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AND NOW, LAST WEEK'S WINNER!

So, let us now celebrate last week's contestants, who took their Thanksgiving leftovers and made them brand-new. And the winner of the Inaugural Salon Kitchen Challenge is ...

Juliet Waters! For giving up the vegan ghost, taking a shot at colonialism, and by bravely celebrating American Thanksgiving with a dish born of the British Empire.

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AND HOW ABOUT A HAND FOR OUR CATEGORY WINNERS? 

In the Soup and Side/Best Mention of Corn Nuggets category:

Madland, for turkey and asparagus soup and a "side inspired by corn nuggets, deep-fried balls of sweet corn and goo that you can find in truck stops in South Mississippi." 

In the category of Best Pie Tip Coupled With a Brutally Cynical View of Thanksgiving:

Mr.Rien, for instructions on turning your pumpkin pie into pumpkin pie brûlée, and a painful remembrance of family and drinking alone. "This recipe takes the reason why people love crème brûlée (the crack of that delectable sugar) and multiplies it, increasing the surface area (and therefore the pleasure) to the power of fuck! Yum!" 

In the Intimidatingly Accomplished (OK, I Called in a Ringer) category:

Ian Knauer, for goose rillettes with cranberry gelee. (And a photo of a raw goose neck.) "That was all I had; parts, a little cranberry sauce, some goose fat, and a bottle of hard cider. To me, that spells rillettes." 

In the Social Graces category:

Sueinaz, for this bit of advice: "For this soup to taste delicious it is important to apologize to anyone you insulted/offended on Thanksgiving. Send a generic e-mail to everyone at your party thanking them for coming over and apologizing for being drunk/belligerent/overly emotional, etc." 

In the Dish I Would Most Like to Eat category:

RebFar, for turkey, cranberry, goat cheese ravioli and likening leftover turkey to failed romance: "Once hot and steamy, it gives way to cold storage, inducing a slight nausea born of having overindulged the day before." 

And, finally, for Most Gratuitous Mention of Champagne for Bonus Points (and there were plenty of them!):

Kathy Riordan, for, well, this: "Take leftover turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and cranberries and put all into a blender until liquefied. Mix half and half with champagne in a tall flute and enjoy!"

I'm Canadian so we had our Thanksgiving back in October. But Thursday morning my 9-year-old son let me know that he was decidedly meh about the tofurkey slices I'd tried to slip into his lunch that week. As I was staring at these thin, sad slices of faux meat, I started thinking about all my Open Salon friends and the fabulous turkey dinners they would be preparing and enjoying all day. Then I started feeling kind of lonely and really hungry. And that's when I got the idea to renounce my ridiculous vegan aspirations, and spend the day inventing a fabulous leftover recipe that would be waiting for them when they got back.

This is really only half invention, since turkey mulligatawny soup is a leftover feast tradition in my family. But we usually have it the day after Christmas (or Boxing Day as we call it in the Commonwealth), and we tend to have it with our golden white yukon potatoes. I knew sweet potatoes would be fabulous in mulligatawny, but I did feel a responsibility to try it out first. Plus, I was hungry, and I was going to need pictures and an excuse to drink.

Mulligatawny, if you've never heard of it, is your classic Anglo-Indian dish. At some point while the Brits were pillaging/colonizing India, someone got the idea to fuse the two cuisines and the results, when done right, can be awesome. (When not awesome, the Brits pretend they are anyway, or make some condescending remark about how real countries don't care about food.) There aren't that many things America lost out on when it decided to have its own country. But had you stayed, you might be able to put this can of Heinz Mulligatawny in your "trolley" for only 82p.

It might seem a little against the grain to follow up American Thanksgiving with a shout-out to one of the few good things to come out of the British Empire. But now that you've successfully stolen Hugh Laurie and made him your own, I don't see why you can't do the same with this exceptional leftover feast soup.

And, anyway, mulligatawny is more of a concept than an actual recipe, so you can fuse it into almost any national cuisine. I'm not big on recipes. If you want one I recommend this one from Epicurious as a good standard. Instead I'm just going to give you the essential rules to avoid disaster.

1. Color combination. The base of a great mulligatawny should be a golden yellow or orange purée. So the first stage should only involve ingredients that won't mess with that color scheme. (If you're ambitious you'll want to boil down that turkey carcass into stock. But if you put anything green in there, make sure you strain it out first.) In this stage you combine sautéed onions, garlic, red (not green or brown) lentils. If you have any leftover sweet potatoes, or potatoes of any kind, this is where you throw them in. (Or you can skip potatoes and serve it the traditional way, with rice.) Mess with this rule and you'll end up with something that might be tasty but will resemble a big bowl of bird poop. And nobody wants that. If you're throwing in cooked potatoes, or leaving out potatoes, mush stage is usually about 20 minutes. Closer to an hour with raw potatoes.

2. Use the best quality curry you can find. Top choice if you can find this is about half a jar of Patak's. This is a British-based curry company that makes a much better wet curry mixture than you will every be able to make on your own. Most recipes recommend its tikka mix. I happened to have half a jar of biriyani mix in the fridge so I used that. You can probably use just about any of its mixes except vindaloo, which is generally too hardcore for anyone not raised on curry. If you can't find this, or any other Anglo-Indian wet curry product, then plan B is the spice combination in the above Epicurious recipe. Commercial curry powder should be your last choice, but make sure it's not more than a year old, and consider grating in some fresh ginger, or toasted, ground coriander seeds to make it a little special. (Tip: To avoid a house stinking of curry, throw it in toward the end of the mush stage.)

3. Balance your flavors. The best mulligatawny is a perfect fusion of sweet, savory, spicy and tart. If you're throwing in candied yams, then you might want to hold back on the coconut milk, and increase the tart ingredients, which can include:

• Granny Smith, or any tart apples. (Peel them first if you want to throw them in at the mush stage. But save some for a nice garnish.)
• Unsweetened cranberry sauce. (If you want to think ahead and use this for Christmas check out this delicious Canadian Spiced Cranberry Chutney recipe.)
• Lemon or lime, added in at the end to make sure you get the right balance.

4. Last things last. Coconut milk, lemon or lime juice, and anything green (leftover string or wax beans if you must) go in at the last minute. There are all kinds of great garnishes you can throw on here too. Peanuts or almonds are good. Yogurt if you've gone a little overboard on the sweetness. Pour yourself a small bowl and experiment if you're not sure. Oh, yeah, and finally the turkey. Don't cook this at the mush stage. You want nice meaty chunks.

Now, while I'm tempted to recommend champagne for the bonus points, the single best drink with any Anglo-Indian meal is beer. But if you're still feeling a little stuffed, or watching your weight, enjoy a nice imported British beer, without the extra calories, by pouring it into a champagne flute.

Bon appétit! (Yes, I know this is not an Anglo-Indian expression. But as a native Montrealer I'm allowed. Next year: sweet potato poutine.)

"Because this is a holiday, Mom. This is what we’re supposed to do!" I would shriek, every word hot with the disappointment of a child whose parents never lost their accents, never taught us the rules of baseball, never gathered us around to play board games like the other parents did on TV.

One year, right after what my aunt called White Kids' Day, when all the white kids come to your house looking for candy, I geared up again. At school I was making construction paper cornucopias and drawing turkeys out of the outlines of my pudgy hands, smiling at pilgrims with impossibly large hats. My turkeys were always smiling at the pilgrims.

It had been a good year. My parents' business was doing well. They even bought a summer condo in Florida -- two beds, pool, near the beach, easy access to the choicest retirement communities -- though they ended up working so much through the summer we never went. "Good news!" my mother said one night, coming home from work. She was beaming. "We’re going to Florida for Thanksgiving!" I didn’t even get a chance to fire my turkey salvo. I sank. "It’s cold now. People go to Florida in the summer," I said.

We flew on Thanksgiving day, because it was cheapest. My parents, ever scared, terrified that we would miss a flight, always insisted on getting to airports half a day early. And so we sat in the gate, our bags stinking with Chinese food we just had to bring, just in case there would be no Chinese food in Florida. We sat through the throngs of people flying to their real Thanksgivings in the morning, then thinner and thinner crowds, until it was dark, and finally time for us to board.

I fell asleep. I slept through the flight, I slept through the car rental, I slept through the drive. My father gently nudged me awake. "Jai Jai," he called me, meaning Little Son. "We’re here," he said. My brother and I helped him with our bags, and when we got out of the garage I noticed the air. It smelled good. It never smelled this good in New Jersey. And I heard the ocean, sounding like the highway out behind my cousin’s house, but nicer, quieter.

My mother was cleaning already by the time we got to the door of our apartment, really working that broom, sweeping away colonies of dead bugs. South Florida fauna is no joke. It’s like we were vacationing in Biosphere 2. There were bugs on the floor, bugs in the sink, bugs folded up in the towels. My mother is horrified by bugs, but there she was, dealing with them happily and soaking the sinks in Dettol. "Go see the balcony!" she said to me. "You can see the ocean and the pool!"

I stood outside, smelling that air again, suddenly realizing how warm it was on my skin. I looked at the ocean, enormous and dark, and at the little blue pool underneath me, glowing. I imagined swimming in it, and started tapping my toes on the floor.

"Jai Jai!" my father called. "Come eat."

We sat, under the single functioning light bulb, and right away I frowned as my mother brought out bowls of rice, some of the food from home, and a plate of vegetables she stir-fried with Spam, though I did like Spam. So this was our Thanksgiving dinner.

But then she did something strange. She opened the oven. She never used the oven. She took out a foil tray. "What’s that?" I asked.

"I went and got this for you, and brought it with us on the airplane," she said, walking toward the table. "It’s your favorite."

She set the tray down. Printed on the paper lid I could see heavy black letters under a red roof. "Pizza Hut!" I squealed. She peeled back the lid. "Spaghetti and meatballs!" I jumped out of my chair and wrapped my fat little arms around her. My father smiled, chewing on his Spam.

"Thank you, Mom!" I said. "Thank you!" And we ate our dinner. 

• One New York pub will be serving some boozy (and stomach-churning) turkey this Thanksgiving: At O’Casey’s in midtown, birds will be “injected with 100-proof Georgi vodka.” The pub owner claims the recipe comes from his Irish mother, and promises that there’s "an ounce vodka in every bite." Because what’s more Thanksgiving-y than rolling bouts of nausea?

• The FDA reminded us how to have a food-illness free Thanksgiving with its handy list of food safety tips (including ones we didn’t know, like the fact that rinsing the turkey before cooking "makes it more likely for bacteria to spread around the sink and countertops"). Honestly, we’re not sure how we survived this long.

• At the Atlantic’s Food Channel, James McWilliams looked at the ethics of presidential turkey pardons. Since 1989, U.S. presidents have been picking two Thanksgiving birds to pardon (i.e., survive the holiday), and most have been sent to farms to live out their lives. George W., in a typical display of brilliant decision-making, chose to send his turkeys to Disney theme parks (where “they were crassly paraded about as holiday attractions”). Now it’s Obama’s turn to make a Thanksgiving statement with the birds -- and McWilliams hopes he’ll send them to an agrarian haven.

• In the Chicago Sun-Times, Jill Barron, one of the city’s best vegetarian chefs, and her husband, Chris, shared their eccentric Thanksgiving suggestions with Michael Nagrant. Their plans may be a bit more ambitious than most people’s -- they’ll be welcoming more than 60 guests -- but the one truly surprising bit in the piece is their choice of stuffing: White Castle hamburgers. The head-turning recipe is available on the Sun Times Web site -- and Nagrant later told an equally surprised Grub Street, “It’s one of the best stuffings [he’s] ever made”

• Also over at Grub Street, some high-profile chefs, including our Kitchen Cabinet’s own Amanda Cohen, recounted their greatest Thanksgiving disasters -- and Yerba Buena’s Julian Medina taught us why we’ll never try making a turducken: “I tried to defrost it very fast; I baked it and roasted it, and they take the bone out, so it was so dry. It was so inedible that we had one slice of turkey out of the whole thing.”

• The Washington Post joined George Mason University staff as they cooked their Thanksgiving feast in a forest -- using a hand-dug hole, hot coals, and a nine-hour cooking time for their turkey. The tradition started in 1989 as a team-building exercise; the group uses six layers of foil to protect the meat from dirt, and once, while digging their hole, they discovered an 18th-century musket ball.

• More practically, the N.Y. Times shared 101 side dishes that you can make in advance of your Thanksgiving feast (including delicious-sounding tomato-corn jam and pumpkin-noodle kugel), four adventurous forms of stuffing, and an Indian curry solution for your turkey leftovers. Sam Sifton, the paper's restaurant critic, will also be answering reader Thanksgiving questions until 3 p.m. (EST) on Thursday.

• On a relaxing note, the NYT's Mark Bittman shared his soothing words of advice for those of us panicked about the prospect of cooking an elaborate holiday meal in the era of local/slow-cooked/organic/fair-trade foods: "Everyone is aware of the stresses of Thanksgiving, and nearly everyone -- the in-laws’ odd friends aside -- is appreciative of your time and effort … Forget your fears, relax, and enjoy it. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be good." Amen.

And that's the challenge of Thanksgiving -- to gather among our kin who know us a little too well and have an amiable occasion enjoyed equally by all, at which nobody is stabbed through the heart with a carving knife.

We're a mobile and over-caffeinated people, and at every family gathering, amid the ancient aroma of turkey and sage and squash and sweet potatoes and a few pounds of butter, you'll find some edgy individualists, someone who knows the true story of what happened on 9/11, the story that the mainstream media have suppressed. A tea party devotee or two. Someone who believes that yeast is the secret of happiness. People capable of harangues and diatribes, but nobody wants this.

The family liberals smile at the family wingnuts. The vegetarian daughter-in-law produces her tofu loaf, which looks as if a large animal such as a buffalo came by and dropped it hot and steaming on the plate. We don't comment on this. She believes that the treatment of turkeys is a moral blight on America, but she does not say so. The Unitarian cousin listens to the fervent Lutheran prayer and murmurs Amen. The Viking fans and the Packer fans sit side by side.

It is the dinner of all dinners, generous and comforting and completely predictable, and a true test of civility, and we do it in gratitude for the simple goodness of life. Our consumer society is all about need and craving, and politics is so much about complaint and resentment, and here is a day devoted to something else.

My family gathers in the house that Dad built in 1947, by the fireplace that Great-Uncle Alfred, a stonemason, built when he was 80. He lived to be 90, and whenever you saw him and Aunt Millie, they were holding hands. Joining us will be cousin Dorothy Bacon, who recently told me that my grandfather James, who died before my time, loved to read and even out in the field raking hay with a team of horses he had a book in his hand; that he was often seen kissing Grandma; and that every night, until he was very old, he carried her in his arms up the stairs to bed. Good to know these things.

In my day, we went outdoors after dessert and ran off our dinner and when it was dark, were allowed back in the house, and we flopped down on the floor and listened to Uncle Lew tell about the night their house burned down in Charles City, Iowa, and afterward watched "The Bell Telephone Hour" on television with Robert Merrill and Patrice Munsel singing "Dear Hearts and Gentle People," and then a horn honked in the driveway and my sister came down from upstairs where she'd been primping in the bathroom and Mother said, "Tell him he has to come inside and pick you up, he can't sit in the car and honk." And so the boy came in. Sheepish, tongue-tied, hair oiled and swirled around on top, he stood as close to the door as possible and we inspected him as a potential relative and thought, "Naw. She could do better."

I remember the urgency of that horn honking. It meant that Thanksgiving was over. The family that had gathered in a tight circle around the feast of tubers and turkey was now breaking up, in search of something finer. The call of the grown-up life. We all hear the honk and run away in hopes of finding a major romance and adventure and grandeur, and good luck with that, and meanwhile, life is good. Be grateful for it.

(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)

© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.