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In the space of 48 hours, hyounpark and I went from "eh, we're still recovering from the last nine weeks of work travel, let's just relax on Thursday and eat leftovers" to a plan for our #AsianAmericanThanksgiving:

- Delmonico steaks with gireumjang
- Sesame cornbread - these first two are from Cynthia Chen McTernan's A Common Table; Southern-raised Chinese-American meets hapa-Korean-Hawaiian.
- Kale laing laing (I've been making something somewhat similar to this for years, just from Vikram Vij and using slightly different spices; Marvin Gapultos, LA-born Fil-Am, points out Tuscan kale's similarity to taro leaves in his tweak on the Filipino original). If I were in California, I'd be trying to get Dungeness crab to do it like how I had at Bad Saint earlier this year!
- Miso-glazed carrots (do I ever prepare a banquet without at least one Joanne Chang recipe? Food and Wine did a profile of Joanne Chang's Asian American Thanksgiving awhile back, and we've used many recipes from her over the years.)
- Cheesy mashed potatoes with scallions (staple foods for H, guidance on the cheese:potato ratio provided by the Leungs from The Woks of Life, another Asian-American family)
- Cranberry-Asian pear chutney (I've been making this most years since I found the recipe in Real Simple in 2001, I eat it like applesauce it's so good, thank you Kay Chun)
- Masala chai tarte tatin (This ... did not quite go as planned, see below. But Ming Tsai, Joanne Chang, Nik Sharma, and Irvin Lin all contributed to the mashup of a recipe I ended up making. Nik Sharma for the spice guidance)
- Malasadas for breakfast! (via Alana Kysar, via the Leonard's original recipe)

So I went to bed Wednesday night, slightly smug that everything I'd needed to get done foodwise was prepared (all sides except the potatoes, and the malasada dough was sitting in the fridge for the first of two proofs), and a general idea that I was going to make a masala chai tarte tatin by taking Ming Tsai's five-spice tarte tatin recipe and swapping in the spices from Nik Sharma's apple masala chai cake.

Then I did a sanity check on the tarte tatin base recipe and WTFed at "6 tablespoons (2 sticks) of butter." WHAT NO, ONE STICK OF BUTTER IS EIGHT TABLESPOONS. I later figured out they did mean 2 sticks, as in *16* tablespoons of butter, but by then, I'd already pivoted away from using Ming's recipe as my base because it called for using the cast iron skillet, and I didn't think I'd quite have enough time to use it and clean it before Hyoun needed it to sear the steaks. Thankfully, I knew I had a Joanne Chang tarte tatin recipe on hand, and hers I could make in my 9" pie dish. But her dough recipe also looked like it would take more time than I had remaining, and called for a food processor when ours is broken.

One more contribution, one more tarte tatin recipe from my cookbook library: Irvin Lin's Marbled, Swirled, Layered. Cubed butter, flour, water - replaced the water with steeped Darjeeling tea, and added some ground-up tea leaves as well. Let that rest in the fridge while making Nik's masala chai spice blend, then macerated the apples with it and a bit of lemon juice. Did the caramel, which still makes me nervous; thankfully Joanne anticipates this and writes detailed, explicit instructions on how to do it right. Arranged the apples, rolled out the pie dough and tucked it around the fruit, popped it into a 400F oven.

... you may have noticed I didn't mention poking holes in the dough, right? Yeah, it started leaking out one of the sides. Which meant chiseling caramel off the bottom of the oven before H could get started with the steaks, which delayed dinner half an hour ... but it was still damned delicious. And now I'm going to eat more pie for breakfast.

Almost every recipe mentioned is written by an American by birthright with Asian heritage, some by multiple generations, like me. (The exceptions are Vikram Vij, an Indian immigrant to Canada, and Nik Sharma, an Indian immigrant to the US.) For providing me with easy access to all of these recipes from the Asian diaspora in America, I am grateful to everyone mentioned above.

The meat and produce are all from local farms, but I'm especially delighted to note that the carrots are from Assawaga Farm, a small farm in East Putnam, CT, specializing in Japanese vegetables, co-owned by a Japanese immigrant farmer and her partner, named to reflect the original Nipmuc name of the river flowing along the farm, colonially named Fivemile (and they provided me with a regular source of fresh shiso all summer! as well as introducing me to komatsuna and mizuna and the Egyptian molokhia). And the flowers that will be gracing our table are end-of-season chrysanthemums and chocolate cosmos from Fivefork Farms, a flower farm in Upton, MA, co-owned by five Chinese-American siblings.

The fact that there will be donuts and steak on our Thanksgiving table comes down to my husband's love for meat and frying things; what could be more American than that.

A blessed and fulfilling Thanksgiving to everyone partaking. I recognize this is not a time of celebration for all Americans, but may the name of the day and our observation of it lead to a better, more equitable world sooner rather than later.