Thanksgiving for One

The unthinkable has happened. I will not have guests for Thanksgiving.

Ordinarily, friends show up for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but somehow it didn’t happen this year. One bunch moved to Georgia, and another is saddled with a difficult octogenarian who requires pampering and obedience. My friend Mike was going to come, but he decided to visit his son in New Jersey. Mike is distressed, because he usually cooks a feast, and he can’t do it this year. His son works in Manhattan and has a tiny, useless apartment kitchen.

Mike made reservations at a restaurant in Times Square. Today it occurred to him there would be a parade running through it. He is not happy.

Last week I was thinking I’d just make a turkey sandwich and be done with it. I was in the store yesterday, however, and the fiends who run the place had set out rib roasts for $10 per pound. These days, that’s actually a very good price.

Feeling myself a victim of entrapment, I bought the smallest rib roast in my long history of cooking beef. Two ribs. A little over 5 pounds.

I thought I would cut a steak off of it, freeze the steak, and roast the rest, but I was afraid a 3-pound rib roast wouldn’t cook correctly, so I’m fixing the whole thing.

The butchers did an excellent job of cutting the ribs off and reattaching them with twine. Usually, I do this myself. Today I took the roast out to apply salt, butter, and garlic, and I found myself asking if the ribs really needed to be tied back on.

Time for Google.

I read that a lot of people cook rib roasts without the ribs. They claim they’re just as good, and the big advantage is that you can use twine to force your roast into a rounder shape. The bonus here is that it will cook more evenly. I decided to give it a try. Cooking experiments are best left for solo meals. Never try anything new when you’re cooking for company. You will face-plant and ruin a memory.

While I was looking at the web, I came across an idea I had heard about earlier this year. People claim the things you put on the outside of meat before you cook it do no good.

If you go to Youtube, you can find at least one video of a person “proving” marinades don’t work. They marinate one piece of meat, leave the other one alone, cook both, cut the outside off the marinated piece, and have people compare the taste. People say they can’t tell the difference. The claim is that nothing soaks in farther than 2 mm.

I asked myself if I was wasting my time, applying salt, butter, and garlic days before cooking.

I decided to grease the roast as planned.

Why did I go against THE SCIENCE? First of all, as a Youtube dissident has pointed out, you don’t throw away the outside of meat when you cook it. Multiply 2 mm by two, and you get about 3/16″ of intensely flavored meat, accounting for both sides. That’s worth the effort of marinating or seasoning.

Second thing…salt penetrates. Anyone who has ever eaten ham knows this. I’ve eaten pieces taken from huge country hams, and they were salty all the way through. If salt didn’t penetrate, it would be impossible to cure a ham.

I don’t know if the garlic will improve the inside of the meat at all, but two days of absorbing salt should make a difference. The butter and garlic will add flavor to the outside of the meat, and they will run off and collect in the broiling pan, providing stuff I can use to make gravy.

I don’t know if it was a good idea to force the meat into a round shape. It’s supposed to cook more evenly, but do I want that? Chances are good I’m getting advice from people who don’t know good food when they eat it. It’s nice when a rib roast’s cap is a little more done. I don’t know if I’ll like it as much if there is pink meat right under the surface.

They say a roast with the ribs removed will give you a tasty salt crust all over the outside, whereas leaving the ribs on prevents one side from getting crusty. I fell for this, but now I wonder if it’s true. My roast will have one side facing down while it cooks. That doesn’t sound like a good way to put a crust on it. I’ll bet it’s not much better than it would have been with the ribs on.

I’ll miss stuffing. I’m thinking maybe I should make stuffing even though I have no turkey. There is no law that says stuffing is only for poultry.

I feel obligated to make a dessert, but I don’t think I will. My best dessert is cheesecake. It’s a lot of work, it’s a calorie supernova, and after the meal, I would have enough left over for a week, making for a very fat November.

I will miss my friends, but it should be nice to have an easy Thanksgiving. Ordinarily, I have to start cooking on Monday.