Big weekend

And it’s only Tuesday (ha, now finishing this post the following Saturday – so Jasper is now one week old!) so we can still talk about it, right?

On Saturday I became a grandma. Jasper Gray Lusis arrived for Al & Emma at 1:35 am.

 
And cookie season officially started since I baked the jam cookies on Sunday night.

Monday night I was supposed to do the Lebkuchen but didn’t have the energy. (PS, I made them Tuesday night). It was kind of a funny day, started off fine but I was not feeling very good and kind of depressed by dinner time. The good parts were having a meeting with a potential contractor for the paint (or maybe side) the house and enclose the back deck project and sorting donations at the food pantry. The bad parts were doing a ton of administrativia and meetings but not getting any grading done, and my stiff and sore knees – both sides hurting by bed time. And Mark didn’t like dinner; a thick-ish vegetable soup with kale in it, and sourdough biscuits, and the ham I imagined him happily making into a cheese & ham biscuit he deemed spoiled. I thought about frying the ham up for some purpose, what I usually do when ham is borderline, but threw it out instead. So of course, after dinner I was assailed by the oh-no-too many-leftovers-going-to-have-throw-food-away feeling with the must get it cleaned out by Thanksgiving twist. We have the soup, some sweet potato gnocchi I made Saturday, and a  few slices of a squash and greens galette that I made with cooking class leftovers and the batch of pie dough I demoed in the class, cutting in the butter by hand, which I have to say made a remarkably flaky crust in contrast to my usual stand mixer method. And in order to get the jam cookies into the freezer, I got out a stuffed pizza I made a while ago and froze, thinking it’d be a good dinner during this cookie season and Thanksgiving prep time. But hope springs eternal – Susan took some soup and a slice of the galette after our walk today, so I’m more optimistic about avoiding food waste. Another PS everything was pretty much eaten except for the last two slices of pizza.

 
So now, another Saturday – Thanksgiving has come & gone, twice. On the actual day, Thursday, Mark & I went to run & walk the Berbee Derby, a benefit race for technology in the schools. I was wondering if my bum knee would make it through the walk. I mean, I’ve walked a 5 K; I had done it on Wednesday actually, but not all in one shot – there was going inside and resting and drinking coffee involved – and not in the wilds of Fitchburg, where Berbee Derby is. At the beginning I thought it was going to be the best Berbee Derby ever. I wasn’t too cold, I didn’t have to pee, and my knee felt fine. Unfortunately as it turned out, something popped in Mark’s knee while he was doing his warmup, so neother of us completed the race. He offered to wait in the car while I walked but I decided having more time to cook would be better.

Over the last two days I made a ton of Thanksgiving food, and photographed almost none of it.

For Thursday, I made spicy sweet potatoes and chex mix and a regular pumpkin pie for Emma, custard filling pastry crust – and I took it all over to her sister’s house, and only stayed for apps & bevvies portion. Emma’s mom was in charge of leftovers, so I know Al & Emma got their share of everything. They gave us some twice baked potatoes and challah to add to our own dinner of egg & cheese biscuit sandwiches.

For Black Friday Thanksgiving, we had a smaller crew than usual – 13 at the table which has not seemed too unlucky except for me burning a few things- the spicy sweet potato topping and the bottoms of the cooked-outside the bird stuffing(s), but I always tend to do that. I worry that it won’t get done in time, and I’m cramming the oven with stuff and the enamel on the bottoms of my older Le Creusets is starting to wear thin, so the iron is starting to show through and stuff can burn. Which was actually all the stuffing this year, because I decided to usher in a new era of NOT stuffing the bird. Considering he was 18.54 pounds. It seems to have worked great except of singeing the stuffing. And John & Megan are off meat so good thing the chestnut stuffing was actually vegetarian – it’s not just my brother any more.

Here’s the menu:

• Chex mix, nut free!
• Pickled carrots
• Apple slab pie
• Pumpkin mousse pie
• Cranberry Bakewell tart – almond frangipane on cranberry jam in a tart crust – it got a little too done and the crust was really dry – “overbaked” Paul Hollywood would say. But a good idea overall, especially for us almond/marzipan lovers. Going to try it again next year, and NOT pre-bake the crust as long as the recipe said.
• Cranberry sauce
• Chestnut stuffing
• Sausage stuffing – really greasy …
• Mashed potatoes
• Fennel parsnip carrot gratin
• Balsamic glazed Brussels sprouts with bacon – good but too much bacon!
• Spicy sweet potatoes – also nut free – buttered & brown sugared corn flakes on top

And John & Megan got to meet Jasper.

Now the oven’s on the self-clean cycle, and the turkey carcass is boiling away in broth. I’ve made my cookie list and going to go shop a little closer to 2:30 when the Ax game starts (U of MN vs. UW-Madison) – thinking there’ll be less traffic once they’re all in the stadium.

And oh yea, here’s a sorta cool pic of a maple leaf stamped into the snow a few mornings ago.

Feeling like I’m shirking something but this does feel like a vacation day, even though I did do some work.

Two cookie kinds done and Biberli tonight – actually Sunday.