Thanksgiving 2007: Night Before

Alex's parents are coming over for Thanksgiving tomorrow and I got some of my cooking out of the way tonight.

The menu is:

Roast Goose with Caramelized Apples
Roasted Autumn Vegetables
Spiced Carrots
Creamed Corn Gratin with Fried Onions
Cranberry Sauce with Cherries and Cloves
Mashed Potatoes
Italian bread
Cabernet sauvignon
Salad (from a bag, blah. Was going to do a bacon-endive-Stilton salad but decided against it at the last minute)

Also Alex's mom is bringing glazed sweet potatoes, which kind of sucks because I have sweet potatoes in my roasted veg and nobody told me about this until AFTER purchases had been made. Oh well.

So tonight I did the cranberry sauce (smelled spectacular), and made the topping and content of the corn gratin (but did not bake, also smelled spectacular). Tomorrow I do goose, apples, roasted veg, and carrots.

I must say, it's really relaxing and almost sort of cathartic to do night-before prep with no real time frame or need to hurry. Just kind of casually loping along, none of my frantic "OH GOD WHAT NEXT AHHHH" thing. And I completely lucked out and EVERYTHING I'm baking tomorrow cooks at 350. So roasted veg go in first, when they come out goose goes in, when I flip it I add a pan of apples, then I put the corn in on a lower level, and then I put the topping on the corn right about the time the goose gets done so I can move the corn up to a higher level, and also then I put the roast veg back in to reheat. Carrots are stovetop and cranberry sauce is in fridge already (hopefully becoming nice and gelatinous... I didn't put it in the fridge immediately because the glass bowl was so hot I was worried that a drastic temperature change would make the bowl shatter, and so I HOPE when I wake up tomorrow morning I will have a nice jellied bowl of delicious fragrant [well probably not anymore but oh well] cranberries).

And this gives me a bit of time to sleep in in the morning, because I have presently been awake for 20 solid hours and while I'm not SLEEPY (for now, and I have been quite sleepy earlier in the day), I'm pretty damn worn out.

It's really good to get shit done ahead of time though.