This last summer, when we first entered negotiations for the house, I envisioned us hosting Thanksgiving in our new dining room. I pictured our friends and family warmed by our new-owner glow and an abundance of good food and wine.
Have I mentioned that our house needs some work? Or that the negotiations took longer than we expected? Scrap my vision of dinner, and picture instead the two of us driving to my mom’s house. (This is no hardship: I inherit my love of cooking from my parents.)
But I did cook for Thanksgiving. My mom asked me to bring an appetizer, and the result was one of those lucky combinations of simple ingredients and creativity that can produce memorable dishes.
I started with “white bean hummus,” which I've been pondering as a way to use leftover beans. I cooked cannelini beans until they were very tender and then scooped them into a food processor. I drizzled in olive oil as the high-speed blade pulverized the beans, which went from chunky and coarse to smooth and fluffy. (Though not as much so as regular hummus. I suspect the difference comes from garbanzo beans’ oil content — twice the amount of other legumes, according to On Food And Cooking.)
I seasoned the bean purée with salt and coarsely chopped sage from our “garden” — a few pots squatting in the new backyard. Salt gave the beans depth and sage balanced the earthy beans with a zingy, vegetal spice.
I thought that the salt-packed capers in my pantry, once desalted in a bowl of water for an hour, would add a complementary flavor, a visual focus, and a punchy little morsel to each serving. It just wouldn’t change the palette of the dish: an olive green caper on a beige bean paste that was flecked with gray-green sage, all sitting atop a brown slice of toasted baguette. The dish needed color.
It also needed acid, a mouthwatering component that would bring the eater back for more. I weighed the idea of pomegranate seeds sitting next to the caper, but then I discovered the last of the red onion quick pickles I made for our last dinner party.
At my mom’s house, I toasted the baguette slices — in small amounts in the toaster when I should have used the already-running oven — spread a bit of bean purée on them, fished thin onions from their sweet-and-sour brine, lay them on top in a rough circle, and finally dropped a succulent caper into the middle.
In a way, it’s probably a good thing that I took the slow approach to toasting the baguette. We scarfed down the bites so quickly that, had I made more at once, we would have had no appetite left for turkey.
