How was your Thanksgiving? I have to say that this was one of the nicest I can remember in an unbroken string of enjoyable holidays. We had our 15 people who ate, played games, talked, watched college football, and hung around for a long time. That’s always my yardstick for measuring how successful a party is.
But since I’ve been writing about the food, I’m going to tell you how that part went. Also, if you don’t particularly care about my results, at least scroll down and read about the two things you shouldn’t do when cooking a turkey. As I said in an earlier post, this is a bit late for Thanksgiving but you may end up having a turkey for Christmas too. (I’m hoping to be asked to do some cooking for that meal, too.)
Parsley-Pecorino Biscuits: N/A. I didn’t make them. This comment from Smitten Kitchen (where I’d found the recipe in the first place) says it all:
I did a very beautiful, highly recommended thing: I nixed a few things on the planned menu and swapped more complicated ones for simpler recipes with shorter ingredient lists but high reward.
Which leads to:
Crispy Sweet Potato Roast: Incomplete. I did not do what I had planned, which was to make the original recipe even more complicated by including slices of apple in between the sweet potato slices along with the shallots. And my sweet potatoes were too fat to fit into the food processor tube, so I ended up cutting them in half and putting them in sideways, producing a mix of different-sized slices that were impossible to arrange in the lovely spiral the recipe specified. But I was fast running out of time anyway, so I just splodged on some butter, drizzled on some cider syrup, and called it a day. They were delicious.
Turkey: C+
I overcooked both the whole turkey and the turkey breast. I made way too much of an allowance for the fact that my whole turkey was about two pounds heavier than the recipe’s guideline. I should have listened to Melissa! It was perfectly edible but not the wowzer that I had hoped for. (I think you should be able to access at least the video even if you don’t have a NYT subscription.)
Mashed Potatoes: A-
They were very, very good—I’m only marking them off a little because I didn’t do all the steps the recipe called for. And I didn’t really make them ahead because, as already noted above, I was running out of time. I don’t think I’ll bother buying expensive mascarpone cheese next time, as it’s so similar to cream cheese. And I didn’t do the browned butter, an ingredient that always makes me a little nervous anyway because the line between browned and burned is so thin.
Gravy: B
I’m not linking to a recipe for this, as it was very much thrown together at the last minute. I left in the onions that had been roasting with the turkey. (Sorry, Gideon! My son hates onions.) It tasted fine, but it wasn’t very turkey-ish. Oh well.
Again, a small reduction in the grade b/c I didn’t do the recipe quite as specified. You’re supposed to have the topping be a half-and-half mixture of buttered bread crumbs and French-fried onions, but (this seems to be a theme) time was a-hastenin’ on. I just dumped on the onions and shoved it in the oven.
Stuffing: A
Great stuff, and I had done most of the prep ahead of time. My hot Italian sausage was really hot. But no one seemed to mind.
Martha Stewart’s Cranberry Upside-Down Cake: A
The only reason this isn’t an A+ is that I punctured the foil lining of the springform pan I used and some of the cranberry syrup leaked out, incidentally making it necessary for me at some point to clean my pizza stone. Honestly! What a mess! But the cake is absolutely scrumptious. Jim said he really wanted a third piece. I had a piece for breakfast this morning since I didn’t eat any last night.
Melissa Clark’s Brandied Butternut Squash Pie: A++++
Oh m-a-a-a-n! Every single piece disappeared. The filling and the crust were both fab-u-lo-so. I used Sally’s Baking Addiction piecrust recipe but followed Melissa’s directions on blind-baking it, not only baking it with the foil lining and the pie weights but also removing those items and continuing to bake the crust for another 5-6 minutes until it was all light brown. Then I put a pie shield over the edge after I filled it so that it wouldn’t get too brown. Even after the pie had chilled several hours the crust, even on the bottom, was flaky and crunchy. I always remember the pumpkin pie of my childhood as having a basically unbaked bottom crust that you just sort of put up with. And I never really liked the filling all that much. This was just incredible. The brandy gave it a nice little kick. Everyone l-o-o-o-ved it. I’m very tempted to make another one before Christmas, but I’ve committed myself to going back to my no-sugar rule until Christmas dinner. Maybe I can make it then.
Two big mistaken ideas out there in recipes, by the way, that you should totally trash:
- Trussing the turkey, meaning that you tie the ends of the drumsticks together with twine and often then pass the twine around the bird, causing it to have a more compact shape. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s wrong for a chicken, and it’s even more wrong for a turkey. The idea behind trussing is that since you’re making the bird into a more symmetrical shape it will cook more evenly, when in reality you’re making the problem worse. Now you have the legs squished up against the breast meat, and in order to get that 170 or so temp in the thigh area in between you have to overcook the breast. I see these cooking shows all over the place where they temp the trussed thigh and it’s 170 and they temp the breast and it’s 150. There’s no way that can happen! So don’t do that! (And many turkeys come with a plastic gizmo already holding the legs together, which would make it almost impossible to stuff the turkey, should you be so inclined. I don’t get it. Just use shears to cut that off.) I used the “splayed” approach for my dinner this year, but that’s sort of a halfway point to the real deal of “spatchcocking,” which is a little more work but has so many advantages that I’m going to do that from now on. You have to cut out the backbone of the turkey and then flatten it out, which is kind of a pain, but then, as they say, you’re golden. Here’s a great post on this whole idea, with videos on how to do the surgery both before and after the roasting: “How to Cook a Spatchcocked Turkey: The Fastest, Easiest Thanksgiving Turkey“
- PUTTING COLD STUFFING INTO THE TURKEY. No, no, no! Even Jacques Pepin said this once on a show. NO!!!! This makes no sense. If you stuff your turkey (which you won’t if you do the spatchcocking, but you can still have dressing underneath it and so you should still pay attention to my ranting and raving here), and the stuffing is cold, then you have to cook the turkey longer than normal because the center of the stuffing is supposed to get to 160-165 in order to be safe to eat. So then we’re right back to the dried-out breast meat problem, which will have to be much hotter than that. I was so pleased to see an article this year that said the sensible thing, which is to have your stuffing warm or hot before your stuff it into the bird. See Myth #2 in the article: “Five Myths about Turkey“
So that’s it for this year. It’s always so sad to recognize that Thanksgiving is over!