wealhtheow

After-Thanksgiving Melee

On Wednesday I made the stock, the pumpkin pie, and a last-minute quiche, as a vegetarian grad student called us at about 9:30 pm to accept our invitation for Thanksgiving. I was up till about midnight dealing with the quiche, but it turned out quite tasty. I adapted a quiche lorraine recipe from the Big Yellow Gourmet Book, taking out the bacon and adding in some spinach and cheese instead.

I got a start on the cooking mid-morning Thursday, electing to make the stuffing first. Once again, I think I wound up using too much chicken broth, and I should have taken the time to toast my challah cubes in the over, as the stuffing was a little moist for my taste. The turkey went into the oven around 2, and was subjected to about 45 minutes at 500 degrees, rather than the proscribed 30 minutes. Once the turkey was out of the oven I started in on the mashed sweet potatoes, which cooked significantly faster than I'd anticipated. Fortunately I had a spare covered casserole dish, which kept them warm. Then it was on to the gravy, which always gives me hives for some reason. I feel so much pressure! People said it tasted delicious, but I couldn't help feeling it was way too salty, probably as a result of someone insisting that shitloads of salt be rubbed on the turkey skin, thereby causing the drippings to wind up being too salty for my taste.

After dinner, Rick oversaw clean-up, and then whipped the cream and served the pie. Does that sound dirty to you? Because it wasn't, I can assure you. It was delicious.

All in all, it was a mostly succesful Thanksgiving, marred only slightly by bouts of sulking, hysterics and breathing difficulties on the part of yours truly. Woo and hoo!

Now I need to come up with an authentic early 19th century recipe for a party we're invited to on Saturday. I might just decide to tell people to fuck off and make coq au vin, as surely people were eating coq au vin 200 years ago. Except I'm not sure how well the coq will transport. I was going to make spotted dick, but I can't figure out where to get suet around here, and I don't feel like investing an inordinate amount of time figuring it out. So it will be either coq or vin or possibly a trifle, because I do love making desserts.

In other news, the new James Bond film has been viewed, and I am pleased to make an unqualified reccomendation. Go see it! That Daniel Craig, he sure is some kind of sexy! Plus I love me some hard-ass Judi Dench.

Thanksgiving Menu

The Bird Itself
Mashed sweet potatoes
Asparagus with lemon-butter sauce
Tossed green salad with pomegranate seeds
Cherry-pecan stuffing
Cranberry apricot relish
Sausages*
Gravy
Pumpkin pie
Freshly whipped cream

*My mother's family are the only ones I know who do this. We think when my great-grandmother was first in this country, she was following another woman in the market to figure out what Americans ate for Thanksgiving. When the woman picked up some sausage, presumably for stuffing, my great-grandmother evidently got the impression that the sausage itself was a Traditional American Thanksgiving Side Dish. To which I can only say THANKS GREAT-GRAMMIE! Believe it or not, the slightly sweet, slightly spicy sausage makes a perfect complement to everything else on the plate. Plus it is yummy with the gravy. But what is not yummy with the gravy? No thing, that is what.

I went to the store last night at 10:30, because someone was too busy to go during the day, ergo I had to make the trip after choir rehearsal. It was actually a perfect time to go, as the store was not too crowded at all and the stock boys (can I still say that? is that nonPC or something?) were stocking up fresh and delicious vegetables. The majority of the vegetable mass I purchased last night were aromatics, and therefore did not need to be of great quality. I mean, when you're chopping up an apple and a carrot to stuff in the nether regions of a turkey, you're not really caring about the quality and perkiness of said produce, as one will eventually discard said produce before human consumption. So it was mostly a successful trip, with one glaring exception.

The store did not have a single container of low-sodium chicken broth. Not one. I checked three different places.

Sigh.

So I grabbed a pack of chicken thighs and will spend tomorrow constructing a stock. It's not that I'm upset about the work, because nothing could be simpler than a stock. But it will tie me down to the house for the whole afternoon. Thank god the office is letting us all go at noon tomorrow, otherwise I'd be up late into the night. And I really cannot take one more late night before I start screaming and throwing things.*

*Probably just laundry and maybe a pillow or two. I am not nearly as dramatic as I'd like to believe.

All in all, I'm looking forward to cooking my second big Thanksgiving meal. Due to my husband's complaints about the saltiness of last year's bird and my own inherent laziness, I will not be brining the turkey this year, meaning I do not have to rise at 5 am to get that started. So I think this year will be considerably more relaxing than last year's gourmet-fest.

Still, if I have to clean up the kitchen on Thursday night after spending two days cooking, heads will fucking roll.