Black Friday Thanksgiving 2016

We had 20 people at 2 big tables.

Here’s the menu with notes:

Apps –
Goat cheese & ratatouille & baguette – a small container of ratatouille from the freezer, that I put in a baking dish, made a well where I put in a small hunk of a goat cheese log, baked, and poured a little olive oil over (from a little bottle a student gave me, from his grandparents’ olives), and served with baguette
Chex mix – extra garlic-ly
Hard squash hummus – based on the Food 52 recipe, but I use less oil. This was a small batch, made from an acorn squash, not very orange; it looked very much like garbanzo bean hummus.
Pickley carrots
Cream cheese & zucchini butter on Rubschlager bread

Mains –
Cranberry sauce – I only made plain, so it worked out perfectly that Susan brought some with orange & crystallized ginger
Pumpkin Pesto Pull-apart bread – I started with this recipe, but used pesto instead of making a spinach pesto. I also changed up the method. I’ll write it up soon, promise.
Maple-pepper-pecan topped chipotle lime sweet potatoes – another change up, I used my Brulee’d Sweet Potatoes with Chipotle, Lime, & Cinnamon recipe, but instead of brulee-ing brown sugar on top, I topped the sweet potatoes with the pecans from this recipe.
Corn pudding
Mashed potatoes
Roasted Brussels sprouts & parsnips – I did what you’re supposed to do to make Brussels sprouts haters like them – I charred them until the insides were almost creamy and the outsides were crisp. And the parsnips were sweet.
Gravy
Turkey with chestnut stuffing – somehow it was an excellent stuffing year. I’m not sure why; I didn’t do much of anything differently. There was a lot of home made baguette (from Steve’s 20th anniversary party) and a fresh batch of cornbread in it, and parsley, sage, rosemary (all fresh), and thyme (dried).
Pumpkin chiffon honey pie with a graham cracker crust, and a few mousse-ettes on the side
Cranberry pear slab pie – like this, a test version I made for a bake off at the UW Libraries on Monday. It tied for 3rd place.
Apple cobbler – this was the dessert from a mistake. I wanted brown sugar cinnamon applesauce, but I put in too much sugar, so I ended up with something that was like cobbler filling. I added a not-too-sweet biscuit style top crust, and turned it into cobbler.
Oatmeal, pecan, dried cherry cookies

On Wednesday I inventoried the freezer, and got out everything I thought I’d use for Thanksgiving – corn, veggie broth, pumpkin puree, old bread for stuffing. After the pumpkin thawed enough, I drained it in a cheesecloth-lined colander. Then I made the jam cookies, which took a lot longer than I thought it would. I also ended up with more than I thought I would. I think I rolled them extra thin. I left them to set, closed up in the sun room, until Friday morning, when I transferred them to the freezer.

After the big meal Friday, everyone helped get both the downstairs & upstairs dishwashers loaded. I enlisted Belana to help dry as I washed the big stuff, and left the turkey roasting pan and the pair of roasting racks soaking. I got the oven self-clean started early enough that it did its F2 (function error) meeping, where you have to go in the basement and flip the circuit breaker to cut power to the oven, before John got home. So we did not re-enact Thanksgivingses past, with the two of us bleary in the kitchen at 2:00 AM trying to get the damn thing to stop, although we both looked forward to it, or at least anticipated.

On Saturday morning I got up and put the dishes away and wiped out the oven, with a good feeling of accomplishment. But, I am kind of on cookie hiatus the last 3 days – and I have not finished grading assignments in one of my classes, either, although that was my intent for Saturday. Thought I’d do the cookie ingredient buying, the case of butter and multiple sacks of flour and sugar, which is exhausting, and then grade. But somehow I decided that since it’s a holiday weekend, I should be allowed to go to entertainments like normal people. So I walked downtown with Belana to meet Mark and see Loon the Juggler at 11:00, and now we’re going to a movie – Fantastic Beasts. There’s always tomorrow, right?

So here’s my Thanksgiving in pictures, from the drained pumpkin to the cleaned out turkey roasting pan ready for ginger cream storage.