Day-After-Thanksgiving Salad

You'll have taken in the joyful first bites of a meal that you only get once a year, gone back for seconds on all the pies, thirds on the wine. You'll have done Thanksgiving in all its messy glory.

A table with a single, uplifting platter of food—one that's loaded with crunchy, spicy greens; a vinaigrette that isn't shy on the mustard; the comforting plainness of sliced new potatoes and a little salty nip of bacon, to give your leftover turkey curb appeal.

But the biggest surprise will be the garlic cloves, which you'll boil in their skins until they've calmed and shed most of their stink and bite. Then you'll brown them up in the leftover bacon fat, and eat them whole.

The underdressed greens won't wilt, the overdressed turkey and potatoes don't return to being plain. As the two mingle on your plate, you'll stay alert till you scrape it clean, without ever seeing diminishing returns.

Altogether, this salad is an uncanny balance of refreshing and filling, salty and tangy, meaty and bright. I find it cleansing in all the right ways. But it's also precisely what you want to cook on the day after Thanksgiving.

After a grand meal of competing interests—a menu of side dishes vying for space in the fridge and oven, on the table and plate; the mentally exhausting (or exhilarating) decisions about Grandmother's turkey versus a new off-road adventure—it will be a healthy denouement to come together on one recipe, with easily identified and distributed tasks.

You can put your dad on vinaigrette duty, your nephew on washing watercress and tearing it into manageable mouthfuls. Your sister-in-law can scrub and roast potatoes, and any nearby child can pull cold turkey into shreds. Or, if you'd rather, you can retreat to the kitchen, while everyone else watches holiday movies or plays bridge, and make this alone.

• 5teaspoons Dijon mustard
• 1/3cup red wine vinegar
• 1cup light olive oil
• 12small red potatoes
• 1/2teaspoon coarse kosher salt
• 2teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper
• 12large cloves garlic
• 8ounces bacon, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
• 1/2cup finely chopped red onion
• 1/4cup chopped fresh Italian (flat leaf) parsley
• 3cups coarsely shredded cooked turkey
• 1bunch arugula, rinsed, trimmed, and patted dry
• 2bunches watercress, rinsed, trimmed, and patted dry

https://food52.com/blog/14984-the-silver-palate-s-genius-day-after-thanksgiving-salad?utm_term=8156730&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20161127_bfcm_2_digest