Editor’s Note: Julia Reed just published her latest book, Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties: An Entertaining Life (with Recipes), and suggests you try the andouille and turducken from Poche’s. 

This Thursday at three o’clock PM, I’ll be pulling into my parents’ driveway in Greenville, MS, where we will shortly sit down to eat my mother’s turkey, cornbread dressing, giblet gravy, scalloped oysters and other casseroles so numerous that she is forced to put half of them on the sideboard in the dining room and the other half on the butcher block in the kitchen and we have to make a lap between the two just to fill our plates.

See Julia’s delicious recipes:

Sauteed Oysters on Toast
Puree of Cauliflower With Curry
Brussels Sprouts Puree
Brussels Sprouts "Slaw"With Mustard Butter

I am exhausted, I don’t want to cook and I really adore my mother’s Thanksgiving menu, which is exactly the same as her Christmas menu. I have never tried to duplicate it because I know I will never be able to make gravy or dressing as delicious as hers nor turkey quite so tender. We are completely different kinds of cooks and anyway her menu is by now too iconic. It belongs to her and to my childhood. Which is not to say I veer too far from it when I do cook on Thanksgiving myself. I clearly remember the first time I did it alone, at 20, for assorted stragglers in my exposed brick walk-up on Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. The kitchen did not even have a counter in it, so I sat on the floor and made: turkey and oyster dressing out of the old, and far, far better, Joy of Cooking (the turkey was covered in cheesecloth soaked in melted butter and the dressing was made of stale French bread crumbs, a radical departure for someone raised on dressing made from cornbread); scalloped sweet potatoes from Gourmet (another radical departure because there was not a drop of sugar or a single marshmallow anywhere near them) and the tacky but oh-so-delicious green-bean casserole with the cream of mushroom soup and fried onion rings on top (a guilty pleasure because, although I had always secretly loved them at other people’s houses, my mother, for all her casserole making, would not stoop to such a common low).

Since then I have had Thanksgiving in foreign countries, dined alone on filet of sole, had a glorious time in a snowbound house in Connecticut with my closest friends (one of whom refused to let me make the green-bean casserole), stuffed a duck with red rice and andouille and oysters, and fed 26 highly thankful souls at my new dining room table (which seats same) in New Orleans three months after Katrina.

But one of the more enjoyable and festive Thanksgivings I’ve ever spent was several years ago, just after my now-husband, then-boyfriend John and I had spent a week in Barcelona and Madrid. We had such a grand time and I was in such a good mood that I expansively called my mother — from Spain — and asked her and my father to come to New Orleans and let me cook for them in my old place on Bourbon Street. We brought back divine Serrano ham (you cannot get the real thing in this country and it is worth possible jail time to smuggle it in) and some great Spanish wines, and I ordered a Turducken from the best Cajun butcher I knew as soon as we landed in Louisiana. (A Turducken is a relatively new invention that resembles a classic French gallotine. It is a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck, stuffed into a deboned turkey, with rich dressing stuffed into each cavity and it is excellent and very, very easy — I wasn’t about to try to match my mother’s turkey the first time I’d ever made her Thanksgiving lunch.)

While everyone stood around in my tiny kitchen, we had Spanish cava with those lovely Spanish Marcona almonds. (New Orleans was, after all, ruled by the Spanish for a lot longer than by the French.) My father adores oysters, but I was not about to try to match my mother’s scalloped ones either. Instead, for the first course, I slivered that fabulous ham and sautéed the oysters with shallots and the ham and the juice of a Meyer lemon off my tree and served it over toast. Then we had the turducken with some braised fennel and a cauliflower puree with a hint of curry that my friend Jason Epstein taught me how to make. Everyone went crazy over the puree and now I serve purees all the time with roast meats in the fall. Jason does one with rutabaga and a bit of maple syrup and I do one with carrots and potatoes (leaving it a bit chunky) with some scallions quickly sautéed in butter. I also love Brussels sprouts and, for Thanksgivings past, I have braised them with garlic and the aforementioned ham, diced them like slaw and sautéed them either in a mustard dill butter or with bacon and thyme, but it turns out they are really delicious pureed as well. Here, I offer the recipes. Happy Thanksgiving.

Click through for Julia’s Thanksgiving recipes …