Thxgvg

Since I guess we don't use vowels anymore.

I didn't think it would be the case, but I spent six hours cooking today.  I had hoped that doing prep work on Tuesday and Wednesday would have saved me time. Nope.  In addition, my sink...erator? The grindy guy in the sink that sucks at grinding stuff. Mine sucks at grinding stuff, and I think I clogged my kitchen sink. So no sink, no dishwasher, no laundry until I get the maintenance guy to come. Blah.

Anyway, food:

• Turkey, duh. Alton Brown's "Romancing the Bird" recipe, but the original one, where we make a cool-ass triangular foil turkey bra to keep the cooking even.
• Mashed potatoes. I tried to use Giada diLaurentis's recipe, where you bake the potatoes after mashing and mixing with pancetta and cheese. It's a bit dry, probably since I tend to make my mashed potatoes dry-ish.
• Green Bean Casserole. This one I made with my own cream of mushroom soup, but I wasn't convinced I liked that soup when I made it. It carries over the "hrm...I'm not sure I like this" to the casserole.
• Stuffing. These were still too moist, and the flavors didn't blend as much as I'd hoped.
• Stuffed mushrooms: I just blitzed the stems, some shallot and garlic, and more of the pancetta, and crammed it in the biggest shrooms I had. Bake bake bake, and they worked pretty well. I might pre-cook the stuffing next time I try these.
• Gravy. I now fully understand how gravy production works, and it is so painfully obvious, I wonder why I ever bothered with added stock and crap like that. Pull turkey, transfer to resting dish, pour liquids into gravy separator, let separate, dump broth to bowl, add fat to pan, add flour to make roux, when thick, reincorporate broth. It needed nothing, and I think if I had just made turkey, this gravy, and some bread, I would have been perfectly happy with my meal.
• Bread. So, this is where things started falling apart today.  I was originally going to make sage bread, but didn't feel like getting up this morning when I needed to to make the dough. I justified this by claiming I'd make popovers. But popovers require a muffin tin, and my only one was being used to make stuffin' muffins. My fallback was to just rip off a piece of the Hawaiian bread I had in the fridge. Good enough, and lazy.

I'm not super happy with the sides this year, which is kind of unfortunate, since I spent most of the time working on those. I still have an apple pie, which I plan on having with a bit of sharp cheddar in a few hours, when I start feeling less like I'm about to explode.