Along with getting settled in, finding jobs and achieving some semblance of stability, I started taking cooking very seriously. I put in a fair amount of practice at it and was eventually putting out more successes than failures (I particularly remember an attempt at alfredo sauce that resembled wet sand). Like I said, I had a fair number of friends in Columbus and we were often hosting dinner parties and other self-catered events. I've surrounded myself with really great people - seriously, not a clinker among them - and I decided that we'd host a "Friendsgiving" in 2005 to thank them for all that they did for us.
My vision for the first Friendsgiving, which I held the weekend before actual Thanksgiving, was to take classic Thanksgiving dinner foods and turn them on their head. The centerpiece of the meal was the Emeril Lagasse pepper-stuffed turkey, but I also made stuffing muffins, sweet potato fries, cranberry chutney, mushrooms stuffed with green beans, cream cheese and french-fried onions (like an inside out casserole), and something with mashed potatoes that I absolutely do not remember. The meal was a huge hit and the high from pulling off such a culinary achievement carried over for an entire year until the next Friendsgiving, in which all of the food had an Indian flavor (think tandoori turkey).
By the time Thanksgiving/Friendsgiving rolled around in 2007, my relationship had exploded and I was in the process of packing up all my stuff and moving out. There was no Friendsgiving that year, though there should have been: some of the best people in the world helped me land on my feet in that big, blue house on Oxley Street. A year and a dumpster full of beer later, Erik, Jen, Nick, Russell, Elissa and I were the OxFam: an unstoppable fun machine. Then I met Erin, the lovely lady who would become my wife.
Before I knew it, the big, blue house was a thing of the past. Russell and Elissa were engaged and moved into their own house (which became the new OxFam gathering place). I moved across town to be closer to my special lady. Nick moved in with Erik and Jen, who would soon become splitsville themselves. Despite all these moves, break-ups, etc., we (including Erin) remained OxFam. To demonstrate this common resolve, we revived Friendsgiving at Russ & Elissa's new place and christened the new incarnation TurkeyFest.
There have been four TurkeyFests since 2009. The first was a relatively straightforward affair with three turkeys (that's them above; from left to right: pepper-stuffed roasted turkey, deep fried turkey, smoked turkey) and pot luck sides from everybody else. The next year, Erin and I moved into a house together and hosted TurkeyFest: The Deconstructioning, in which I disassembled three turkeys and cooked each part separately (highlights: rotisserie-roasted turkey breast, bacon-wrapped stuffed turkey breast, spicy turkey sausage links, and buffalo turkey wings). Last year, I assembled a breakfast, lunch and dinner menu revolving around turkey, starting with fried turkey and waffles with cranberry maple syrup, followed by a Hot Brown open-faced turkey sandwich, followed by a traditional Thanksgiving roast turkey dinner.
This is essentially a food blog, but food to me has always been about the experience of sharing it with people you care about. That's why TurkeyFest began: as a way to break bread with friends, give thanks to each other and share a common experience. And yet, over the course of the year between TurkeyFests 2011 and 2012, OxFam would change forever. Our tight-knit group of friends, our party train, our fucking family, would be broken up by forces majure. Russell and Elissa were leaving Columbus for good...
Stay tuned for Part 2, coming shortly...
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