Had this lovely dish at a restaurant in Vegas on a work trip last week. Underneath the probably two pounds of meat was a bed of mashed potatoes, and if you look closely, you can see some caramelized cheese too. It was really good and would easily have fed my whole family of four for a dinner, with some leftovers. I had debated getting a nice salad instead, and the sudden shift and juxtaposition of choices amused my colleagues.
Had this lovely dish at a restaurant in Vegas on a work trip last week. Underneath the probably two pounds of meat was a bed of mashed potatoes, and if you look closely, you can see some caramelized cheese too. It was really good and would easily have fed my whole family of four for a dinner, with some leftovers. I had debated getting a nice salad instead, and the sudden shift and juxtaposition of choices amused my colleagues.
For maybe the last 5 or 6 years, I’ve been in charge of cooking our Thanksgiving turkey. This year, I wasn’t certain I’d be cooking for a bunch of people until fairly late, and I wasn’t able to pre-order a gigantic free-range, organic, summa cum laude turkey in advance. In the past, I’ve gotten a turkey somewhere between 20 and 24 pounds to feed a passle of people. This year I ran out three days before Thanksgiving and got two 12.5-pound turkeys instead (the larger bird being unavailable). They were frozen, which isn’t something I’m used to (in the recent past, we’ve gotten birds that were alive on Tuesday), and there were two of them, and I wasn’t sure how that’d work in my oven. They turned out to take nearly an hour longer to cook together than I think one of them alone would have taken. It all worked out, though, and they turned out about as beautifully as two creatures who have been murdered for the sake of a historically misinformed food glut can turn out.
I put nearly as much effort into my rolls, which turned out delicious and equally, non-grotesquely beautiful as the turkeys. My process photos below show how the rolls progressed. For the turkey, thank(sgiving)fully I show only the finished product.
I did have a first this year. It’s common when you get a turkey to find a little sack full of the organs, which generally one turns into giblet gravy. I didn’t like giblet gravy until I was a bit older, and my wife doesn’t like it, and my kids turn their nose up at gravy altogether, so we default to my wife’s preference (which is fine by me; I like regular old gravy just fine). This year, only one of my turkeys had the organ sack in its cavity. The other had the top half of the poor critter’s head. In general at least in the U.S., we tend to prefer meats that don’t much look like the creatures we’re killing. At least in this case, I suppose I can say that I looked the poor bird in the eye, at least one of them.
Meat is pretty gross (I contend that being a physical body in the world is pretty gross), and while we eat it with most meals, we don’t eat a whole lot of it with any single meal. During the Macy’s Day parade today, I heard the stat that some 280 million turkeys are killed in the U.S. each year for Thanksgiving. When I was in I believe the third grade, 280 million was the estimated population of the United States. It’s a staggering number. I mean, there was a turkey served in the U.S. today for each person who was alive in the U.S. when I was in the third grade. That’s crazy! I’m sort of ashamed to have contributed two of those turkeys, especially when for me the real hits of Thanksgiving tend to be the vegetable dishes, but I suspect that there’d be revolt if I proposed a veggie Thanksgiving in the future.
We also made cranberry sauce (from cranberries, not pooped out of a can), mashed potatoes, and green bean casserole. Others in the family provided other delicious sides, including perhaps the loveliest sweet potato casserole I’ve ever seen and a really yummy broccoli casserole, and we’ll make some stuffing and sweet potato casserole tomorrow to augment our leftovers.
It was a good Thanksgiving overall. I woke at around 7:15 and cooked and cleaned until about 12:30, then ate a plate of food and cleaned for a bit longer. It was nice to listen to the family chatting and to share some laughs, to hear my kids playing with their little cousins. The rest of the day stretches out before me. I’ll spend a few minutes making terrible noises on my guitar, then will read to my family, then will maybe watch some TV, and finally read until bedtime, and then I’ll sleep tomorrow until I feel like getting out of bed. I’ll feel sympathy for those who have to work tomorrow and will feel perhaps a sort of benign contempt (if that can even make sense) for those who spend the day doing cutthroat shopping (tempered by sympathy for those for whom the day’s deals amount to a necessity of the season).
For a couple of years now, we’ve made pizza and watched a movie together as a family on Friday nights. My wife is usually the pizza chef, but sometimes I blunder my way through it too. Here’s a quick set of photos from a recent effort. We usually have bacon on hand because that’s what our daughter likes, and using the bacon grease to oil the iron skillets is a nice touch. It was only in the last year or so that we started using skillets instead of other types of pans, and I don’t think we’ll ever go back.
I’ve made tabouli a few times, both from scratch and from a mix, but I’ve always used bulgur for the grain. This weekend, a coworker posted a photo of tabouli made with quinoa, and I thought I’d give it a try. I found this recipe and whipped up a batch yesterday with three varieties of local tomatoes (an orange, a red/oranged stripey one, and a green/purple one) to add some more color. This tabouli also has carrots in it, which I had never tried in tabouli but which is a good way to get a veggie that I don’t usually go out of my way to eat. Confronted with the options of regular old white quinoa, red quinoa, or a three-color mix, I opted, at my daughter’s urging, to get the mix. This stuff is delicious and promises to get even better over the next few days.
My wife requested pineapple upside down cake for her birthday, and even though it’s a day early, the kids and I decided the birthday weekend was a good enough excuse to make the cake a day early. I think we’ll be skipping over the remnants of two Thanksgiving pies already in the fridge to give this sucker some attention tonight.
I’ve been eating horribly for the past couple of months, and though I’m not generally one for making New Year’s resolutions, the beginning of a new year is a great time to start eating better again after the holiday glut.
Right now I have a hankering for fresh, minimally processed foods. I’m not big on most raw veggies, and I’m certainly not going all raw or Paleo or anything (hard to do with kids, even if they are pretty pliable in terms of food). But I think I can work more fresh, raw foods into my diet. I’ve been enjoying hummus lately but wanted to try making my own. While looking through one of my Moosewood cookbooks for a hummus recipe, I saw a reference to tabouli, which I first had earlier this year and loved. So while I had chickpeas soaking, I whipped up this batch of tabouli, which is fantastic. My wife is downstairs making pita bread from scratch now, and I’ll make the hummus once the chickpeas are done cooking in a bit. Lunch tomorrow is going to be a real treat.
Bulgur mixed with olive oil, lemon, salt, pepper, and garlic. Next to that, parsley, mint, and scallions.
The finished product. After food processing the green bits and mixing with the bulgur base, I added tomatoes and some cucumber. This stuff is delicious.
Two Ells 