Turkey Dinner
Is that a plate of dinner or is that a plate of dinner? I have decreed that for every Thanksgiving meal from now on the dress code shall be sweatpants. All belts must be removed at the door.
Big feast tonight, despite my best intentions to streamline and keep it simple. It wasn’t that complicated, really – the usual roast turkey, a Winter’s bird stuffed with the same stuffing my mom always made – sauteed onions and celery, cubed bread and sage. A quick cranberry sauce – one bag dumped into a pot with a splash of cranberry juice and a heaping cup of sugar, and a couple big plums chopped and thrown in – I’ve never done this, but it worked smashingly, and gelled more than usual, possibly on account of the plums? It was a good switch from the usual orange.
There were Brussels sprouts with candied pecans (cook them and do the nuts in advance and then finish the lot right before dinner – they were met with great fanfare for something so supposedly universally hated – I posted the recipe over here), carrots (from our garden!) and parsnips cooked in a hot pan with butter, oil and thyme, another loaf of that cheesy garlic batter bread, and sweet potatoes tucked into the oven alongside the turkey and then mashed with butternut squash I did quickly in the microwave – all it needed was a drizzle of maple syrup and dab of butter.
After dinner there was much running around and screaming and playing hockey on the front sidewalk and throwing crab apples at the house. The kids had fun, too.
And there may have been some hanging around in the kitchen dunking chunks of leftover stuffing into the bottom of the gravy, which was particularly dark and sticky tonight. The drippings in the bottom of that pan was the stuff dreams are made of – my dreams, anyway – with really no grease to skim off. It would have sufficed for dessert.
Which, naturally, was pie. It has to be upside-down pear gingerbread or pie – and I may have mentioned in years previous my feelings toward pumpkin. I cheated this year, but then again not really – in Kelowna last Friday (for the day, another story I’ve yet to tell) I spotted a freezer full of homemade pies – apple raisin (reminiscent of my great aunt Noreen) and cherry – with handwritten instructions for baking on little slips of paper on each one. I could only manage two in my carry-on bag. It’s a good thing they were raw is all I can say, because my flight was delayed.
There remains downstairs one slice of cherry I imagine will go very well with thick yogurt and hot coffee in the morning. (After my 10k run, of course.)
October 10 2010 | leftovers | 23 Comments »
