Thanksgiving dinner

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

• pick up turkeys (or Tuesday, whenever Earthfare calls)
  
• put one turkey in the fridge; other in the freezer (the second is for our second thanksgiving in the spring)
  
• pick out a bread recipe for the stuffing
  

• make bread for stuffing
  
• pull out sausage to thaw for sausage balls
  

• cut up bread for stuffing; allow to dry
  
• make sausage balls: find recipe, grate cheese, mix everything up, bake
  
• pumpkin roll: make cake, make filling, assemble
  
• make 2 loaves of French bread
  

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:

• prepare yams & marshmallows
  
• prepare stuffed mushrooms
  
• assemble stuffing
  

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

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. :)

We don’t have normal Nitty Gritty posts for Saturday or Sunday because of an event we hosted at our house on Saturday. We call it T-Day 2. It’s a second Thanksgiving for our friends to get together because they of course all had family commitments in November. This was our third T-Day 2 and it was a lot of fun. Sunday’s dinner came from leftover food from Saturday.

You can read all about it on the main blog: T-Day 2 post.

the whiteboard

We don’t generally go out on New Year’s Eve. There are too many crazy people out, and we’d rather stay in and have a peaceful evening at home. We’re homebodies at heart. Sometimes we have people over; this year, it ended up being just Jeff and I.

As I’ve already stated, I’m a list maker. In general, if it’s not on the list, it doesn’t get done. Since I was making a fairly big meal last night (at least for us - we do a lot of one pot meals around here), I made a list of what needed to get done for supper on the whiteboard that lives in the kitchen. I had the luxury of spreading out the tasks over the course of the day so that I didn’t feel like I had spent all evening in the kitchen. If you were trying to do something like this after work, on, say, a Friday night, I’d make as much of the food as possible (the salads, roasting the garlic, the potatoes up until the baking, prepping the green beans, and the cheesecakes) a day or two before.

The first thing I needed to do was make the cheesecake. My trusted cookbooks featured recipes fit for 16, not two (the Betty Crocker one called for 40 ounces of cream cheese, and was going to be difficult to cut down), so I went to the Internet. I’m particularly fond of All Recipes, and found a recipe that looked just about right here. I followed the recipe almost to the letter, except that we didn’t top ours, I substituted butter for the margarine in the crust (we avoid margarine because of trans fats) and I crumbled up graham crackers instead of buying crumbs. One and a half crackers made up the 1/3 cup the recipe called for. I had enough filling to make two small crust-less cakes in addition to the six with crusts. I used a cupcake tin to bake them. I found the time estimates with the recipe to be about accurate (I wasn’t eying the clock terribly closely yesterday). I made them up around 1pm, so that they’d have plenty of time to chill in the fridge. I was delighted with how these turned out; often, when you use a mini-cheesecake recipe, you’ll end up with a result that tastes of cream cheese but doesn’t have the right rich, creamy texture; these did.

The next thing I did was to bake the potatoes for the twice baked potatoes. I bake my potatoes in the microwave, since baking them in the oven takes upwards of an hour, and twice baked ones end up being finished in the oven, anyhow. I threw 6 medium potatoes in the microwave for about 10 minutes and then let them cool.

I made up the salads sometime around 4:00pm. These were very simple salads, since they were just an appetizer for the meal - red leaf lettuce, carrots, and green and yellow bell peppers tossed together. The result went into a large Tupperware container and into the fridge.

Next, I pulled out the green beans, washed them thoroughly, and cut off the ends.

After that, I put together the potatoes. I cut the cooked potatoes in half and scooped out the insides, leaving just a bit of flesh on the shells. The potato flesh got mashed and then mixed with about two ounces of grated muenster and two ounces of grated vintage (a local sharp cheddar), a little bit of butter, and generous helpings of garlic and onion powder, salt, and pepper. The resulting mixture was spooned back into the potato shells, the shells placed in a baking dish, and the baking dish in the fridge.

About 6:00 I remembered that I’d wanted to roast some garlic to eat with the steaks (notice that it’s not on the whiteboard; I’m glad I rememberd). Cut off the tops of a head of garlic, put it in an oven safe dish, pour a little olive oil over the tops, and throw in a 400 degree oven for about 40 minutes. I used my toaster oven and the tops burnt a bit; 30 minutes would have done. Turn off the toaster oven; the garlic will sit until dinner is ready.

We sat down to eat the salads and watch some West Wing on DVD around 6:30. At 7:00, we paused and I pulled the potatoes back out of the fridge; they were in a glass dish and I wanted to bring it to room temperature before putting it in the oven. I also pulled the steaks out of the oven to thaw in a bowl of cool water. Around 7:15, the potatoes went into a 350 degree Fahrenheit oven, and the steaks were still thawing. They were mostly thawed by 7:45. I heated a stainless steel skillet (cast iron would have been better, but ours needs seasoning) on 5 on the electric stove, and in the meantime, doused the steaks with Worcestershire sauce, rubbed them with a cut garlic clove, and then sprinkled salt and pepper on both sides. When the skillet was hot, I added a tablespoon of butter, waited until it was melted, and then put in the steaks for three minutes on one side, then three minutes on the other. (These were about 3/4 inch thick sirloin steaks, and I left the fat on them for flavor. How long yours take just depends on how well done you like your steaks, and the meat itself. I’m actually not very good with steaks yet; I was a vegetarian for a long time, and beef was the last thing I added back. I was fortunate that in having a few friends who could tell me what to do with the steaks last night.) Then the steaks went into the oven on the second rack underneath the potatoes. The cleaned green beans went into the skillet with a little more butter, and were cooked with a lid on for about ten minutes, which resulted in beans this side of crispy and coated in beef juices and butter, which was just lovely. At this point, the potatoes had been in for about 45 minutes, but anything after 30 would have done; the cheese was melted and the tops were browning. The steaks were mostly done with a little pink inside. I would have preferred mine to be less pink, so I’ll probably go four minutes to a side next time.

And that was it. We feasted on the steaks, potatoes, and green beans, and then followed it up with the cheesecake. It was a restaurant quality meal at home without having to deal with the nuts and crowds that are out on New Year’s Eve. I spent some time in the kitchen, but I like cooking, so it was hardly a hardship. I did most of the dishes as I went along, so the pile this morning wasn’t too bad.

Happy New Year!