Thanksgiving Dinner

For Thanksgiving this year it was going to be down to the four of us, so I invited some friends from school, and Corrine and her husband Ryan came, and we had a really good time!

Here's what we ate:

Turkey: I didn't have any room in the refrigerator to thaw my turkey, so I cooked it from frozen again. This works amazingly well. After about 6 hours I took out the neck and stuffed a bunch of herbs (sage, rosemary, and thyme) in the cavity. See the Recipes page for the timetable.

Rolls: Of course. I made it with half white flour so they wouldn't be so dense since I was serving them to company. They rose so fast I wondered why I bothered.

Mashed potatoes: I decided no one would complain about having too many starches on Thanksgiving. I do need to remember that the steam shorts out my hand mixer, though. I was glad it was mostly mixed by the time that happened. And that it recovered in time to beat the whipped cream.

Sweet potatoes: 4 sweet potatoes, peeled and hacked up (the turkey was sitting on the cutting board by this time so I didn't have a surface to cut on. Bad planning, 2 apples peeled and cored and sliced (thank you Naomi!), and a spoonful of brown sugar. Oh, and I poured maybe a third of a cup of apple juice for moisture over it, and popped it into the microwave until everything was fork tender.

Salad: I made a big green salad to fill up my plate and remind me I didn't need three helpings of everything. It mostly worked.

Cranberry sauce: Corrine did an excellent last-minute job standing watch over the cranberries since I forgot to do it ahead of time.

Jello salad: It came out runnier than I like. I think next time I'll reduce the water a little from what I posted in the recipe. But not down to jello jiggler proportions.

Gravy: I have never successfully made gravy on my own before, but Corrine told me Ryan really likes gravy, so I found a recipe and it came out great! I sprinkled the flour over the juices instead of shaking it, so there were some small lumps, but by the time I got it to the table I don't think anyone noticed, including me.

Pies: There were three pies. Corrine made an awesome Chocolate/Peanut Butter Pie, very rich and yummy! And there was pumpkin pie, which came out about as perfect as any I've ever made. And I found a recipe I had to try, even though it brought the person/pie ratio to 2, for cranberry cheesecake pie. I highly recommend this pie, even though mine came out of the oven with lots of cracks and it wanted to stay in the pan. Maybe I should have cooked it a few minutes longer, but it's yummy anyway!

After dinner we sat and talked and had a great evening. I hope your thanksgiving was as nice as ours!

Happy Birthday, Benjamin!

Those of you who pay attention to Benjamin's preferences know that his favorite color is green. So today, for his 19th birthday, he got three ties, and two of them were green. We don't have any announcements to make on the mission front, but he has started the paperwork (all online, so no paper is involved, but you know) so we hope to know before we move when and where he'll be going.

His preference for green apparently extends to flavors, and the brave young man repeated his request for a lime cake, and we also had mint chocolate chip ice cream. I have tried before to make a lemon chiffon cake, just substituting lime everywhere it said lemon, with pretty awful results. If I recall correctly, that had something to do with not reading the recipe carefully enough. Well, I've now made this recipe four times and it gets better each time. And I think I can say it was a success today! No dense, chewy layer in the middle. I frosted it with whipped cream flavored with a little lime juice, and it was ok, not overpowering like whatever I tried last time.

Anyway, Benjamin has now finished his freshman year at the University of Utah, majoring in Computer Engineering, and he's getting ready to move on a bit. Happy birthday, Benjamin!