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.

BLTs and lunches

I haven't done much cooking lately. Well, that's not true, it just for some reason feels like I haven't.

Saturday night I was up until 2 making a corn salad, green beans w/ bacon, and corn muffins. The corn muffins were quite tasty and very corny (I put them in the fridge to prevent spoiling like happened with my last uber-moist cornbread), the green beans were, well, probably underdone (also my virtually brand new big wide deep frying pan has a dent in it! what the fuck!), and the corn salad I didn't end up trying. Alex didn't either, when I took it out of the fridge in the morning he went "ew." It had roma tomato, corn, jalapeno, roasted orange and green bell peppers, shallot, and a lime dressing.

Also that night I threw together beef fajitas-out-of-a-bag, which were quite underwhelming.

Travel was moderately acceptable for the picnic (the reason I did all that cooking), although about 1/3 of the muffins got smushed cause stupid me just tossed them in a ziploc bag and then set the green beans on top of them, and nobody ate the muffins because the fried chicken Dad bought came with biscuits. Also ants got everywhere, guh.

Beyond that I haven't done much in the way of cooking. I attempted to assemble a small bento for my 6 PM Monday class, since it's 3 hours long and I assumed there'd be a 15-min break or something, but all we got was a 5-minute break, which is not nearly long enough to eat a muffin, grapes and some cherry tomatoes, especially when eating is not allowed in the classroom.

Yesterday for lunch I took leftover udon noodles with a muffin and some deli turkey, and finished off the udon for dinner. Today I took deli turkey with olive oil-garlic whole wheat penne. Not too exciting. I haven't felt like cooking, mostly because the sink is overflowing with dirty dishes and it's intimidating, to be honest.

But tonight I knew we had bacon and romaine and fresh tomatoes we needed to use before they went bad, so I stopped at the grocery store on my way home and picked up a loaf of bread for BLTS. ...and a bag of mallowcreme pumpkins, and a few boxes of organic soup (butternut squash, sweet corn, and vichysoisse), and a box of brown rice, and a pack of fresh 4-cheese ravioli. I'm a terrible person.

The BLTs were good by the way.

Oh and Alex's work is having another chili cook-off next Wednesday, which I will of course be making my world-famous chili for, since I have an imaginary title to defend. (I didn't even place last time, but my chili got eaten way more than the winners' chilis so I figure I won the People's Choice Award)