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| Let the Hunger Games Begin |
On Thanksgiving day, at a couple of minutes before 1:00 PM, with great fanfare our granddaughter Emma rhythmically pounded her tom-tom drum as she chanted along with the beat. "Come to the Feast! Come to the Feast!"
Emma had been preparing for this performance for several days, constructing her drum at St. Paul's Christian Day School and then rehearsing with her pre-school class and also at home. She also learned a sweet Thanksgiving prayer she recited immediately before our meal.
Weeks earlier, Emma and her mommy Gina had sent out invitations announcing the 1:00 PM dinner time, and the meal began on schedule.
To make the deadline, working mom Gina pre-ordered groceries for delivery on the morning before Thanksgiving, at which time with steady assistance from her sister Amy and occasional helping hands from others, including your humble correspondent, she began following her carefully prepared list of tasks.
Even Emma got into the meal preparations by making, with hands on direction her Nagy Ria, pilgrim hat desserts out of marshmallows dipped in melted semi-sweet chocolate chips attached attached to chocolate cookies.
Mostly, Emma worked on fesive craft decorations with her grandmothers Ria and Julie.
For the first time in four years, Julie and I were with all three of our children, our granddaughter Emma and Gina's husband Laszlo.
My sister Darlene, her husband Brooks and their son BG3, plus their Pomeranian Teddy, all flew in from California too, making it the first big Thanksgiving with all of us together in twelve years or so. Laszlo's brother Szilard also attended Thanksgiving dinner along with their mother Ria, who lives with them, but her husband Z had to take a holiday shift at work.
Gina and Amy have worked together on Thanksgiving meals since Amy moved east to attend UConn in 2009, and several holidays of practices resulted in an impressive feast indeed.
Gina, an epidemiologist by profession, followed a scientific method of pre-planned steps with carefully selected culinary experiments gleaned over the years, because unlike the rest of this blog, Thanksgiving Dinner is not Quick-Clean Cuisine.
No indeed.
This was a time-consuming, complicated-recipes, follow-the-list-or-get-hopelessly-lost, mess-up-as-many-pots-pans-and-bowls-as-necessary delicious meal for a dozen people who had been salivating for weeks.
Step by step, the meal preparation unfolded, and Gina never once stopped smiling, obviously happy to be at the task.
Believing there's never enough stuffing for leftovers despite usually making a double recipe, Gina decided to make a quadruple batch of the turkey day favorite that required two enormous mixing bowls plus a large aluminum tray that would normally be used for cooking a turkey. I'm proud to say that I did a lot of stirring on that dish, because stuffing again ruled as one of the stars of the meal.
Where did she discover this crowd-pleasing recipe? For the answer, we must look 2,869.3 miles to the west, to Bothell, Washington, in the greater Seattle area. While attending graduate school at the University of Washington, Gina enjoyed several Thanksgiving dinners at the home of her Bothell-based Aunt Cheryl (Julie's sister). With four large onions, 40 ounces of Spinach and lots of fresh herbs to mix with 24 ounces of cornbread, it was more like a vegetable dish than a starch, but the taste was all stuffing stuffed with delicious stuff, the kind of stuff of which stuffing magic is made.
I also helped peel, cut and mash potatoes under the direction of Gina, although I have to say that Amy actually did a lot of the heavy mashing before I wandered back into the kitchen from my other duties as native American chief.
If you're like me, you think stuffing and mashed potatoes are always the highlights of Thanksgiving dinner, but Gina would not stop there.
Oh no! Not for one moment
She also made a turkey.
Not exactly a daring choice on Thanksgiving, but Gina also brought that to another level.
She started by brining the turkey the night before in a special brining recipe she apparently got from "Christy M" and some even more anonymous person (possibly forced to enter witness protection because this is such a killer recipe). Gina elevated the turkey on a rack inside the pan (as I said, she took it to another level, quite literally) so that it didn't soak in its own juice like most turkeys do.
Surprisingly, when Gina took the turkey out of the oven, drippings were less abundant than usual, causing concern that there may not be enough drippings to moisten the huge batch of suffing. Somehow, she figured out a solution involving broth of some turkey part boiling on the stove top, and Ria even managed to harvest enough drippings to make some delicious gravy.
Between the brining and the rack, the turkey browned perfectly with all the juices sealed in. It cooked so evenly and retained so much moisture that it was hard to tell the white meat from dark meat. It was all delicious.
While the turkey cooked, Emma managed to get Laszlo, Jay and the biggest kid of all (me) out of the house to do some sledding on fresh snow in the back yard, helping us all to build up our appetites, just in case the amazing aromas hadn't already worked their magic.
Oh, and by the way, we did have vegetable side dishes, too. Sweet peas with pearl onions as well as a salad of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers were tasty. Ria also made her secret cranberry sauce, which includes cranberries, mandarin oranges and walnuts.
For dessert, we each had one of those delicious pilgrim hats, but I'd have to say the biggest hit of all was Gramma Mary's Fruit Cake, which Gina and Amy have been churning out as Christmas presents for several years. I think among us we ate about a half dozen fruit cakes. Yes, they're that good, and Gina has asked me to post the recipe here so she can always find it easily. (That's a preview of coming attractions.)
Was it quick? Not at all. Was it easy to clean? No, it made an enormous mess of the kitchen, sometimes using up bowls just to break down the enormous quantities into easier to manage sizes. Once, there was even an incident where the turkey tried to make a run for it during the prep stage, spilling molasses brine on the floor.
But most importantly, was it cuisine? Definitely! It was one of the best Thanksgiving dinners ever.
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Before all the dishes had been washed, the Christmas Season kicked off in New City. Upon arrival in New City, Nana had pulled out some traditional games given a new spin with Disney's "Frozen" characters. Darlene and Brooks arrived with a new knit outfit for Emma. Emma's Uncle Szilard, who lives in New York, arrived at the Feast with a "Frozen" dinner plate for her.
Uncle Jay waited until Friday to give Emma the Nerf bow and arrow in a huge gift bag he'd brought with him when he arrived at 3 AM on Thanksgiving morning, but I believe Christmas crafts had already started Thanksgiving afternoon.
And while preparing the feast itself is time consuming and complicated, diverse leftovers can lead to many easy-to-assemble creative dishes while the festivities continue.
