Thanksgiving

Our Thanksgiving was rather ordinary. That is a good thing. I’m not too fond of surprises showing up on a holiday.

The day itself was fairly decent. The rains stopped. This was particularly fortunate because I grill my turkey on an outdoor, charcoal grill. There’s nothing (okay, I’m using a bit of hyperbole here) more miserable than trying to start a fire and tend to grilling in a downpour. This was (if recollection serves me correctly), the fourth time out of five years that I’ve grilled the turkey. Three Thanksgivings ago was the exception because we were in an apartment without a porch, so grilling wasn’t much of an option. Once again, the turkey turned out to perfection. Grilling it also frees up the oven for other things. Not everyone has a double oven.

Elise worked Wed. night, so prior to that she baked the dinner rolls and made the pumpkin pie. The pie recipe came from Cook’s Illustrated. The secret ingredient for the filling was the addition of canned yams (sweet potatoes). I thought the pie was quite good.

After seeing a few suggestions for cranberry sauce bandied about on Facebook, I had Shelley make the sauce with half the sugar, a little bit of orange juice concentrate, some nutmeg, cinnamon, salt, and pepper. I think most of us liked how this turned out – not as sweet, much tarter, and some interesting flavors not usually found in cranberry sauce – especially not in the canned ones!

While Shelley was cooking the sauce, I was slicing cranberries for use in a spinach, cranberry, and mandarin orange salad. I accidentally slipped my fingers and sliced into a fingernail with, of all things, a paring knife – albeit a very sharp, Victorinox paring knife.

I also prepared some stuffed mushrooms. I baked it, and then promptly forgot to serve it. Not so with the stuffing. However, the vege-chicken slices suffered the same fate as the mushrooms. Not that we needed the two dishes that were forgotten.

I finally got the baked yams (sweet potatoes) to turn out like I saw in the photo accompanying the recipe. This also came from Cook’s Illustrated. The science behind yams is that the starch converts to sugar near 175F. Above that temperature, the conversion process stops. The trick is to try to keep the yams under that temperature for as long as possible to maximize the sugar content. (No extra sugar needed for candying using this method. It ends up plenty sweet without the added sugar.) Tricks include starting them in a cold oven and keeping them covered for the first half of the cooking time. The trouble I’ve had for four previous attempts was that the yams cooked too much on the surface and burned. What is desirable is browning and caramelization, but not burnt to a black crisp. I finally got the right degree of browning by following the recipe to the letter and tightly sealing the baking pan with the extra-wide, heavy-duty foil. In the past I was using regular width foil, and that didn’t seal the pan sufficiently, allowing too much of the steam to escape during the first part of cooking and allowing in too much dry heat (apparently). Anyway, I’m happy that I finally got it right.

For the dinner itself, we had a couple from our church over. We had a little party with Christmas music playing in the background.

As for today, no Black Friday for us. No malls, no shopping centers… No stores that open at the ridiculous hours of 3 and 4 a.m.! Just downtown Petersburg. I might wander down there later. We’ll see. I have a sermon to prepare.