Thanksgiving Day in Replay

Well, Thanksgiving Day's Great Event was a tremendous success!

We started the day off relatively late. It was my first day off from work in weeks and we all felt like sleeping in. (Except for both little ones, especially the Amazing Omnivorous Child, who is always up at the crack of dawn.) Zizi had made it a point to make quiche again for breakfast (the same recipe as mentioned earlier this month, except this time I had the money to spend on bacon! Hee hee...)

We then went shopping for a couple of items we had missed, and after returning home, put both little ones to bed for naps. Yeah, children are at their most gorgeously beautiful when they are asleep and quiet! That gave us plenty of time to cook to our hearts' content without any interruptions.

I started off making a spinach soup of my own design. It came out most excellent, except you really have to add a lot of salt to taste, since there is so much milk in it. I used maybe almost a half-gallon of milk. It really does take a lot to get it right, although it's partly about how thin you really want it to be. I like my soups relatively thick. (Spinach soup also gives you the ugliest front teeth ever, but culinary awesomeness has its price.)

Zizi in the meantime mixed the ingredients for a pumpkin pie, but this pie had a twist. I had just been to a company "holiday" party, and they had a pie-making contest in which someone had entered a combination punpkin pie/chessecake. It was amazingly tasty and I suggested that my wife make that instead of just a straight pumpkin pie. She did and it was extraordinary. The only problem she had was that we don't own a blender (horror of horrors) and the cheesecake part came out a little lumpy because it had to be blended together by hand. More love in it, I say. And lumpy doesn't mean less tasty.

She then proceeded to set our chicken cooking (yes, we had chicken instead of turkey) with a rub made from oil, crushed garlic-covered almonds, and sage, rubbed underneath the skin of the chicken for extra tenderness. I'm not sure how she does it, but the chicken came out so wet and tender and juicy that the meat literally fell off the leg when she went to pull it off. It was delicious.

I also made stuffing to go with our meal, which I made with ground pork instead of actual sausage. The difference was palpable. Instead of the taste of sausage overwhelming the rest of the mixture, the ground pork instead leant a milder flavor, which allowed the spices that I added to actually complement the whole dish. The result was a very mild and homogenous meaty flavor, helped by the fact that I cooked the chicken giblets in with the pork.

All of the day's cooking and preparing and baking and everything else totaled about 9 hours. It was as relaxing and fulfilling as it was supposed to be, with Bing Crosby and Eiffel 65 music playing on Grooveshark and much wine to drink. I felt like the day really accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish. We also watched some Internet TV while stuff baked and broiled and such, catching up on our favorite shows.

Ahhh. Now we're all full and have a fridge full of leftovers.

And I don't think we've all had so much butter in one day as we did on Thursday...

-- Best Regards, Nick