Friday
Nov252011
Shout Out: Thanksgiving Highs & Lows
CTbites Team
Thanksgiving has come and gone for most and while I'm thankful for many things, I am most grateful that A) My husband did all the cooking B) We didn't burn down the house while deep frying the Thanksgiving turkey.
As we all recover from the meal of meals...let us know...
What was your tastiest Thanksgiving dish?
What was the worst dish in your Thanksgiving lineup?
1 lucky commenter will get an early holiday gift & WIN a CTbites mug!!
Reader Comments (19)
My parent's host Thanksgiving each year and my Mother is a phenomenal cook. Some favorite dishes included the herb roasted turkey, penne alla vodka, chestnut, sausage stuffing, sweet potatoes and string beans.
Favorite desserts included pecan pie with bourbon and orange zest, chocolate walnut cake, and coconut pie.
If I had to pick the worst dish, I guess it would be the dinner rolls. They were store bought.
Clementine & salt rubbed turkey was my high. Low was a slightly bland apple pie. You can't have everything.
Grilled rockfish was tops at Mad Hatters in Hamilton Bermuda
Rum cake dessert at the hotel was unexpectedly non moist.
Both a respite from gobbllers and pumpkin fight
I shopped Sport Hill Farm in Easton for all veggies and picked up 4 shapely butternut squash without knowing what the plan was. Found a recipe for butternut squash, pecans and currants, adapted from BALABOOSTA in NYC. With roasted garlic, champagne vinegar and thyme, this dish was the bright spot on the table. DELICIOUS!
We had a couple of chickens from the Saugatuck Craft Butchery. They were absolutely amazing. So flavorful and juicy! That had to be the best dish.
I think our worst dish was probably the chorizo stuffing. It was a last minute idea and it turned out to be too salty. All in all, everything was pretty damn delicious, though.
I've never liked pumpkin pie. But this year a pumpkin grew all on its own in my garden. We roasted it and filled the freezer with many containers. This Thanksgiving I made my first pumpkin pie. I based it on a recipe in Marion Cunningham's Fannie Farmer Baking cookbook, but I replaced the brown sugar with Red Bee honey, and instead of all the traditional spices I used a little fresh ginger and cardomom seeds. It was delicious. I wouldn't say I like all pumpkin pie, but I loved this one.
This was the first year my husband and I hosted Thanksgiving. It was a bit chaotic but we got it done!
The best dish? The turkey! I'd never roasted a turkey before yesterday. Brine, fresh herbs, an onion, halved garlic bulb and a quartered lemon in the cavity -- a bit of grapeseed oil on the skin w/ some pepper & fresh herbs, basted every 45 mins -- pulled from the oven when the thermometer reached 160*... It was tasty! It also looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting!
The worst? I'd have to say the one dish that never made it to the table! Goat cheese stuffed figs wrapped in prosciutto and drizzled w/ honey. My husband got caught upstairs talking to family after he'd put them in the oven to reheat. I completely forgot that he'd put them in. Needless to say, it was the smell of burning honey that reminded me!
I recently tested negative (meaning non-allergic) for chestnuts after 7 years of missing this great flavor. So my favorite dish was my wife’s delicious chestnut stuffing. And to complement this great dish (both the wife :-) and the stuffing) was a delicious D’Artagnan Organic turkey. Then I followed Ruhlman’s simple gravy recipe with sage, salt, pepper and just a dash or white wine vinegar (yup). It was a great day with family and friends and great food. Oh yeah, Mother in law brought four flavors of ice cream from Rich’s Farm, I think the best ice cream in the state.
I'm taking the easy way out. The best dish was the sandwich I just made consisting of slivers of turkey, sausage stuffing, garlicky mashed potatoes, rosemary cranberry sauce and a smear of triple cream cheese on a toasted and flaky bakery roll. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Smoked seasoned pork belly for 1 hour, then roasted for another. With homemade cinnamon applesauce and cranberry sauce.
I always try at least one new side dish at Thanksgiving so there is always something new among the old favorites. After purchasing some bourbon at Saugatuck Grain & Grape this past week, I decided to include bourbon glazed sweet potatoes to this year's feast. It was amazingly simple yet really flavorful. It was also a favorite since there were no leftovers!
This year was superb for us! We had a fresh turkey with all the fixings, along with wonderful homemade stuffing, sweet potato's , broccoli and cheese casarole, my favorite...spinach & cheese pie (yum!)... noodle pudding, our traditional cranberry jello mold, a wonderful brisket/w short ribs for our non turkey eaters! I really can't say anything came out bad this year! YEAH!!! For dessert, we had blueberry, cherry and pecan pie. ( plus many assorted cookies & pastry's for the kids! ) Very awesome cooking this year!
We spent our Thanksgiving with the Baltimore elite. Oh dear (pinky raised) The Thanksgiving buffet at the hotel was okay - the ham was less than stellar, smothered in yellow mustard...really? BUT we sat in a luxury box later that day at the Ravens game that was catered by Ruth's Chris...! Lumps of crabmeat, jumbo shrimp, filet on the grill. The football game was boring as all hell, but the food was outstanding. Best in the NFL, from what they told me :)
My husband & I each cook a turkey; mine is a traditional bird in the oven. My husband cooks his turkey on the rotisserie, basting it will holding his favorite IPA beer. Both birds always taste awesome, but his always looks "Bon Appetit: cover ready! I mixed it up this year and put my fresh turkey in a cider brine mixture. The skin came out as beautiful as the rotisserie version (caramel color, crispy skin) and it was very flavorful and moist. Both birds were awesome and all the side dishes were classics. The homemade pecan pie flopped, not once but twice this year; cannot figure out what happened with the homemade crust. It looked awful but it did taste scrumptious!.
A two- way tie for Best: Lobster Risotto or Diver Scallops with Black Truffles Encroute at Le Cirque in NYC.
Worst: My first big family dinner at my new home- my oven door fell off the night before Thanksgiving with a pie in the oven!
It was the best of times it was the worst of times, it was Thanksgiving 2011.
My wife and I had shopped for weeks gathering the ingredients for a wonderful Thanksgiving feast. Relatives with whom my wife had not shared Thanksgiving in more than 25 years were coming from out of town. On Wednesday we went into high gear. I did the scut work and my wife cooked and baked. Two large casseroles of dressing were baked. Two pecan pies, one regular and one chocolate bourbon had been baked. A 4 quart tiramisu had been made and put to cool. Vegetables had been prepped and refrigerated for roasting on Thursday morning. My wife had made 4 pounds of chopped calves and chicken liver pate for appetizers, as well as cooking and decorating shrimp platters. A chocolate decadence cake was cooling in the fridge. Wednesday evening, two 8 pound hotel style turkey breasts had been roasted, they would be sliced in the morning and heated in gravy. The giblets were put aside to make gravy, along with the drippings from the large bird that would be roasted Thanksgiving morning.
All was put away in the Sub Zero by 11:30 PM and we went to sleep very tired and knowing that we had to be up at 5:30 AM to get the 22 pound bird into the oven. I awakened at 5:20 and headed to the kitchen. I opened the Refrigerator door and something didn’t seem right. The temperature display for freezer read zero, while the display for the refrigerator read 70 degrees (our Sub Zero has separate compressors for freezer and refrigerator). Everything was warm to the touch. My wife arrived in the kitchen to find me sitting at the island shell shocked. In response to her “what’s wrong?” all I could reply was that “we have a problem.” Everything had to be thrown out, not just the items that had been prepared, but all the cream, milk, eggs, butter, bottled dressings and other everyday grocery items that were in the fridge along with the uncooked bird.
What to do? Guests were arriving at 2PM for a holiday meal. We were too tired to start a Thanksgiving meal from scratch, and even if all the ingredients could be gathered it could not be ready on time. There was no way we could be assured of a restaurant reservation for 20 with no notice on a holiday, it was far too early to start making calls.
I reminded my wife, that as much as I disagreed with retailers being open on holidays, Stop and Shop would be open at 7AM. We quickly devised a non-Turkey menu and showered and dressed. At 7:15 we were making our way through the empty aisles of Stop and Shop. Assorted cheeses and crackers were picked to accompanying drinks. We chose 4 pounds of jumbo shrimp and horseradish to make cocktail sauce. The makings of a large salad were chosen as well. We chose fresh gnocchi and the makings of an Alfredo sauce for one main course and onions and peppers and ground sirloin to make a meat sauce for fettuccine. Fresh Italian bread was coming out of the ovens and loaves were chosen to make garlic bread. We determined that the pecan pies and chocolate decadence cake had survived, but gathered fresh fruit, and whipping cream to finish desserts. Butter, creamers, juices and condiments were purchased as well.
Thirty minutes and $250 later we were out the door and on the way home to start all over preparing a non-traditional Thanksgiving feast. We walked in the house and the Sub Zero was working perfectly. I had reset the temp to 38 and it had reached that setting. What caused the glitch? We have no idea and it’s still working fine. We just weren’t meant to eat turkey this Thanksgiving.
What was the best dish this year? -The fresh gnocchi in Alfredo sauce, into which I cut some jumbo shrimp.
What was the worst dish? The homemade cranberry sauce my sister-in-law brought. It not only was bad, but it didn’t go with pasta and sauce. Sister-in-law insisted on eating it anyway.
At the end of the day, everyone was thankful for the chance to be together, the great weather and tasty nontraditional Thanksgiving food, except the sister-in-law who felt cheated out of a turkey dinner. I guess one turkey deserves another.
@Bagelman
Welcome to CTBites, much better than you know where. Glad that you joined in the discussion and hope to catch up with you.
I see you did find the chocolate and glad the cake survived the SZ disaster. And a true believer rallies and it looks like you did excellently.
Drop me a line at jfoodctbites@gmail.com to catch up.
Stopped by our friends' house after our family meal. Their stuffing was of the cornbread variety, with spicy chorizo and crawfish tails. It was all I could do not to bury my face in the entire bowl.
MY BEST SIDE TO DATE......SPIKED SWEET POTATO SOUFFLE...MADE WITH TUACA an Italian liqour with hints of vanillia, caramel and orange...whipped with sweet cream butter and brown sugar..baked to perferction with hand sliced marshmellos for the perfect amoun of gooieness!