Saturday: cheese pizza, side salads
Sunday: corn and potato soup; rolls
Monday: tacos
Tuesday: corn and potato soup; rolls (leftovers)
Wednesday: tacos (leftovers)
Thursday: taken out to dinner by one of the professors I worked for this semester
Friday: @ my parents’
Saturday: leftover bbq beef and taco beef pie with cornbread topping
Sunday: homemade pasta
Monday: over easy egg tacos
Tuesday: pork tenderloin and cheesy potatoes
Wednesday: salad
Thursday: I had dinner with my class for our last class of the semester; Jeff had breakfast tacos
Friday: date night! out at Moe’s.
Holy cow, where did December come from?
Saturday: pot roast with potatoes and carrots, beer bread
Sunday: salad
Monday: slow-cooked galbi, rice pizza
Tuesday: pasta and red sauce taco bell (hangs head)
Wednesday: salad turkey pot pie
Thursday: bbq beef pie leftovers (Joyce class night)
Friday: pizza slow-cooked galbi, rice
Sunday: pork tenderloin with mashed potatoes and gravy
Monday: burgers and fries
Tuesday: turkey noodle soup with egg noodles
Wednesday: tacos
Thursday: leftover tacos
Friday: tossed salad topped with tofu, biscuits
Thanksgiving went off without a hitch. My mother was extremely pleased, everyone else was very pleased, and no one person spent too long in the kitchen. A few notes, mostly for myself for next year:
- We did a whole turkey because I wanted leftovers. We left my mom a pile of dark meat, I have the carcass for stock, and we have a bunch of leftover white meat which will get frozen in dinner size portions. It was a little fiddly but not bad. By the end of the day I was muttering that my sister was right, and we should just do turkey breast next year, and we just might (turkey breast in the crockpot is dead easy). But there’s leftovers, and my mom does like dark meat, and eh, we’ll see. :)
The breast meat was just a touch dry, but everything else was perfect. My parents turned out to have an electric roasting pan, which I was a bit skeptical of but which turned out to be very handy, as oven space was at a premium later on. Also, it was much more efficient than an oven, being much more tightly enclosed around the turkey. We put it in at 12:30, cooked it for half an hour at 350, then turned it down to 300 when we realized how well it was cooking, and it hit 175 at 3:45. Which was early, but that’s okay; we kept the pan on for awhile, and then turned it off, and the turkey was plenty warm enough when we got to it.
I basted it in butter and olive oil, with sage, thyme, salt and pepper, and rosemeary, once an hour. The neck, some baby carrots, and half a chopped up onion went into the turkey, and vegetable broth and water went into the bottom of the pan. Tasty tasty.
- The turkey was very well received. The sweet potato casserole was a total hit. We’ll keep it on permanent holiday rotation. So was the half gallon of Homeland creamery eggnog that I brought along (at least, it was a hit with the folks who drink eggnog), so I’ll make sure to tote another half gallon to Christmas.
- I made too much stuffing. Dear self, even as much as we like stuffing, the largest casserole dish is too much. Half as much next year would be good.
- The bread recipe for the stuffing was this one, and it was mighty tasty. It also made good bread pudding the night before when I had too much bread for the largest casserole dish.
- One cannot bake bread on the bottom rack of my mom’s oven without the bottom browning too quickly.
- Food likes and dislikes: Mom likes her cranberry sauce straight and cold out of a can (so we skipped the warm cran-apple sauce, which is how I like it. But mom really likes cranberry sauce, and I had enough other things to eat). Sister the middle does not like cranberry sauce. Sister the youngest does like not stuffing. Cousin doesn’t like potatoes. Dad eats anything. Mom likes sauerkraut.
- The pumpkin roll is the canonical Thanksgiving dessert for our family. I made it this year, and it turned out not bad but not great. The cake was a little on the dry side, and cracked when I rolled it. I’ve since been told the secret of getting it to not crack (the directions weren’t terribly clear), so that shouldn’t be a problem next year. The filling wasn’t as creamy as it could have been, which I blame on the fact that I ground organic sugar to make “powdered” sugar because I kept not getting around to going to the regular grocery to buy powdered sugar. Next year I’ll either do that, or bite the bullet and buy the insanely expensive organic powdered sugar.
- I really missed the green bean casserole. We didn’t do it this year, on the grounds that we needed something green on the table that wasn’t covered in sauce (we also had tossed salad) but I really, really missed it. Next year, I think I’ll do green bean casserole and plain green beans.
- My sausage balls, for munchies beforehand, were tasty but dry. This is not uncommon with my sausage balls. I need to figure out how to fix this.
- Local and organic notes: The green beans, sweet potatoes, sausage and flour and cheese in the sausage balls, and turkey were local (my mom canned the green beans herself). The cranberry sauce and the pumpkin and sugar in the pumpkin roll were organic. Various ingredients in things, such as the butter, were organic.
Monday
packing list to take to my parents:
sausage balls
turkey
French bread
vegetarian “chicken” broth
bread for the stuffing
spare t-shirt
thyme
rosemary
sage
pumpkin roll
eggnog
camera
onions
lemons
Cooking
About 4 hours before we want to eat (depending on the size of the bird; take along HTCE):
- turn the oven to 350 degrees
- wash the bird
- pat dry
- pull out the innards
- stuff turkey with onions and lemons
- prepare basting solution: butter + olive oil + s&p + thyme + rosemary + sage
- chop up an onion, potatoes, carrots
- start bird on its breast in the turkey roaster; put “chicken” broth and vegetables in bottom
- roast when oven has hit temp; baste every thirty minutes or so
- flip to breast side up with about an hour to go
- broil for five minutes when done to crisp up
- done when 170 on meat thermometer
- pull out and let settle while plating up everything else
at some point during the afternoon, if we haven’t already:
45 minutes before we want to eat:
- dice potatoes and put on to boil
- put stuffing in oven
15 minutes til:
- put stuffed mushrooms into oven
- put the yams in the oven
10 minutes til:
- put corn in pot; heat
- put green beans in pot; heat
- mash potatoes; put into bowl and cover
- pull the salad stuff out and bowl up
- set the table
right before we want to eat:
- put my cousin on turkey carving detail
- make gravy
- serve up vegetables into serving bowls
- get everything else out of the oven and onto the table
Saturday: dinner at a friend’s house; taking cheesy potatoes and bread
Sunday: cube steak, gravy, roasted potatoes
Monday: over easy egg tacos
Tuesday: something with the rest of the package of cube steak, side salads
Wednesday: dinner salads
Thursday: Thanksgiving at my parents’
Friday: unknown yet. depends on family plans, leftovers, and whether anyone is remotely interested in food.
I love the Internet. Have I mentioned how much I love the Internet? I love the Internet because my memory for details isn’t always the world’s greatest, and I’m a bit disorganized, so writing down details often doesn’t help (my current brain, a small spiral bound notebook that stores everything from book recommendations to my aunts’ email addresses, is … somewhere, in this house). However, when I store things online (and remember to tag them properly) they’re easy to find, which means that in preparation for Thanksgiving this week, I can read about TDay 2.0 from this year, and be reminded of important things that I’d completely forgotten about (such as the fact that the turkey took twice as long as it should have to thaw, and that it had innards tucked inside that needed to be removed before cooking. Luckily, this was a holy water blessed happy organic bird, and the giblets were packed in paper, not plastic.) So, far anyone who is cooking a big meal for the holidays this year for the first time, that’s my first bit of advice: write down everything, from how well dishes went over to how long things took to cook, so that the next year, you can make new and more interesting mistakes. :)
My family has generally gone up to Baltimore for Thanksgiving with my mother’s family. However, the matriarch of the family, my grandmother, passed away this fall, and so we decided to stay down here for this Thanksgiving and just do Thanksgiving with our immediate family (mom, dad, me, Jeff, my two sisters, and our cousin-that’s-more-of-a-brother). I suggested that we split up the cooking so that no one person was going crazy with all the cooking, and everyone agree that was a good idea. So, we’re having:
pre-dinner gaming and cooking munchies
chex mix (my mother makes the best chex mix on the planet. One day, I need to remember to get the recipe from her)
sausage balls
spinach balls
dinner
turkey
stuffing
French bread (one of my sisters doesn’t care for stuffing, so yes, we’re having both bread and stuffing. If the bread doesn’t vanish during the cooking and gaming stage of the day)
green beans
corn
mashed potatoes and gravy
stuffed mushrooms
yams with brown sugar and marshmallows
cranberry sauce
dessert
pumpkin roll
pecan pie
whatever else my mom makes - she loves dessert, and is good at it, and I doubt she’ll keep to a pecan pie. :)
Jeff and I are responsible for the pumpkin roll, the turkey, the stuffing, the sausage balls, and the French bread.
I need to make a grocery list and a plan of attack for the day itself, so we don’t end up eating at 9pm. :)
Last Sunday, we made pork tenderloin, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Jeff and I both love Thanksgiving dinner, so this was a psuedo-pre-Thanksgiving dinner.
I’d never made stuffing. It needed to go into the oven first, so out came the How to Cook Everything. However, his recipe called for insane amounts of butter, so I mostly just winged it. I browned up a little sausage. While that was cooking, I tore up some homemade hamburger rolls that I’d previously frozen and thawed Sunday night. They went into an 8×8 pan with some salt, pepper, sage, and thyme, a couple of glugs of olive oil, and just enough vegetable broth to moisten the whole mess. It went into the oven at 350 for about 40 minutes.
The pork tenderloin was easy - we get ours by the pound split into fourths, so I pulled out two fourths, thawed them, and browned them in a pan with some freshly diced garlic. Once they were browned, I pulled them out, sliced them into quarter inch slices, and put them back in the pan with a little vegetable broth, salt, pepper, sage, and thyme. I turned the heat down and let it simmer until the pork was cooked through and tender.
When the pork was most of the way cooked, I put on the cranberry sauce. At some point in the last couple years, I’d read a suggestion online that mixing canned cranberry sauce with applesauce would make very good cranberry sauce, and it certainly does. The twist Sunday night was that my applesauce was homemade. I’d always been intimidated by homemade applesauce, but we had a bunch of apples sitting on the counter that were too far gone to eat straight up, but weren’t too far gone for sauce yet. HTCE said that whole apples could put into a pan with about a half an inch of water, brought to a boil, then simmered until the apples had fallen apart and the sauce was the consistency desired. Lacking a food mill, I peeled and cored the apples first. Other than that, it really was that easy. The peeling and coring took about five minutes, and otherwise, the sauce cooked for an hour or so, with me sticking my head into the kitchen periodically to give it a stir and make sure it didn’t need more water or that it wasn’t burning. We can now cross something else off the list of things that we have to buy pre-made, at least when apples are in season, and once I learn how to can, that won’t be a problem.
So, part of the applesauce went into a can of organic cranberry sauce from the co-op, and the rest went into the fridge for lunches during the week. The cranberry sauce only took a few moments to heat through, and then dinner was ready.
This was a fairly cheap meal to make. The pork is $6 a pound, and we had half a pound. The stuffing cost under a dollar, even with the sausage, olive oil, broth, and and spices, because I can make rolls for pennies a batch. The cranberry sauce was on sale for $1.99 a can, and the apples were a dollar a pound (and, let’s face it, they were apples that we hadn’t gotten around to eating - it’s too easy to buy too much fruit when it’s in season - and would have gotten tossed if I hadn’t decided to try to make applesauce) and I probably used three pounds or so. There was leftover pork and stuffing for Jeff for lunch the next day, and cranberry sauce and apple sauce for days. Active prep time was low too - probably 10 minutes on the stuffing, 10 minutes on the sauce, and 10 minutes on the pork, with some cooking and stirring time in between. Overall, it was a nice Sunday evening dinner (our default for Sunday nights is salad; I’m not quite sure why, since Sunday is one night that I have the time to really cook something involved) for not a whole lot of time or money.
Saturday: over easy egg tacos
Sunday: pork tenderloin, stuffing, cranberry sauce
Monday: homemade pizza salad and corn muffins
Tuesday: salad homemade pizza
Wednesday: chicken soup, rolls chili and leftover corn muffins
Thursday: enchilada pie
Friday: salad quizno’s
