That said, we cooked a pretty nice Thanksgiving meal. Pics and commentary below for your amusement.
This is a dough hook that is hooked on to dough to be made into homemade cheese-filled crackers as per the Alinea cookbook. Carol at Alinea at Home made these and she said they were good. She is right about most things but not this one. I thought they were a pain. We also deep-fried some potato skins and those were tasty.
Giving your guests something to nosh on is pretty important.
We butterflied and high-roasted the bird as per a recipe in Cook's Illustrated from a couple of years ago. This is what it looked like before:
And this is what is looked like afterwards.
Attractive, yes, but it still tasted like turkey (ie not like very much at all).
Dressing for turkey was not tasty. It was a Cook's Illustrated recipe for sausage and cornbread stuffing. Maybe this would be good if it had been more savory. I probably screwed up the cornbread. Baking is for wimps anyway.
Also the gravy was not brilliant. Somehow I managed to turn the onions into little flecks of charcoal. Something clearly went awry as the final product was half a quart, not a quart as predicted. Here's a pic of the original roasting pan with tasty bits in it, plus a pic of the wet stage. I didn't take a pic of the final product because it is just brown sauce and who cares about that?
But we had plenty of other stuff that was great. The cranberry-pear-ginger sauce was outstanding. It looked pretty nice when finished.
We also replicated the Pommes Anna from last week. Great call.
The plated main looked attractive:
Desserts were fantastic thanks to the efforts of my fiancee. First dessert course was a Whiskey Apple Crumble Pie.
That is her hand covering up a piece of crust that fell off.
Very very nice.
And finally we made "coffee and doughnuts" from The French Laundry Cookbook. This was fantastic and we will make it again.
Still not a fan of Thanksgiving but an okay meal nonetheless.
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