Thanksgiving

Today I cooked my first thanksgiving dinner.  Now, I have cooked all the foods that go into thanksgiving before.  Even all at once.  But never before was I in charge of the thanksgiving day feast.  Today I was.

Remember my last post - about being laid up sick?  I'm pretty well recovered now, but during that laid up time I also caught up on my favorite shows.  Including Good Eats.  And they had a thanksgiving day special.  They've had them before, but this one promised 4 hours of cooking on the day, stress free.  So I followed the plan.  There are a couple of hours pre-preparation, and the turkey has to be thawed four days early so it can brine, but on the day itself, four hours.

I pre-prepped.  I brined the turkey.  I chopped vegetables and peeled potatoes, and had bowls of things in the fridge waiting for turkey day to arrive. And I wrote down his instructions, complete with times to start doing different things.  I printed it all out so I had a checklist.

Wow.  It worked!  Four hours of cooking, with a few breaks in the middle.  No stress, plenty of mess.  Dinner was on the table at the appointed hour.  And it didn't taste half bad!  And I learned a few things in this process.

One - yellow potatoes and Yukon Gold potatoes are not the same thing.  I cooked the yellow potatoes for the specified amount of time and they were not soft enough to rice.

Two - potato slices do not mash in a mixer.  Not very well.  Unless maybe you have one of those guards that make everything that wants to fly out of the mixer fall back in.  On the plus side, the dog was quite happy to eat potato slices off the floor.

Three - "smashed" potatoes taste as good as mashed potatoes.  They just aren't as light and fluffy.

Four - Using a shopping list made up of the ingredients from the recipes does not include beverages or ice cream for the pie.  Oops.

Five - giblet gravy may taste good, but it looks gross.  Next year, the giblets may flavor the gravy, but they won't be IN the gravy.

Six - It is possible to have cleanup for thanksgiving dinner take twice as long as cooking it.  Of course, there are the long waits for the dishwasher to finish a cycle.  Still . . . .

All in all, dinner was a success.  The turkey was good, nobody was upset about the smashed potatoes, the panzanella (which was made in place of traditional sage stuffing) was approved.  I think my mother-in-law was grateful that dinner was at our house instead of theirs, so I got the major cooking and cleaning up to do and maybe she was not unhappy that I didn't do a perfect job.

I think this was successful enough that maybe I'll do it again next year.