Cooking with Kid(s)

I enjoyed having my nieces in town for Thanksgiving. I think the best part
(other than the Raggedy costume)
was the quality time I spent with Adele in the kitchen on Friday! (Making food that was homemade, but full of refined flour and white sugar - and food coloring! - not exactly Slow Food or Local Food or Real Food.)

I posted earlier about trying to figure out what to serve for breakfast to my niece that does not include eggs, oatmeal, or peanuts. My sister decided on pull-aparts - and actually got up early in the morning to make the dough, so it had plenty of time to rise.

Okay, so breakfast still wasn't ready until 10:30, and I didn't get any pictures of the process, but Adele did a great job helping me put little balls of dough rolled in butter and cinnamon sugar in my Bundt pan.

She's two, so I was afraid she'd pile all the dough on one side of the pan. Actually, she did a great job of putting the balls around the pan. When she had filled one layer of dough about halfway around the pan, she looked at her handiwork and exclaimed (I am not making this up), "oh look, it's a perfect rainbow." She was right. The balls of (brownish) dough in a semi-circle were indeed a perfect rainbow shape. She continued on with her work, and eventually the dough made a perfect circle. After the first layer, I think she got a little bit bored, and she started just throwing the dough anywhere. But it only took a little bit of rearranging before the finished product was set on top of the oven to rise again. The rolls were pretty good, although they could have had more of the butter/sugar mixture!

Later in the day I asked Adele if she wanted to make cookies with me. She and her mom do cooking "projects" at home sometimes, and she really seems to like them. Plus, Portage is a nice town but it isn't the most exciting place for two-year-olds. (We don't even have an art desk.) I got out my grandpa's Crisp Cookie recipe that my aunt gave me a few years ago, when I knew I wouldn't make it all the way to WI (from Kentucky) for Christmas, but didn't want to miss out on Grandpa's cookies. (Or the decorating that goes with it.)

Michael and I had (a little too much?) fun decorating the crisp cookies last year!
Adele helped me pick out good cookie cutters (she named the shapes as I held them up - if she didn't know what the shape was supposed to be, we didn't use that one)
hmm . . . what could this be?

She was very interested in sprinkling flour on the dough mat
and she even helped roll out the dough.
The cookies turned out pretty well by my standards - none of them were burned or undercooked, and only a few were smashed/broken.
With three pans and lots of helpers (and photographers) the job went quickly, even if it was very hot in the kitchen! Adele took a nap while the cookies cooled.

Adele sampled the cookies after her nap.
Oliver and Loki tried to convince Adele to share with them (but she didn't)
Finally, we were ready to decorate! (Aunt Dee Dee made a little mistake about what time the parade was supposed to be on Friday night - I had it in my head all day that the parade was at 5:00 but our internet was down, so I had no way of verifying this (without going downtown to look at the signs). Around 4:45 as we were piling on winter gear to go to the parade, I checked the internet again and it was working - which was a good thing because the parade was not until 6:00.) So we used the extra time to decorate the cookies.

Adele was a very good sport about wearing a kitchen towel as her "apron."
Mommy showed her how to do one, and then Adele decorated like a pro.
Okay, so she got a little bit messy . . . that's what the newspaper was for!
What's wrong with this cookie, MeMaw?He has an owie knee, just like BaPa!
I sent the decorated cookies home with them.
I wonder how long they lasted.

Success!

Thursday morning started bright and early, as I threw together a loaf of bread in the bread maker, just in case someone needed a sandwich. After showering and taking care of the dog, I peeled the potatoes, losing two fingernails and a little skin in the process - but didn't have to worry about keeping my nails nice for a wedding in two days, so I really didn't care. The potatoes soaked for four or five hours to leech some of the potassium out of them, making them healthier for my dad. In an ideal world, I would have kept some of the peels in the potatoes, but my understanding is that a lot of potassium (which is healthy for many people but doesn't mix well with certain medications) is in the peel, so down the disposal they went. I am trying to be good about keeping food scraps, but I've never hosted a big meal like this before (once I had my parents and sister up for a meal and that was a really big deal) so I was trying to keep things simple.

I chopped carrots, celery, and onions to roast the turkey on. I had six carrots from the farmers' market two Saturdays ago, and Michael picked up some celery at the grocery store. The onions are locals that have been hanging out in my kitchen for a couple of weeks.
The 16.5 lb turkey came fresh on Tuesday from a farm in southern WI.


I stuffed it with more celery and carrots, to make it nice and juicy.
I watched a show on the Food Network where the chef soaked a cheesecloth in butter then laid it over the turkey during the roasting process. My mom had heard about this technique from a friend, so I decided to give it a try. Mmm . . . a butter soaked blanket.
I had intended to get the turkey in the oven at 10:00, so I was pretty happy that I got the bird in at about 10:20. I had left plenty of time to get the bird out and the other dishes cooked before we ate at 3:00, so a 20 minute late start was nothing to be worried about.
Then I frantically started to think about appetizers, after Michael's mom and step-dad, and my little sister, my twin and her family arrived. We had WI cheese (of course), Ritz crackers (one of the few processed foods), homemade pickles, and a little plate of cream cheese topped with apple butter, pumpkin butter, and cranberry preserves. My mother-in-law and my little sister were kind enough to follow my uncertain instructions and put it together for me. The pumpkin butter was a big hit. Sorry I don't have a better picture of it - I had delegated the picture-taking at this point! My sister made a dish like this with cranberry chutney once upon a Thanksgiving, and I was inspired as a way to use up some of my pumpkin butter. My mom had the idea of serving with with bagel chips - which they do not sell in Portage, apparently. So my mom picked some up . . . and was the last person to arrive. In the meantime, my mother-in-law jumped right in to chop celery for stuffing, to wash dishes, and to basically do anything else I asked her to do. She's great, what can I say?


Of course I realized sometime after midnight on Wednesday that the turkey baster I bought last Thanksgiving had broken, and I had nothing to baste the turkey with. We improvised. I basted once, but my mother-in-law, my twin, and Michael took over from then on. The recipe I watched on TV did not talk about basting, and I hadn't really considered it, never having made an entire turkey before. (My step-father-in-law suggested I put a couple of cups of water and some chicken stock in the pan, so I did, and was glad I'd taken his advice. I was also glad to have had multiple containers of chicken stock in the freezer.)


I made a large dish of stuffing which was okay, but I think I might skip it next year. I love stuffing but I always make too much.

Michael and I had a private conference about the green bean casserole and decided to skip the lard-fried onions on the top, because the house was very warm from the oven, the stove, and the gorgeous sun beating in the non-curtained windows lining the south side of our house. (The sun was streaming right into the kitchen, so someone had to move the appetizers out of the way before they melted.)
My twin (who had previously been assigned the job of mashing the potatoes) offered to help with the mushrooms and roux. She delegated the mashing to my mother-in-law, who was happy to help, and then I think she handed the pot over to my mom for a while - right when I added the milk and butter, making the whole mashing thing a lot easier. Sorry I don't have any pictures. I have no idea what I was doing at that point! (Possibly microwaving the 2 lbs of sweet corn from the farmers' market that I'd frozen in one huge bag just for this very meal.)


It was plenty warm so even though I took the rolls out of the fridge a little late they had no trouble rising in my kitchen.


We checked the turkey right around 2:00 and it was done.

So it rested under a tinfoil tent for about half an hour, until we woke my dad up to do the carving. In the meantime, the stuffing and green beans went in the oven, and my mother-in-law and I washed the dinner plates, which have spent a lot of time in storage over the last 35 years or so.
My mom made the gravy, which I got to put in the gravy boat that matches the china from my great-great-aunt that my mom gave me as a wedding present. The rolls got a little bit dark on the bottom. I kind of forgot about them, and they probably would not have made it into the oven at all if it hadn't been for my mom - but I never told her that my oven is a bit touchy, and I like to check things a few minutes before the shortest suggested cooking time. They weren't that bad - Adele ate at least three. I served the mashed potatoes in a beautiful bowl that Michael and I got as a wedding gift from my friend Tracy - with whom I have celebrated many Thanksgivings, most of which were in Tennessee with her grandmother. After I took this picture Vern asked about cranberries, so I took the three types of cranberry out of the fridge - my mom's cranberry relish with pineapple, that her mom used to make, my mom's cranberry sauce with cinnamon, based on a different one of her grandmother's recipes, and the cranberry preserves I canned earlier this summer/fall. They were all a big hit.
We were a little bit crowded around the table(s) but everyone had enough to eat!

And later on we came back for pie - two types of apple pie from my mother-in-law, cranberry-apple from my mom (with real WI cranberries) and my pumpkin pie with whipped cream (which my mother-in-law, my twin, my mom and I all tried to whip by hand - my preferred method - but eventually I had to get out my whisk attachment for my hand blender because it was too hot in my kitchen!). I sweetened one batch of whipped cream with maple syrup, but that batch developed small dark chunks of ??? in it - so I used sugar in the next batch, just to be safe.
Adele loved her pie. Especially her second "slice" which was just a big pile of whipped cream!

And then someone dressed Anna up in her Halloween costume so I could get a picture with my Raggedies.