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.

Gearing Up

On Tuesday I was supposed to pick up our fresh, local, free-range turkey at a farm about an hour away from my house. I ended up taking a subbing job for an elementary music teacher Tuesday morning, so my mom picked up the turkey, then brought a few supplies to my house - like her huge crock pot for keeping the turkey warm while my dad carved it, dessert plates, and goodies for the little girls. And a surprise for me - a new card table, which is still in its box in the garage because we were able to scrape together enough chairs for all 11 people. But next time we need them, we'll be thankful for a new card table with four matching chairs!
My mom also brought a cornucopia, which we used as a wedding decoration last year, because Adele loves cornucopias. Her first job when she got to my house was to find the cornucopia.

Michael and I had spent many hours the previous weekend cleaning and getting set up - I even put the china out on the tables to see how it looked (then put the china back in the cupboard until Thursday afternoon without having taken a picture). Michael didn't realize we had gotten such nice linens as shower/wedding gifts last year.
Wednesday while working at the law firm I was keeping an eye on the weather, as our out 0f town family members were traveling down from Minneapolis and up from Indianapolis. While central WI was in a relatively clear zone (although we had some very heavy rains in the morning) both sets of relatives were driving through mixed snow and rain, with a little ice thrown in the mix for good measure. I had been planning to do the grocery shopping after work, but I'm terrified of driving in ice, and Michael works right down the street from the grocery store, so I asked him to pick up the groceries instead. It goes a little bit against the grain of my control-freak nature to ask him to do the shopping for me, and make decisions about what kind of crackers to get or the size/type of orange juice, milk, and cream cheese containers . . . but he did an amazing job. (And brought home LOCAL, ORGANIC, Pasteurized (not Ultra-Pasteurized) milk in the process! I wanted to cry when I saw it. Of course, that milk was $6.00 a gallon instead of the $3.57 I paid for the non-organic variety of the same brand, but it was not ultra-pasteurized. I was pretty tickled.

We were pretty hungry Wednesday night, and I'd been trying to keep the fridge relatively empty of non-Thanksgiving-related food, so we ordered Chinese, watched on episode of The Office on Netflix, and got to work. Michael finished vacuuming and picking up, and I started in with the baking - a loaf of bread for stuffing (in which I forgot the egg, even though I had it sitting right on the counter - oops),

dough for rolls,
which I decided to make with half whole-wheat flour this time (I don't know why I played with this recipe for a holiday meal - although they turned out mostly okay),
and the pumpkin pie. (This time I made it with half whole-wheat flour instead of all white.)
Oliver is sure interested in lard.
My first try at the crust didn't turn out so well. I had to ball this back up and roll it out again. It worked much better the second time.
Here's another picture of my grandma's old (1960s) Tupperware dough rolling mat, and her rolling pin too. I have my own rolling pin and dough mat that I picked out with gift cards from our wedding, because I didn't get my grandma's until this past spring. I tried to give my newer ones to my sister this weekend but she wasn't interested. I guess she'd just as soon I make the pie. (I went in to the museum on Tuesday night and had a conversation with several of the members of the museum's Advisory Board about our Thanksgiving plans. One woman gave us her perfect recipe for turkey: "My sister makes it.")
I saved a little bit of the pureed pumpkin for Anna - who heartily enjoyed it during our big meal on Thursday.
My recipe said to stir the pumpkin, brown sugar, and spices until shiny. The pumpkin and sugar were already so shiny when I added the nutmeg and ginger that this picture turned out very white, even though I used the cuisine setting on Michael's camera.
That one is actually milk and cream.
I put the rolls together while the pie baked.
Then while the pie cooled I did dishes, put the root beer and diet coke on ice, brought frozen vegetables into the house,
took appliances I would not be using into the basement, found outlets for my mom's coffee maker, her crock pot, and my crock pot, baby-proofed the kitchen, bookmarked all of my recipes, pulled pots and pans out from their nooks in my cupboards, and cubed the bread for my stuffing.
That was a lot of bread. And of course I made way too much stuffing.
and washed all of the potatoes.
I finally headed to bed around 1:00, with plans to get up again at 7:00 to bake another loaf of bread (in case Adele needed a sandwich), soak the potatoes to lower the potassium level (my dad has problems with high potassium), and get the turkey in the oven by 10:00.