November 24, 2007

Rate the Hate the Tryptophan Coma edition

Ah, Thanksgiving. Twice. I am thankful for two excuses to cook Turkey in 6 weeks. I told you all of my menu a few weeks ago, but for this Thanksgiving, I didn't cook any of it. I made entirely new stuff (except the Stove Top). Now, if you think I am mentally unstable enough to spend 2 more hours typing the menu from Thursday, you'd probably be right you have another thing coming. I will, however, happily share with you the gist of dinner, and the surprise item of the day.

First, the turkey:

Porcini mushrooms with fresh rosemary and thyme

blended with butter and garlicrubbed under the skin of the turkey that brined all night in salt water with pepper, Worcester sauce and brown sugar. The turkey got stuffed with and baked for just over 2 hours (god bless convection ovens).

There were basic old garlic green beans, and Stove Top, and gravy made from cremini mushrooms, porcini mushrooms, turkey stock, pan drippings and cream. And then there were potatoes.

Josh LOVES onions and peppers. My hatred of both onions and peppers burns with the heat of a thousand suns. But since I had such a kick-ass Thanksgiving last year, and he had such a craptastic one, I thought I'd make him a little something special. A just for him thing. So, I julienned a medium red pepper, a medium yellow pepper, and sliced a medium red onion. I tossed them in olive oil with salt and pepper and roasted them for 15 minutes. Then I quartered what I wanted to be 1 1/2 pounds of fingerling potatoes, but I live in the motherf*ing suburbs of motherf*ing Canada and couldn't find any, so I went with small white potatoes, tossed them in olive oil, too, with salt and pepper, threw them right on top of the peppersand then roasted the whole thing on 375 for 50 minutes. I mixed in 1/4 cup fresh chopped parsley and (I think) 2 tbsp fresh chopped mint and roasted the whole thing for 10 more minutes. I topped that with fresh chopped basil and voila!Seriously, I thought I was going to hatehatehate this. Turns out, it kicked serious ass. (It was shocking, even to me.) Throw that all one one not-nearly-big-enough plateand you have the very, single, most bestest Thanksgiving dinner I have ever cooked. Ever. I'm not kidding. And it was crazy easy. I even managed to bake a decent cookie for dessert.Those would be pumpkin cookies that I make....with molasses. Jumpin' Jesus on a pogo stick; I loves me some molasses.

But, did they like it? As they say, a picture says a thousand words...

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