Thanksgiving 2008 Recipe Wrapup
Amanda and I made Thanksgiving dinner pretty much from scratch this year, and happily everything turned out very well!
I picked up a 10 lb turkey from Dipaolo turkey farm. Initially we had planned on brining the whole bird, using a recipe from epicurious, but we did not have a pan large enough to submerge the carcass. So the day before Thanksgiving I found myself dismembering a raw turkey, which is quite a bit more exhausting than carving it after cooking! Then again, how often do you have the chance to snap a turkey's spinal column with your bare hands? Opportunity of a lifetime, I'm telling ya.
We decided to brine the dark meat in the legs and wings, and bake the breast meat separately in citrus and rosemary. The brinng worked spectacularly well, easily the most tender flavorful turkey I have ever had, but sadly the breasts came out dry. At one point we had discussed wrapping them in prosciutto prior to baking to help keep them moist, but in the rush it was forgotten.
A stuffing recipe with bacon and apples? OK! I went heavy on the thyme (from the windowbox plant) and sage. The bread (along with the beans and whatever else we did not get from Greenmarket) was from Fairway, the best-est grocery story in NYC). The only complaint I had with the stuffing was that the apple flavors were mostly lost. If I try this recipe again, I'll probably double the amount of apple and cut it into larger pieces, to help it survive the long bake time.
While I was tending to the gravy, Amanda made stuffed sweet potatoes wrapped in prosciutto, based on a recipe from what we're eating. One factor we did not anticipate was that the potatoes did not really soften up much during their time in the oven, despite the claims of the recipe. We had pulled them out of the boiling water a bit ahead of them being completely finished, thinking they would soften further in the oven, but the potatoes that were not soft all the way through after boiling remained a bit tough post-bake.
Serious Eats had a recipe for string beans with bacon and chestnuts had sounded great, until we realized exactly how much work preparing chestnuts is. The recipe has using "bottled peeled roasted whole chestnuts", but being the DIY types we picked up whole fresh chestnuts from Greenmarket and set to work. How hard could it be? To prepare chestnuts, Joy of Cooking recommended cutting an X in the side of each nut and boiling them for 5 minutes. Then peel off the shells - which we found an incredibly time consuming task, and exhausting for the fingers! Now that the chestnuts are peeled, they can be cooked, which is done by boiling them (again) for 30-40 minutes, then baking them for an hour. We got about halfway through the shelling process and realized there was just no way we had the time to devote to doing this with so many other dishes still up in the air. So we aborted on the chestnuts, but the string beans were fresh and the bacon was good quality, so I think everyone was still happy with the results.
The rolls were made with mashed sweet potatoes, using a recipe from pinch my salt. These were a huge hit. I had been worried the sweet potato would dominate but instead it just gives a slight flavoring to the yeast rolls. The ones that were left unfrozen (but bagged) unfortunately turned moldy after only a few days, probably due to the egg and sugar. Fortunately I have at least half a dozen still in the freezer...
For desert we made sweet potato, pecan and date, and icebox pies. I was a bit dubious of the pie crust recipe thekitchn had, but for heavy pie fillings like these the extra density of the crust worked. (The Oreo crust of the icebox pie was pretty tasty too)
The cranberry sauce, gravy, and mashed potatoes were consumed without ever being photographed. Very sad.
So, was the meal worth 12+ hours of cooking over two days? Ummm... YES! But once a year seems about right to me.
Posted 2008/12/03 in food; no comments
< Switching to Pyblosxom, and a colophon | The More Things Change... >