Greetings and welcome to a fluffy, little open thread. This week I thought I'd sit back and engage in a bit of digestion. You know, take a moment to review the damage.
Thanksgiving with the Werelynxes
Thanksgiving for me this year started on Wednesday. Up bright and early, I started making some pies. I made four pumpkin pies this year. My crust recipe is pretty bog-standard: three cups of flour per cup of shortening, one egg, cold water— maybe a bit of vinegar, a tablespoon of sugar, pinch of salt— I fancied it up with some cinnamon and cardamon. After following a variety of advice on how to achieve a flaky crust, I've discovered that the best advice is to not follow the directions in my cookbook which calls for me to cut the shortening into the flour until it has the consistency of cornmeal. I now cut up the shortening into cubes, dump them into the flour, whip together the egg and other ingredients and add that to the bowl. Then to mix it together I just lift and fold things over, squash it down, lift up the edges and fold them over the top, squash it down again— and this method of mixing is a bit similar to a technique I learned from an article on French puff pastry dough by Julia Child. Her dough was mostly butter. Pressing down my pie crust dough and folding it makes my smaller portion of shortening spread out similarly, in progressively thinner sheets. And it's these layers of sheets of shortening that form the flakes. Now I just need to figure out something to fill the crusts with for a bit of prebaking. Stones? Marbles? Beans?
This year I used butternut squash from our garden instead of the usual proper pumpkin and took inspiration from the recipe in The Joy of Cooking which calls for fewer eggs and more pumpkin than my usual recipe. I just guesstimate the spices. Tossed in some star anise because it was there. Allspice, nutmeg, cloves, ginger and cinnamon too— of course. Molasses, cup of sugar, 2 eggs, 33% fat cream and a bit of milk, and 2 cups of pumpkin per pie.
With the first pie in the oven I started grinding the cranberry relish.
Frozen cranberries, a whole seedless orange (with the peel) and, praise be to the great Wada Woo: a hunk of fresh ginger root.
Then I got a start on the stuffing. I make a sort of ground Italian style pork sausage and fry that up with a lot of onion. Then I had a couple hours of work to attend to and when I got home I dumped the ground sausage and onion mix into the sink. I added a couple big bags of dry, cubed bread and rolls that we'd been saving up for a month or so, grated half a large celeriac and a dozen peeled apples onto the pile— topped that with entirely too much dry sage, some extra salt and pepper and mixed it all up.
I think the bucket I filled with the stuffing mix holds about 10 liters. Well over 10 quarts for the metrically impaired.
One day, four pies (one topped with a melted bar of dark chocolate, two with a cup of crushed pecans sprinkled into the filling and one plain), plus the relish and stuffing prepared.
There was plenty of work left for the next day.
Then there was the bird. 23 pounds of turkey to clean and stuff. Mrs the Werelynx ordered one from an internet store for a local poultry farm. She'd also ordered a couple of extra turkey drumsticks that I skinned and used to make some broth. I needed the extra bits of skin because the farm's butchers always take too much skin off when they cut the neck of the turkey off. Don't they know about roasting turkeys over here in Europe?
Yes, I actually stitched the two bits of skin over the neck gap. Then I stuffed the bird, using only a pitiful fraction of my absurd amount of stuffing. I stitched things together and tied things up and covered the bird with bacon. I also melted some butter with a sploosh of tawny port wine and a dash of salt and injected the bird in several spots with it— using a hypodermic needle with the biggest-bore needle I could get from the pharmacy. I set the oven to around 165 degrees Celsius, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 325 degrees Fahrenheit.
Once the bird was in the oven there were other tasks to complete.
I browned the flour for the gravy— And to make the gravy I use the drippings from the pan and some of the turkey broth made from the extra drumsticks whisked into the browned flour. I further season it with a generous amount of black pepper.
I made a batch of cheese sauce— a ton of processed cheese with added butter, grated Parmesan and cheddar— and a bit of nutmeg and black pepper.
Did I mention how much black pepper went into the ground sausage?
I cut up about five heads of cauliflower and steamed them until tender. I then broke them up further while mixing them into the cheese sauce.
The turkey got basted a few times during cooking, another layer of bacon was added, drippings from the pan were stolen for the gravy.
I seemed to have forgotten that my mom's old cookbook had cooking times for birds as big as ours. As it was, my estimate was off by about an hour and so I stalled until dinner time by wrapping the bird in aluminum foil and dropping the oven temperature.
Mrs the Werelynx had peeled and #1 Son had cut up a big pot's worth of potatoes. Topped off with water we were all ready to boil when— the stove decided to stop working. Fried, kaput.
So there we were, the turkey out of the oven and resting, guests already arriving, about half an hour until dinner with a pot of raw potatoes. Mrs the Werelynx and #1 Son began microwaving batches in bags before quickly realizing that we'd be microwaving potatoes for another two hours. Clever Mrs the Werelynx drained off the water, added a bit of sunflower oil and salt, spread them out in a baking pan and tossed them into the oven. Thanksgiving was saved!
Our guests brought other treats: sweet potatoes, strudels salty or sweet, even an Algerian dish made with puff pastry, filled with tomatoes, onions, garlic and fresh coriander. Topped with a black olive! La coca d’ Alger!
The guests continued to trickle in for another hour. All together, 20 of us had gathered to celebrate family and friendship. We may need a bigger table— or a bigger apartment. I may have brought this autumnal feasting tradition to this family in Europe, but it's Mrs the Werelynx who organizes it and calls the gang together. I jokingly called her “lepidlo” last night after our guests had left. That’s the Czech word for glue.
It was a grand evening, although I spent most of it in the kitchen. Even 20 of us didn't manage to eat half of the turkey. I think our youngest guest was about 15, our oldest was a bit over 80. The 15 year-old pretty much monopolized my attention. He was glad to have a sympathetic ear listen to him rattle on about high school life in English. His dad is also an American, married Fabulous Mother-In-Law's cousin. Usually the dad and I chat in the kitchen— and we did, a bit. Not quite sure how we got to chatting about Robert Crumb. Heh, his son felt a bit left out of that conversation. I missed out on some fascinating guests though. Part of having a diverse family is a variety of interesting conversations around the table.
The last two guests to leave were the wife of Mrs the Werelynx's father’s cousin (did you follow that?) and her son. He happens to be an artist and asked if I’d be interested in a job he'd turned down, a commission for an oil painting— a ridiculous job, basically reproduce Da Vinci's Last Supper on a hunk of 40 cm x 60 cm canvas for less money than I’d get stocking shelves at the grocery store down the street for a couple of weeks. Yeah, no. He also asked about any comics projects I might be working on and I drug out a stack of pages from the last one for him to look at. Feeling like it's time to revive it and get back to drawing.
Today, I couldn't be bothered to move very much. Outside, the wind was gusting. There was rain, sleet and snow. Instead of toddling off to the printers to check on a print, I stayed home and hunkered down with a cold turkey, mayo and lettuce sandwich and the ongoing MST3K Mega Turkey Day Marathon Telethon!
Thanks for stopping by.
This is an open thread.