Post-Holiday Quiet

So the dishes and serving platters are put away, the orange and brown decorations are coming down and we're onto the green and red (and blue and white) baubles, tableware and tchotchkes.  The kids and other family have headed home, and the house is quiet again. Our Thanksgiving was one of the best ever, and I hope yours was, too.

Here are a few highlights from our day:

Thanksgiving mornings begin with a game of frisbee at the beach. Since I pre-cook everything but the turkey, I have a lot of free time during the day to spend with my assembled tribe, which definitely makes for a better day for the hostess, I think. Universal Law: Happy hostess, happy guests.

The two times you can see me running are these: if someone is chasing me with a knife or if I am at the beach with a frisbee. Thankfully, this is the latter event.

Table is set and ready.

Sputnik appreciated the many laps and arms that wanted to hold him throughout the time we had a full house of guests.

I've said before that holidays are like people; each one in each year has its own distinct personality. Some are tense, some are sleepy, some are frantic. If I had to choose a personality for this year, I'd say mellow. We wrapped up the day (after a few bottles of wine) with a rousing game of Card Against Humanity, where we older folks surprised and impressed our kids with how outrageous we could actually become once lubricated with enough alcohol.  

Yup. It was a good day on the homestead.

Best. Turkey. Ever.

So I think I mentioned in a posts several months ago that my blogging friend Stephen Andrew Jones ( http://stephenandrewblog.blogspot.com ) wrote a post that sold me on buying a sous vide system for cooking, due to his gorgeous, magazine-worthy pictures of his perfect Thanksgiving turkey. The other option was to show up at his house for the big day and just enjoy all his hard work, but since that's technically stalking (but is it still stalking if you bring really good wine?), instead I bought a sous vide system for myself. Stephen Andrew has several good posts on making a perfect Thanksgiving turkey on his blog, so if you've suffered through the curse of dry meat this year please check out his holidays posts from years past, as well as a couple of links I'll post below. It will change your life.

The sous vide uses vacuum sealed bags with the food inside, cooked at very precise temperatures, to cook meats and poultry to perfection. They cook at a lower temperature, for a longer time, making them safe to eat. I will never, for the record, knowingly eat a dry, briny, 165 degree bird again. 

Here at the homestead we've seen more than our fair share of dried up breast meat and under-done prime rib around the holidays and the stress of not knowing if we'd have another disaster every year was making restaurant reservations in town look extremely attractive.

Ollalieberry mimosas using my favorite sparkling Marsanne!

And so it's especially nice to be able to report that our home-cooked Thanksgiving turkey was, by far, the best any of us had ever had, whether at home or dining out. And for me, it was, by far, the easiest Thanksgiving prep I'd ever had. Thank you Stephen Andrew!

There were several factors working towards making this -- bar none -- the most delicious but also the easiest Thanksgiving ever.  The vacuum seal system I bought alongside the sous vide allowed me to vacuum seal anything, and so I used that opportunity to pre-make ALL the side dishes in advance and hold them in the fridge without fear of spoilage or flavor changes (including stuffing, which stayed moist and delicious despite not being cooked in the bird).  So all the side dishes were done by Wednesday.

Behold the stuffing cooker.

Thursday was Pie Day (we celebrated dinner on Friday, so Thursday was a prep day), using pumpkins I'd harvested a couple of months ago and Olallieberries harvested and fast-frozen in spring.  All I had to do was make two pie crusts and cook it all up, which wasn't hard.

Then our Friday Turkey Day arrived, and it was time to cut the raw bird up into pieces. I decided to only cook the breasts in the sous vide system and sear and then braise the legs in the oven, in a red wine reduction sauce (I got 99 problems, but lack of wine ain't one of them). I also pulled all the breast skin off (sous vide cooking means no crispy skin sadly, but there are alternatives for making this happen!). I slathered the peeled-off skin in bacon fat and a little salt  and popped it into the oven on a sheet of parchment to roast by itself. I roasted up nicely, but shrunk a lot, so next year I will be covering it with another baking sheet to hold it flat and help keep it's shape and size.

I then seasoned the two breasts and trussed them together to make a kind of "turchetta," popped it into a vacuum bag and dumped it into a stock pot with the sous vide cooker. Both the breasts and the legs were scheduled for exactly 2 1/2 hours of cooking. With about an hour left in the cook time, I took out all the side dishes out of the fridge and stuck them in the oven too. The stuffing I cooked outside in the solar oven to help keep it moist.

EXACTLY two and a half hours later, I had a perfect Thanksgiving dinner -- no stress whatsoever. What a cooking revolution. So nice to be able to tell people you're going to eat at 2 pm and MEAN IT. Commitment kept! There was literally no guesswork at all, which was so helpful to me as I started heating up side dishes and getting the table ready.

Generation Two, minus our son Groceries who is stationed in South Carolina.

We had two of our three kids home and I'm happy to say they absolutely loved the meal! So did Big Ag, even though he's not in this pic because he's off in the kitchen somewhere getting himself a drink.

Here is a link to the two recipes I used for this year's feast:

http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/11/food-lab-sous-vide-turkey-crisp-skin-sous-vide-101-thanksgiving.html

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/11/red-wine-braised-turkey-legs.html

Celebrating!

I might have mentioned that due to the kids' schedules in transit, we are not celebrating Thanksgiving until today. As a blended family, this is nothing new to us. Depending on the kids' (my son, Big Ag's son and daughter) time with their "other" parents (our ex-spouses) this is something we know how to roll with.

Who knew there was an advantage to getting divorced! Well, there is. It teaches you to allow your children time away from you at an early age, and it's good practice for later on.

Yes, we divorced families know we have to be flexible regarding time with our children. I remember having a full Christmas, including fancy dinner, presents, carols, etc. with my son on December 22, because he was going to be at his Dad's house on "real" Christmas. Of course Christmas was difficult for me that year because I knew it was Christmas Day and my son was not with me. I think I went hiking with a friend or something. 

But for me the most important thing was that my son was happy, and having two Christmases at that young age seemed to fit the bill nicely.  Plus since you can also throw Chanukah into the mix at my house (all eight nights of it), winters are a good time to be here at our homestead -- if you like receiving presents and eating good food.

Within a couple of years after the divorce, my ex-husband and I were managing to work out Christmas so that we both got to spend time with our son on the actual day itself, and could even put our differences aside long enough to let him have Christmas with both his parents -- we'd generally either do breakfast or dinner together. That too, required patience and flexibility, but we made it work and I think our son is the better for having seen us do it. Eventually, my ex and I became good friends, and he is also good friends with Big Ag. I like to think it was that mixing together during the holidays that helped bring all that about. Call it a Holiday Miracle if you like.

But my point is, eventually, ALL parents have to learn to be flexible, as their children grow up. It's not just you. There will surely come a time when everyone's son or daughter wants to spend Christmas at their boyfriend's/girlfriend's home, with his or her parents (potential in-laws) instead of you. 

Sometimes it's because of geography -- if your son falls in love with a girl from St. Louis, her parent will be expecting their daughter to come home for the holiday as much as you're expecting your son to come home for the same.

And unless you're planning on being a territorial asshole about it, you will graciously share your children (and someday, grandchildren) with the parents of the one they love. So maybe you have full Christmas dinner on the 22nd. Or the 28th. Who knows.

But here's the cool thing -- and I think it's safe to say it is just about the only cool thing about going through divorce, but it's there, regardless:  We divorced parents already know how to share our kids -- we've been doing it literally for years. We learned the skill early on, and now that the kids are grown we already know how to let go, knowing losing a holiday is not losing a child forever. 

And so, with the turkey preparations underway and the house preparing to fill with our grown kids (2 out of 3 anyway) and possibly even an ex-husband on the way, may I wish all those in unusual circumstances, all those in non-nuclear families, a wonderful holiday season, whatever day you happen to be celebrating. 

Three's no reason to confine the celebrating to just one day, anyway  Some of us learned that a long time ago. After all, no one ever says, "'tis the day." The expression is "tis the season."

Big Bird Day

As I get ready for Thanksgiving dinner on Friday (kids will be in transit on Thursday so we'll do the sit-down thing Friday afternoon), I can't help but remember all the happy Thanksgivings at my godmother's house.

As so many artists do, she kind of created her own loosely-knit colony of "family" members, including her kids, several ex-lovers, friends of her kids, and anyone else who was kind of at loose ends on Turkey Day. After my father died and my mom left the country I spent many happy Thanksgivings at her place, a grateful "orphan" to whom she was a second mother. 

Awkward moment as I decide I need to begin drinking. However, note that I am ROCKIN' those 1980's suspenders!

 My boyfriend and I used to spend the day at her place before heading up to Big Sur for the long weekend. One time she invited one of my ex-boyfriends who was at loose ends for a place to go, and somehow I ended up sitting with them both (pictured, ex on the far right). Can anyone say, "awkward?"

These are the kinds of things that happened all the time at her place.

She's now in a memory care facility and I'm sure will be spending the big day with one of her kids. I'm sad that she no longer remembers the crazy Thanksgivings where we never knew who was going to come through her door, but it's a memory I'm still happy to have.

So often in life there's more to be thankful for than resentful against. No one's life is perfect, and none of these Thanksgivings were either, but I treasure their memory more than if they were made of diamonds and gold.

This is one of the last paintings my Godmother did before losing her ability to paint, and I'm especially thankful to have it hanging in my house this year. 

I hope each and every one of you has an absolutely wonderful day, and may your friends and family (and whoever else is in your particular "colony") have a perfectly imperfect day. 

Painted perfection....moonlight on the water.

Thanksgiving 2014 -- Warm sand and crappy pie dough

Even though I prepared most of our Thanksgiving feast on Tuesday and Wednesday, somehow Thursday felt as chaotic as ever, except for the morning, when we headed to the beach to throw the Frisbee around for an hour or so.  It was a gorgeous, sunny day and I was loathe to leave and return to the kitchen. It felt good to get some exercise too, ahead of the food-fest that was to come, and so we may have found a new Thanksgiving tradition.

Safe to say that this new tradition was discovered in part because the temperature was 20 degrees higher than normal; we were in the low 80s by lunchtime.  All day long the sun shone, we kept the windows open, and we donned summer clothes for the afternoon, as we stood around the barbecue as the turkey was smoked and cooked.

Here's an interesting note on the heat, however ... for the first time I had a tremendously difficult time getting my pie dough to perform properly.  I just couldn't make a cohesive dough, and making my pumpkin and ollalieberry pies was extremely frustrating.  It turns out that if your kitchen is too warm, the gluten in the dough does not bind properly. (Hence the instructions in the recipes about chilled ice water and cold shortening -- there is a reason why they all ask for this.  So add to your notes that a cool kitchen goes a long ways towards helping the pie crust-making process, too.)

So with one homemade and one last-minute, store-bought pie crust (oh the shame), things still worked out and everyone was happy and extremely well-fed.

If the weather is like this next year, I am making one thing for Thanksgiving -- reservations at a nice restaurant in town, with outdoor seating and cool drinks.  That will give me more beach time to throw the Frisbee in the morning, and I will save myself the frustration of pie dough that shrinks and falls apart, not to mention the hot kitchen. The whole holiday of Thanksgiving is not designed for summer weather, I must say.  So next year if it's like this, I'm taking the hint and opting out of the cook-fest.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

It's starting

How do your Thanksgiving preparations generally begin?  Mine usually starts with an emptying of stored food from our garage freezer...stuff we harvested or made just a few months ago, much of which was stored specifically with Thanksgiving 2014 in mind.  

I will be honest with you; the months of August through November are not pretty ones for my freezer.  It seems like every day during summer I try and fit more and more of my harvest into it, and it's not pretty; we've had arguments erupt over freezer space. For instance, last week Big Ag brought home two extremely large bags of enchiladas from the cook at the ranch, and finding space for them was a huge issue. Big Ag wanted to save them for the kids (who are coming from college this week) and I wanted to eat them now -- just to save freezer space, of course. Of course.

Anyway, today began with taking out a couple of big bags of last summer's ollalieberries, most of the spinach and a quart of broth, among other things, which took my freezer from the "overflowing" category back to just "pretty damn full." 

I'm going to begin fixing things today and putting them in the fridge so I can just pop them in the oven on Thursday and heat them back up.  This will include my spinach casserole, maple pecan yams, cheesy potatoes, pies, cranberry sauce and stuffing. That will leave just the turkey and Yorkshire puddings to fix on Thanksgiving day.  This is a strategy which will hopefully leave plenty of time for games of Cards Against Humanity, Scrabble, a long walk on the beach and maybe even a nap on the back patio, in the sunshine.

And I have already made my usual pronouncement that I am not helping with dishes.  Three days of cooking is enough work for this "holiday," although even with all the work, I must confess that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year.