Thanksgiving Replay

Even though we  have made the full transition to Christmas time in our house, I thought I would take a few moments to look back at Thanksgiving. Here is the completely, outrageously huge turkey. Sure, 18lbs for 6 people is a little overboard, but that's what Thanksgiving is all about. (Writing this reminds me that I have a huge turkey carcass in my refrigerator that needs to be made in to turkey stock. Yikes.) The bird was delicious. I pretty much followed Tom Collichio's Herb Butter Turkey recipe that I saw on Epicurious. The basic idea is to slather the turkey with herb butter, baste with stock and add butter to the pan as the turkey cooks. The best idea in this recipe was to reserve about 2 tbsp of the herb butter to add to the gravy makings. This was by far the best gravy I have ever made and I credit it all to the copious amounts of butter.

Dave's dinner plate. Note the precise organization.

The other greatest hit of our meal was the sweet potatoes. For years, I have been trying to recreate the sweet potatoes my stepmother made. Her dish was like a sweet potato souffle, but not super fluffy. The best part was the brown sugar crumble that topped her sweet taters. After reading a ton of recipes, I basically decided to wing it. I cooked up about 4 lbs of sweet potatoes the night before. Thanksgiving morning, I mashed the potatoes up with 2 beaten eggs, 1/4 cup butter, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 cup soy milk (we had a dairy allergic guest at our dinner) and spiced it up with cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice. I made a struesel topping using 1/2 cup flour, 1 cup brown sugar, 1 cup chopped pecans and 1/2 cup butter. (This is pretty much from Pioneer Woman's sweet potato recipe.) This made way too much streusel, but it was really delicious. I just topped off the mashed potatoes, baked them at 375 for about 30 minutes while the turkey was resting. They were great.

These are what my skillet rolls looked like. Almost as pretty as PW's.

In addition to the turkey and sweet potatoes, we had green beans, regular mashed potatoes, confetti Brussels sprouts (a recipe from Dinner a Love Story), skillet rolls, and of course assorted sauces and gravies. It was quite a feast.







 The highpoint of the meal, though, was certainly dessert. Dave made a fabulous pumpkin pie from a Paula Deen recipe. And I made a pretty mediocre apple pie from a Mario Battali recipe I found in New York Magazine. Dave's pie was so delicious and was eaten amidst endless laughter as Jamie yelled, "pumpone pie!" That's toddler for, "Give me pumpkin pie!" It might be the cutest thing ever. And, yes, we spent the rest of the weekend asking Jamie, "Do you like pie?" To which he obligingly shouted, "Pumpone pie!"