12.10.03. 11.30am.

oof.

i swear, sometimes i think i should start a food blog.

due to the presence of a free turkey (thank you, hyatt), we decided to have thanksgiving 2 (the bride of thanksgiving) this sunday. on the guest list (at least the guest list who said yes) were new friends malea and ben, and their 18-month-old son lucius, and old friend katie. (she is old! decrepit! ancient! um... ahem. yes.) and the four of us. and a dead turkey. who was not so much a guest, as a meal. guest of honor, i suppose you could say.

anyway, we thought hey, seven adults, of course we need an ammount of food that would make the ancient romans raise their eyebrows. thus, the menu was to be as follows:

needless to say, we were cooking all weekend.

first, the turkey. i had never cooked a turkey before - closest was the time i basted at lila's house. but we found this recipe in cook's illustrated, to which we just got a subscription, for Spice Rubbed Turkey, and it sounded yummery, so we decided to go for it. first step was to brine the turkey. that means submerge it in salt water in a bucket for a few hours. we had to buy a bigger bucket. the brining, apparantly, helps keep it moist and flavorful, and prevents the drying out that so often happens with roasted turkey. anyway, after drying the turkey off, it was time for the spice rub. i got all the spices from the rainbow grocery, which i just discovered and think is really neat, where they have all their spices in big mason jars and you can measure out how much you want of each. i'll forget some of them, but the spice rub included paprika, mustard, cinnamon, rosmary, cloves, cumin, and allspice. there were definately others too. i wanted there to be fenugreek, just because i like to say fenugreek. so i had a bowl full of a mix of these, and rubbed the mix all over the turkey. and inside the turkey, which was, honestly, a little lewd. also, separated the skin from the breast, and rubbed some of the spice and some oil between the skin and meat. this thing had no crevice not rubbed in spice. and then we refridgerated it until the next morning. next day, filled it with stuffing and roasted it for a while. flipped it around a few times, which was awkward, but mostly it sat there and got yummy. it got done just before the guests arrived, and i carved it (my first time carving too). i was a little worried that some of the meat was very pink, until i realized it was colored by the paprika. oh, and it was excellent! a little too salty, perhaps, but not very much. moist, flavorful, tender - both white meat and dark. didn't even get dry when it cooled off and we ate it as leftovers. brilliant. a complete success, as far as i'm concerned. also, we took the carcass and made an insubbordinate ammount of turkey stock that we're trying to find a use for.

now, the stuffing. to me, stuffing is the best thanksgiving food. it's got all the yummy things! so we looked in the joy of cooking and found basic stuffing, and among the variations were sausage-apple stuffing and wild mushroom stuffing, so i thought i'd do both. it called for a pound of bulk pork sausage, but when i asked the meat guy at the farmer's market for it, he said he didn't have any. "but," he said, "you can take any old sausage and just cut it open." "ah, true," i realized. "can i interest you in our cranberry lamb sausage?" he asked. "possibly," i said. he brought it out. "great sausage," he said. "i used it to stuff a turkey last week." "that's exactly what i'm doing," i said. he leaned in. "the gravy you make from this stuff will be off the hook," he said. he had me sold. so that sausage (which we sampled, and good lord, that's good sausage), some granny smiths, brown mushrooms (with a couple expensive mushrooms thrown in to enhance the flavor), a loaf of french bread cut into cute little cubes, onions, celery, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme (really), some chicken broth and egg. in the future, more egg and less broth, but overall excellent stuffing - nice mix of sweet and salty and fatty and spiced flavors and textures and everything.

we knew the mashed potatos would be good when we were looking for butter for the rolls, and ben said, "oh, i meant to bring some butter, but i used it all when i made the potatos." he also used sour cream. good stuff. especially nice when complimented by the giblet gravy. we had a long argument about whether it's pronounced with a hard or soft G, and by the end of it none of us could remember (a) what was correct, or (b) what we had thought in the first place. the gravy was pretty easy. put the ugly bits of the bird in a sauce pan and cook 'em up with onions and celery and carrots, except we were out of carrots. then boil in broth for a long time. then take out all the chunks, cut up the meat into tiny bits and put them back in, with some butter and flour, and some herbs. it didn't thicken enough, so we added some cornstarch, and that did it. and it was much tastier than i thought it would be - i usually don't go in for the giblet kind of gravy, but this was quite nice.

the garlic lemon greenbeans were a bit boring. basically steamed, and combined with garlic and lemon juice and bread crumbs and parmesan. they were fine, nothing special. the funnest thing was using the hand-held blender to make sandwich bread into tiny little crumbs.

the apple sauce, however, was awesome. applesauce is the easiest thing in the world to make. cut up apples, put them in a big pot, and turn on the heat until it's applesauce. we used a combo of macintosh, granny smith, rome, golden delicious and jonagold apples (the joy of cooking said it's better to use a couple different kinds to round of flavor). also put in a little apple juice and lemon juice, and some nutmeg, mace, cinammon and cloves. and eventually we had a big honkin' pot of chunky applesauce. i love it a lot. delicous. lieva says too much spice and too chunky, but she's just wrong. it's yummy.

the leek soup is a thanksgiving tradition at lieva's house. leeks were all blended up and cooked for a long time, and other little bits of leeks were added later. we had some to do some straining, because our hand-held blender was not up to the task of pureeing all the stringies (which, incidentally, gave our garbage disposal some issues, and because of which we eventually had to dump concentrated sulfuric acid down our drain - scary stuff). and then it's mixed with some cream and egg before you eat it, and some white pepper and salt. good stuff.

lieva also made the fresh rolls - she's been on a bread kick recently, which makes everyone happy. the rolls were good. you know, little and soft and bread-like. like rolls should be.

and the pies. the relative merits of apple vs. pumpkin will not be discussed her - suffice to say, they were discussed in the kitchen. both pies, however, were very good. the apple pie had the same apples as the apple sauce. lieva learned that when you seal the edge of the pie, you have to do it very well, or sticky stuff leaks all over everything. the rest of us learned that pie is good.

and she melted chocolate for drinking. i think with cream. and a little dusting of spices on the top. thick, and rich, and excellent.

and blodgett's homemade vanilla ice cream was excellent too - very light and subtle and tasty. made with a real vanilla bean. do you know how much a single vanilla bean costs? four dollars! crazy. but made good ice cream.

it all only took 36 hours to make, and everyone agreed it was an unequivocal success. aftewards we sat around and said "oof" and watched monsters inc. together to try to cheer up lucius, who was getting sick, and was therefore inconsolable, but still cute. and now we have a fridge full of leftovers. go, us. we rock.