Posted on 11/23/2023 7:12:13 AM PST by Reno89519
Very healthy pie......honest.
Saved. I’ll try this next week or two. Looks delicious.
Dry brined and spatchcocked turkey - a 11 pounder. Roasted Brussel sprouts with a balsamic reduction and flaked parmesan, roasted butterkin squash, mashed potatoes with heavy roasted garlic, stuffing, gravy, pickled beets. No dessert.
Having dinner with 2 other couples, high school classmates of my husband. We are providing the meat...a sirloin tip roast...hope it turns out ok, as I have never cooked one before. No one wants to travel for Thanksgiving. Highways are just about as bad as airways.
Yummy....every dish a gem.
Mmmmmm......better make two....its that good.
I will be going out to a restaurant with my 98-year old father in the early afternoon. Then, tonight, I will be heading over to a family member’s house for another, more traditional dinner with everyone invited. Dad does not like to interact with more than one person at a time.
Happy Thanksgiving, FRiends.
We learned years ago cook it ourselves to not get sick and to have what we like.
As God is my witness, only turkeys will fly.
Happy Thanksgiving! I was going to post this as a separate thread, but I’ll just add it here.
A lot of people will post WKRP Turkey Drop clips today. Granted it is a classic! And I love it!
But I think one of the other funniest Thanksgiving TV show episodes in my book is Mad About You – Giblets for Murray episode (link below) and I will tell you why.
The reason is that I can relate to it so much.
When I was a newlywed in 1983, married that September, we didn’t host the family Thanksgiving, but we hosted the family Christmas dinner and I went all out, way too out as it turned out.
I decided to do a “traditional” old fashioned “English Christmas” dinner with a roast goose, and yes, I know that Scrooge after his “redemption”, bought the Cratchit’s a huge turkey to replace their small and lowly goose, but a goose seemed a good choice at the time – “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat”, and all that.
I made a chestnut dressing, a plumb (figgy) pudding, roasted vegetables including roasted Brussel sprouts and a homemade whole cranberry/orange relish and not cranberry sauce out of a can. I also prepared a mashed potato dish but used red skinned potatoes with some of the skin on with a lot of garlic, whipped with heavy cream and eggs, fresh rosemary, and topped with parsley and baked it as a puffy buttered casserole, and a sweet potato dish but with no marshmallows. And no green bean casserole and no canned corn.
I made a punch bowl of a cranberry and orange sparkling cider punch. I also purchased several bottles of some very good wine, some beer for the grownups and sodas for the kids.
Since this was pre-internet and YT days, I went to the library and got out all sorts of cookbooks along with consulting The Joy of Cooking that I had gotten as a wedding shower present and bought some cooking magazines and watched some “holiday” cooking shows on PBS.
I poured over these for many weeks, days and hours, taking notes to come up with the “perfect” menu while learning and in some cases practicing the proper cooking technics.
There was a butcher shop in the shopping center where I worked as manager of a convenience store and got to know the owner. He special ordered me a fresh whole locally, farm raised goose and FWIW it was a lot more expensive than a turkey.
And we had a lovingly decorated perfectly symmetrical real Christmas tree that my husband and I chopped down ourselves at a local Christmas tree farm, wreaths with plaid bows I had made myself and electric candles in all the windows, sparkling white lights on the shrubs outside, candles all over the house, a homemade dining table center piece with a pineapple and oranges covered in cloves with sprigs of pine on top of a beautiful Christmas plaid table cloth, soft instrumental Christmas music on the stereo, and since this was the first house I ever lived in with a fireplace, lots of wood to have a good roaring fire.
FWIW – I wasn’t a completely novice cook but in retrospect, this was quite an ambitious undertaking.
And it really wasn’t so much that I was trying to impress anyone (OK, maybe a bit) as much as I wanted to impart my love of cooking and host a “traditional” Christmas meal and a warm welcoming home for the people I loved who I thought would love it too.
I thought this was going to be the perfect Christmas dinner and I was going to do it my way.
The guests were my parents; my brother, his wife and their 3 children - their teen daughter and an their elementary school age kids - a boy and girl; my uncle (my father’s brother) and his wife and my Norwegian born grandmother who came all the way from NJ to MD; my brother’s best friend - a single guy who had no other place to go and an older widowed neighbor woman with whom I’d become friends with.
So, this is what happened.
My parents showed up some 4 hours early. Neither my husband nor I had even showered or gotten dressed yet as I had gotten little sleep since I had been up late the last two nights and gotten up very early that morning preparing and had enlisted my husband to do the last-minute house cleaning.
My dad staked his place out at the kitchen table, wanting to talk to me constantly as I was cooking, chain smoking and drinking beer starting at 11AM and it wasn’t all that long before the beer ran out.
My mother kept offering “help” while also criticizing my menu and just about everything else in the passive aggressive way only a mom can, including, and I kid you not, criticizing us for buying bags of ice.
Then my brother’s family arrived, 3 hours early.
Their kids became bored rather quickly and their teen girl who had friends in my neighborhood, went to see them and didn’t come back until just before dinner along with one of her friends and when she and her friend came back, it was obvious to me and my husband that they were was “as high as kites” and reeked of weed but her parents thought they were just being “silly”.
We had a finished basement, but it tended to be cold, so we had purchased a kerosene heater, and it was the only room with a TV. So that’s where the younger kids went. We didn’t have any gaming systems but thank G-D we had cable.
My uncle, aunt and grandmother arrived, not quite as early but still way too early and as I was still cooking and still not yet having showered or changed clothes yet, you know, into my perfect Christmas outfit, so I found myself also trying to cook and entertain my guests while in a tee shirt and sweatpants.
I will also note that the Christmas of 1983 in the Baltimore area was one of the coldest on record. The low temperature on Christmas Eve was way below subzero and only climbed to a high of 3 degrees on Christmas Day and plunged to well below zero again on Christmas night.
My Norwegian grandmother was soon complaining about how cold she was. My husband moved her to our recliner and placed it as close to as possible next to the fireplace that he had put more, way too much firewood into as was probably safe, and covering her in a blanket, hopefully without catching her on fire.
My uncle would later tell me that my grandmother told my other uncle in CA that I had tried to freeze her to death and didn’t feed her anything.
FWIW – my grandmother gave us as a Christmas present - a used linen tablecloth that had gravy stains on it.
Somehow, in all this chaos, I managed to quickly shower and change and get dinner to the table, although 2 hours late. But I was pleased with the results, my guests, well, not so much.
No one except my husband liked the goose. And no one liked any of my side dishes.
Several complained that there wasn’t any canned jellied cranberry sauce or sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, corn or a green bean cassrole and my youngest niece and nephew started crying when their mother suggested that they should just try my food, even if it was “bad” – she kept saying over and over again - “try it you might like it” and, “you like this - yes you do”.
My oldest niece who was still high from visiting her “friends” was the only one who ate a bit of everything, but she was probably still high enough that she might have eaten the centerpiece if that was the only thing left on the table.
Fortunately, I had in my pantry several boxes of Kraft Mac and Cheese, so I made that for the younger kids to keep them from crying. Several of the adults also ate the Mac and Cheese instead of what I prepared.
Overall, it was a disaster, but then it got worse.
After we did the gift opening, and as I was cleaning up, the kitchen sink overflowed. It turned out that our pipes froze because of the fridged temperatures and further exasperated because my mother, in her attempt to help, poured cold goose fat from the roasting pan down the kitchen sink drain.
The only good thing was that my brother who had just recently lost his job and was struggling, my husband and I got his kid’s Christmas lists and got them at least two things on their list and so his kids were finally happy. And my SIL brought several pumpkin pies and “Cool Whip” which everyone liked.
But then things went from bad to even worse(er).
The pipes had frozen so bad that the basement bathroom and utility sink overflowed with sewage. Everyone left, not that I could blame them. I would have left too if I could have.
I was left with a kitchen full of dirty pots and pans and dishes and with no way to clean them up and way too many uneaten leftovers to fit into the fridge, and a husband frantically calling our landlord, friends and plumbers on Christmas.
My brother’s friend went home and came back with his shop vac to help with the cleanup. And my widowed neighbor stayed to help me clean up the kitchen as best we could, but I sent her home, thanking her for her help.
Around 1 AM I found an unopened bottle of wine and pored a glass, two, three…and then a bottle of Scotch and a ½ pack of Salem cigarettes my father left behind and went to the living room, sitting in the recliner next to the fireplace, looking at my beautiful Christmas tree and listening to soft jazz type Christmas music and trying to “chill”.
Then I heard the crash and the sound of our Huskey choking on a goose bone as she had gotten into the trash. Fortunately, I managed to get it out of her mouth without a trip to the emergency vet.
My family and I still laugh about my first Christmas dinner. And yes, I still laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
Years later after we bought a house, we started hosting the family Thanksgiving dinner. One year we had 24 people over – a dining room table and a card table as an extension, a kid’s table in the kitchen and some people sitting on folding chairs.
But I learned my lesson and kept the menu much simpler and traditional as in a stuffed turkey just like my mother always made, canned cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top - things pretty much everyone liked. Sure, I might have snuck in a few “gourmet” dishes or appetizers here or there or added some special touches of my own, but I also enlisted others to bring sides and desserts.
By that time my oldest niece was no longer getting high before dinner and had a husband and 2 kids of her own and my youngest niece was also married with a kid.
And while I never went “buffet” I did use “Chinette” paper plates instead of China to make the cleanup easier especially since I didn’t have a dishwasher at the time, no one complained.
Anyway, I find this funny and totally relatable. Sorry that you will have to skip though some ads.
Mad About You - S 3 E 8 - Giblets For Murray
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5s5bqs
We decided two years ago, after my mother died, to go out for Thanksgiving. My mother always insisted on getting out the “good” dishes, crystal, silverware, etc. - all of which needs to be washed by hand - including the pots and pans, serving dishes and more. With 15 or more people, this was a massive chore - I often spent several hours after dinner on clean-up while everyone was enjoying him/herself.
The best part about going out is not having to do all the planning, days of preparation, setting the table, clean-up, etc. - it gives me far more time to enjoy my out of town guests w/o all the fuss and craziness, which I do not miss, at all. Everyone loved it - and we’ve been doing this the past two years, including this year.
We’ll do the crazy act for Christmas.
In California, we put all of that into a tortilla and have leftover turkey dinner burritos - delicious!!
These fluffy sweet potato biscuits slathered with orange
butter and honey are a nice addition to the turkey-laden table.
Fluffy Sweet Potato Biscuits
Secret to fluffy biscuits-----keep everything cold before mixing.
Ing 1 cup flour 1/2 tsp salt 3 tsp b/powder 4 tbl cold solid shortening 1 cup cold cooked mashed sweets, 1/2 cup cold milk
How to: Sift dry ing. Cut in shortening. Add potatoes. Eyeball in milk to make firm dough (not too stiff). Roll out on floured board; cut with biscuit cutter. Bake on greased pan 400 deg 25-30 min til golden.
Okay by me.
I’m very thankful that our family NEVER has that slimy green bean casserole!
Today, at my sister’s (Baldwin77) it’ll be:
Turkey and gravy, ham, scalloped potatoes, stuffing, baked beans, Watergate Salad, pumpkin pie, and more stuff that I can’t remember. Everyone brings something to add to the basics.
Also roasted Biden.
It’s that an actual thing?
Thank you for sharing your story - and so vividly, I could visualize it unfolding in my mind! That sounds that a terrible day & a fantastic memory!
Several complained that there wasn’t any sweet potatoes
with marshmallows on top, or a green bean casserole.
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