She helped soooo much. Thanks twinface! We agreed ahead of time to just relax and enjoy the cooking. I can get so picky about how things go that I can be terrible to work with on the cookings. But we both agreed to be totally chill and just see what happened. So we did.
Gilgamesh also helped.
He lay on his new favorite thing, the sleeping bag, in the middle of the hallway to make sure we were graceful enough to dance around him.
Here it is:
Thanksgiving Spinach Salad
Ingredients:
1 package baby spinach
some pecans
some dried cherries*
some plain chevre
1 lemon
Wash spinach. Toss ingredients together except lemon. Add a squeeze of lemon to each serving.
Ciabatta
Ingredients:
Go to your local French-Italian bakery and buy a loaf of ciabatta. Slice generously, warm in the oven. Eat. (No way I was gonna add baking bread to the already long list of cooking that needed to be done for this meal.)
Garlic Potatoes with Spiced Sour Cream
Ingredients:
As many baby red potatoes as you want
several cloves of garlic
4 tbsp butter, melted
salt and pepper to taste
1 tbsp paprika
1 tbsp garlic powder
1/2 cup sour cream
Chives, diced (we couldn't find any and used scallion greens. Chives would have been better)
Mix the sour cream with the paprika and garlic powder. Add black pepper to taste. Refrigerate
Put slits in the potatoes, but don't cut them all the way through. Slice the garlic thinly and insert garlic into some of the slices in the potatoes (about three/potato). Roll the potatoes in melted butter. Place the potatoes in a baking pan, sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper. Bake at 400 degrees until soft, about an hour. Top with sour cream mixture and a sprinkle of chives.
Turkey
Alright, this baby had three main parts that made it delicious: brining, the stuffing/basting combo, and the rubbing/baking step that we stole from Emeril.
1) Brining
Ingredients:
2 oranges
2 lemons
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup salt
about 1 gallon water
handful of rosemary
handful of thyme
1 turkey (we had an 11.2 pounder, for the simple reason that we just couldn't find anything smaller!)
a bucket large enough to fit your turkey and 1 gallon of water, but small enough to fit in your fridge
Add sugar, salt and spices to the gallon water in the bucket. Stir until dissolved. Quarter the fruit and throw it in the bucket as well. Clean the turkey. Remove the giblets and neck (I almost did not find the giblets), trim off any extra fat, rinse it with cold water. Immerse in the bucket. Put the turkey with bucket in the refrigerator for 12-48 hours (we went with 12 as we were worried about the saltiness).
2)
Ingredients:
2 cans of chicken with wild rice soup
1 can cream of mushroom soup
2 cans of turkey broth
1 can of french fried onions
2 onions
7 cloves of garlic
Turkey from Part 1
A little butter
Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Remove turkey from brine. Rinse it with cold water inside and out. Pat dry inside and out. Place it in the pan and rub it all over with the oranges from the brine. Then rub it with butter (according to Emeril, people. Not my idea...). Quarter the onions and stuff them inside the cavity. Add the garlic. Turn the turkey breast-side down. If you are using different kinds of soup (like I recommend above), mix them together first or you will have to hold the turkey out of the way to stir. Pour the soup into the pan with the turkey. Place in oven. Roast breast side down, uncovered, for 1 hour. Flip! Baste with 1/2 cup turkey broth. Return to oven to cook uncovered for about another 2 hours. Baste with 1/2 cup turkey broth every 30 minutes. When within the last hour of cooking, start sprinkling the turkey with the french fried onions after basting each time.
Cook until that pop-up timer pops out or turkey is about 185 degrees F. Carve. Serve soup mixture with turkey.
Enjoy!
Cranberry Cream Cheese Wontons
Ingredients:
One package of gyoza wrappers
4 oz (1/2 package) of cream cheese
1/2 can of cranberry jelly
canola oil
Let's see. What's the unhealthiest way to prepare a fruit? First, lets squeeze all the juices out of the rest of it. Then let's add a bunch of sugar and turn it into a jelly. Then let's can it. And then let's mix it with cream cheese. Wrap it in a floury tortilla layer. And fry it in oil. That's it! That's perfect!
Oh boy. Kristen doesn't really like cranberry jelly, so we decided to try something new this year. In my mind, it was justified because we had to have a cranberry course at our Thanksgiving dinner.*
Warm the cream cheese for about 30 seconds in the microwave. Add the cranberry. Mix till smooth-ish. Add a small dollop to the center of a gyoza wrapper. Seal with water. Heat the oil until it's...well, hot. I don't know how hot. But you want the wrappers to start sizzling as soon as they hit the oil or the oil will just seep in and make the interior greasy. If the outer shell of whatever you are frying gets crispy right away it will seal off the oil. So, heat it until it is hot enough. Then fry these babies. Quickly. Remove them from the oil before they burst and the cream cheese mix makes the oil splatter everywhere, burning you and smelling gross. Can you tell that happened to us?
Pumpkin Cheesecake, New York style
1) Crust
Ingredients:
1 package of graham crackers, crushed to make 1 1/2 cups
1/3 cup sugar
dash of cinnamon
1/3 cup butter, melted
Mix the ingredients together, press into the bottom of a 9 inch spring-form pan. Bake in the oven at 350 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes
2) The rest
Ingredients:
1 pie pumpkin
4 8 oz packages of cream cheese
1/4 cup cornstarch
1 2/3 cup sugar
2 tbsp vanilla
3/4 cup heavy whipping cream
cinnamon, nutmeg, and all spice or cloves to taste, about a tbsp each
2 eggs (well, we used 2.5, but the recipe we used called for eggs but didn't mention them, so we were just guessing. 3 eggs seemed too wet.)
Crust from Part 1
Slice up the pumpkin into manageable chunks. Scoop out the insides. Steam until the skin separates easily from the flesh. Mash the flesh with a fork. Then blend it in a blender until smooth (limited materials here: my smoothie maker worked, but it wasn't pretty). In a separate bowl, mix the first package of cream cheese with 1/3 cup sugar and the cornstarch. We didn't have a hand-mixer, so we microwaved the cream cheese to a manageable softness first. Beat in the remaining packages of cream cheese. Add the rest of the sugar and the vanilla. Add the eggs, and keep beating. At this point we should have added the pumpkin and the rest of the spices. The heavy whipping cream should be added last, and only stirred until it is well mixed in. It should not be beat too much or the cake will get too fluffy. Don't overmix. Spoon the mixture over the pie crust from Part 1. Place the pan in a larger pan containing water that comes up the sides of the cheesecake about an inch. Bake at 350 degrees F for about an hour, until the cheesecake only barely jiggles at the center when you shake it. Cool, then refrigerate overnight. Nom nom nom.
Could you tell we were too hungry to take good photos for the last one? This looks/tastes so much better than these pictures can capture!
*So, Kristen brought cranberries instead of cherries for the salad. So I had no excuse to eat deep-fried cranberry wonton deliciousness.
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