Thanksgiving

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Two consecutive days of feasting - that's what Thanksgiving was this year in Hammerland. Thursday we had our feast at home with Cherie's mom, Peter and Katherine joining us. On Friday, we headed up to Sebastapol to do it all over again at my sister's house with Ginny, Kelly, Jessie and cousin John. John came over the Sierras from Carson City to join us, which was a real treat.

For the Thursday feast, Cherie was master chef and wisely took a cue from a caterer friend (shout out to Phoebe!) and decided to make two 12 lb. birds instead of one monster bird. This provided several advantages:

• You could do one bird the day before, including gravy. This allowed for plenty of meat prepared ahead of time and gravy AND the iconic bird right out of the oven - all without the frenzy of trying to pull everything together at the last minute.
• More dark meat.
• Plenty of leftovers for everyone.
• A 12 lb turkey cooks in an hour and forty five minutes!

This was a brilliant plan and made the whole preparation and clean-up a good deal easier.

Cherie also decided to try a couple of new dishes this year. The first was braised cipollini onions with balsamic vinegar. This dish was amazing! We'd gotten a bunch of these lovely, incredibly sweet cipollinis from Two Small Farms (our weekly "big box of produce") and the dish was really, really good. The second dish was butternut squash with tangerine and sage glaze - this was a bit of a disappointment. We're such big fans of butternut squash and tangerines, we had high expectations. Unfortunately, the dish was too subtle; too lacking in flavor to stand-up to all the other thanksgiving flavors.

Cherie's take on the ol' standard "green beans almondine" was to use a combination of haricot verts and wax beans that were jazzed up with some pomegranate seeds. Of course, Cherie's standard sausage and stage dressing accompanied the brined turkey which had been stuffed with apples and lovingly painted with the calvados and soy application we've come to love. Incredible gravy adorned mashed potatoes that proved the value of using a ricer! Katherine made a pecan pie and Merle made a pumpkin pie. We served a lovely Lougner Cremant d'Alsace Brut - a French sparkling wine made with Pinot Noir grapes. Lovely and very dry...perhaps a bit too dry to standup to freshly made cranberry sauce. I also bought a Coppo Brachetto d'Acqui (thank Nick!) to accompany us for dessert, but by then we'd had entirely too much consumption and the Brachetto lives to be enjoyed another day.

Zack sang for his supper by singing a song he and his class performed at his school's Thanksgiving event. And then we opened birthday gifts for Cherie, Peter and Katherine, all of whom have birthdays this week. Peter bellied up to the sink to wash dishes with Cherie while Katherine and I attended to the kids who'd really been good about not being the center of attention all day. Then, we retired to enjoy some fine single malt scotches that Peter had brought to enjoy: a 25 year old Talisker, a 10 year old Bruichladdich and an 18 year old Dalimore. Mmmmm mmmm....

Posted by Tom Hammer on November 24, 2007 3:45 PM | Permalink