Thanksgiving!

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Me and a couple of my girlfriends put together an ACE Thanksgiving menu. I thought I'd share a couple of the dishes... I only have recipes for the ones that I made, so I'll just give the titles of the things the others made, and you can google them.

I am blessed beyond measure. To be able to share a special day with friends is incredibly important. I am so thankful that we have such good friends and that they are willing to indulge a couple of Americans in their need for tradition. And it doesn't hurt at all that they're good cooks.

I decorated the apartment a little- in my mind's eye it was much grander than it turned out. But I was pretty pleased with the home-made decs. 

 

(that last one is Mike's Opie-dog-turkey)

For starters, we had Jamie Oliver mulled wine. It was incredible.  We followed the recipe pretty closely, although put in a little bit less sugar than the recipe said (mainly because we ran out). It was really beautiful, not too spicy or sweet. It was a really nice warm starting drink. It snowed about 4 inches here, so everyone was coming in from the cold, and it was nice to be able to give them something warm on their arrival.

For meat, we had "turkey a la Minnesota". We couldn't find a whole turkey, that didn't cost a kidney, so we had to make due with a turkey crown. This was PLENTY of food, so it's probably good we didn't have a whole turkey. Basically, I followed Alton Brown's roast turkey recipe and added some sage butter rubbed under the skin. I also used some heather rock salt instead of kosher salt in the brine, which gave it a beautiful smell. And I didn't use any oil for the aromatics. I thought it was too much with the butter under the skin. We also had a lovely French Canadian meat pie called Tortiere, which was really savory and lovely. Finally, we had apple cranberry sausage stuffing. It was a perfect compliment to the meat pie and turkey, because it had a nice sweet flavor.

For sides we had maple butternut squash casserole, sweet potatoes with sugared pecans, a lovely Jamie Oliver salad, rolls, my grandma's mashed potatoes, corn pudding, and whiskey gravy. I only have the recipes for the mashed potatoes, corn pudding, and gravy.

Mashed potatoes:

1 lb potatoes quartered

1/2 heavy cream

milk

salt

pepper

5 tbsp butter

In a large stock pot, boil the potato quarters until they fall apart when pierced with a fork (10ish mins). Drain and transfer to a bowl. Add small cubes of butter, salt, pepper, and the cream and smash (if you don't have an electric mixer) or mix (if you have an electric mixer), add as much or little milk to get it to the consistency you want. More milk is runnier, less is chunkier and stickier. Add more salt, pepper, and butter to taste.

Corn pudding:

Cook's note: this is almost my most favorite christmas/thanksgiving dish ever. It's a Mike's Alabama/Kentucky family special. It's loooovely.

3 Tbs flour
3 Tbs sugar
5 eggs
1/2 C milk
1 14 oz can creamed corn
1 14 oz can whole corn drained
1 C heavy cream
2 Tbs melted butter

In large mixing bowl, combine sugar, flour, salt and pepper to taste.  Gradually whisk in cream.  Add eggs and whisk till smooth.  Stir in milk and all corn.  Drizzle the butter on top.  Bake 350 for 45 min. or till set.  (around 1 hour for me)

Whiskey Gravy:

1/2-3/4 cup whiskey

flour

1/4 cup cream

milk

drippings from the turkey

salt and pepper to taste

Start by making a roux in a small-medium saucepan with the cream and flour. Whisk the flour into the cream over low heat. Whisk in enough flour to thicken the cream. Add in the whiskey- the more you add the stronger the taste. Pour in 5-6 ladles of drippings from the turkey. Whisk in milk and more flour to thicken. For thicker gravy add more flour, for thinner add more milk. Keep over low heat. Add in more drippings or more whiskey to taste.

We would have had pumpkin pie and tartre al sucre (french-canadian sugar pie) but it snowed about 2 inches in an hour, on top of the 5 inches that we already had and everyone needed to get home... it wasn't the perfect end to the dinner, but it was a great meal, great camraderie, great homey feeling all the same. 

It's still pouring snow, so we might be stuck here for the next week. Thankfully we have enough leftovers!

Stovies!

I made a traditional Scottish meal for dinner tonight! Stovies. In honor of this, I will do my best to write the rest of the blog and recipe in Scottish.

Oi!
(hello)

 Fit leich?
(how you doing?)

Nae ta bad. Foos du?
(not too bad. How're you?)

Stovies are a Northeast Scotland tradition. Usually, they're made from the leftovers of the Sunday Roast, using the neeps (parsnips), tatties (potatoes), meat and a wee (a little)  bit of drippings all thrown into one pot. The origins of stovies are said to come from a time when masters would give their servants the left over food from Sunday lunch. They would take this home or to their quarters and make a dish that could last them all week and was easy to cook. This is a warm homey dish for quinies (girls) and loons (boys), wifeys (women) and mannies (men) alike.

Ok, enough Scottish slang. That's hard and I dunna ken (don't know) that I can keep going. 

Ingredients:
For the beef. 
1 lb beef cubed (good scottish beef is recommended)
1/4 cup beef stock
1 cup water
1 cup merlot or other red wine
3 cloves garlic chopped
1/2 onion chopped

Stovies:
Cooked beef
3 large or 6 small potatoes, quartered
1/4-1/2 cup of milk
1/4 tsp rosemary
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 tsp garlic

Roasted beets
4-5 beets roughly chopped into bitesize pieces (Fig 1)
olive oil or butter
salt and pepper to taste
Fig 1: Beet hands. Might be in your best interest to not wear a white shirt while doing this.

I cooked the meat a couple of days ago. You could probably do it all in the same day, though.

1. Sweat the onion and 2 cloves of garlic (chopped) over low heat.
2. Drizzle with olive oil.
3. Once onions are translucent, put the beef in
4. brown the beef- usually between 5 and 10 minutes, depending on the size of the beef.
5. Bring water and stock to a boil in a large stock pot.
6. Dump beef and onion and garlic in.
7. Add merlot
8. add last clove of garlic
9. Simmer for 2-3 hours
10. Boil the potatoes in a large pot of salted water. Drain when tender when pierced with a fork. Return to pot.
11. Pour milk over potatoes, smash with a fork- should NOT be smooth, remain chunkey.
12. Take meat and onion mixture (which should be amazingly tender now) and put into frying pan, along with some of the merlot broth (to taste).
13. Add potatoes. Over medium heat, heat through and mix together. Add rosemary, garlic, salt and pepper to taste.

For the beets:
Preheat oven at 350. At step 10 above, put chopped beets into a bowl. Drizzle olive oil or melted over beets. Sprinkle generously with salt, and not so generously with pepper, and mix it all around. Wrap in aluminum foil packet. Bake for 45-60 minutes.

Traditionally, stovies are served with piping hot with oatcakes, beetroot and skirlie (which is like oatmeal stuffing) but as Mike said, 'if you ate that, you'd sink to the bottom of the ocean'. So, instead, we had broccoli (Figure 2).
  

Fig. 2: Dinner! Looks gross- a bit like 

German textbook food- but is tasty!!

Cheers!