was listening to his pedagogy while noticing that his wife plucked feathers in fast circles.

About the time we sacrificed Tom Hudgens' turkeys, the last farmer in my family put her organic farm up for sale: a small, diversified farm that had never had a drop of chemical agriculture, abutting a National Wildlife Refuge. My husband and I had made the decisions years before that made it impossible for us to buy the farm and it passed out of the family. At least one of the students who helped draw the turkeys quietly hated my guts, but he was the only one I had talked to about the farm slipping away.

Amid the smells of wet feathers and turkey blood, I felt really blessed. I was wearing bonepile clothes, to sacrifice someone else's birds that would be mostly eaten by guests. It was my borrowed farm in a wilderness I knew I'd be leaving. I was very conscious of the gift of good teaching from a friend's father and my own. Everything about that slaughter spoke of someone else's kindness, but I didn't feel poor. Application season had begun, and I was going to get to give away everything. Gratitude.

Thanksgiving: Iconoclasm

I love tradition in many ways. I wear a lace veil in church, regardless of what language it's in. I eat lamb at Easter in some form. Every zombie walk should end by dancing "Thiller." But the Thanksgiving turkey & trimmings never made the cut. Last year we had no company, but a ravenous nursing baby, and I had an Angus steak with french fries.

Baking turkeys and pies every day for a catering company the first year of my marriage didn't help. The last thing I wanted to see when I came home from work on my first Thanksgiving as a married woman was another damn turkey, so we had lasagna instead. The cheese was bright green with organic basil from our tiny community garden plot, saved in ice cubes.

We decided that first Thanksgiving together that the best way we could keep the holiday was to cook and eat food that really inspired gratitude in us. We had lasagna a few times, eventually becoming the full Italian soup-to-espresso. We've made Armenian game hens with apricot rice, Lebanese food, tamales, cumin-glazed chicken with chipotle-peach salsa, lamb and shiitake ravioli.

My son asked why we didn't have turkey, when that's what he's learned about at school. This is what I told him:

Thanksgiving is a celebration of gratitude and immigrants. The Pilgrims were merely the first immigrants. They were neither braver nor harder working than those who followed them, and the food that came with subsequent immigrants is fabulous. Immigrant food for Thanksgiving is our tradition. Tradition should always point to truth. We thank God for all our blessings and all the people who've come to this country.

Son: That makes sense, Mom. Can I have Vietnamese food this year?

Me: Yes, dear. That's what we got the ducks for.