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.

Practice Pumpkin Pie

Last week I gave serious thought to baking a practice pumpkin pie just to make sure I could get the pie crust right. I don't have a lot of experience making pie crusts, since I have only owned a rolling pin for about a year. The homemade crusts I have made in the past were pretty good, but I made them with butter and shortening. This Thanksgiving I want to make my crust with lard. Lard is supposed to make the best crusts, and I happen to have a large tub of it in my fridge.
When my friend told me on Friday that she'd celebrated an early Thanksgiving with her family in South Dakota, and no one had made pumpkin pie, and when she mentioned she had nothing to do on Sunday, I invited her over for pie. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to make the practice dish I'd been thinking about.

Yesterday Michael and I washed windows, scrubbed floors, vacuumed, cleaned revoltingly dusty light fixtures, and rearranged furniture in preparation for Thanksgiving. Usually I bake bread on Sunday and make a big pot of soup or something else for the week. Instead, I baked a couple of pumpkins and rolled out a pie crust for practice. Dinner was provided by Pizza Hut.

I had three pumpkins on my counter - two from the garden, one from the CSA. I've been checking them for any sign of mold or softness. The garden pumpkins are just fine. The CSA pumpkin is starting to get a little big squishy. It does not sound hollow anymore if I knock on it. So I guess that pumpkin will be a centerpiece instead of dessert. Of course, the CSA pumpkin was the biggest of the three, and I was kind of counting on it to make sure I had enough pumpkin for a practice pie, a real pie, and pumpkin bars for my book club in December. I guess I'll have to make different plans for book club . . .

While the pumpkins roasted, I combined three different recipes for pie crust and came up with something very usable.

I used one and one-third cups of white flour, four ounces of lard, half a teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon of sugar, and about thee tablespoons of ice water. I put the lard in the freezer for about 15 minutes before mixing it in with the dry ingredients. The pastry came together so well I did not need to add any water. I know too much water can make a pie crust tough, but my crust was a little bit too crumbly.
Even though it came together without any water, I will make sure to use more like five tablespoons next time, and add the water a little earlier. My recipe for pie crust says to pat the crust into a four inch circle, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes before rolling it out. You are also supposed to let it warm up on the counter again after taking it out of the fridge - but I skipped that step because the dough was so soft already. It ripped around the edge when I transferred it to the pie plate, but I was able to pat it back together pretty easily.
This is not the prettiest pie crust in the world, but, I'll be honest, if you want pretty pie you are going to have to read someone else's blog. I've never been able to make pie crusts look fancy. I'm lucky if the crust is relatively even along the rim.

While the crust was chilling, I worked on the pumpkins.
Because I used a recipe for the filling from my America's Test Kitchen book, the recipe was very long and complicated, and while I was trying to follow multiple strange steps, I snapped at Michael for asking me to help him with a crossword clue. The type of recipe I prefer is simple: mix dry ingredients; set aside. Mix wet ingredients. Slowly stir dry ingredients into wet ingredients. Bake. The reason I used this oh-so-complicated recipe that calls for a food processor which I do not have is that it is the only pumpkin pie recipe I own that does not call for a can of evaporated milk. It does call for cooking the pumpkin, spices, milk, and cream on the stove top before mixing them with the eggs and pouring them into the crust.
I had to have Michael mix the eggs with my immersion blender while I poured the hot liquid in, since I don't have a food processor, let along a food processor with a place for pouring in additional food, as called for in the recipe. I needed three hands, and only happen to have two. And even though I had snapped at him earlier, he was happy enough to help. After all, the end result was going to be pie.

Even though I had pre-baked the pie crust, the crust was very pale, and the filling was not very colorful either. I did not think it looked very appealing as I put it in the oven.
Mixing the eggs with my immersion blender caused the them to get frothy. But the recipe did not say to skim the foam from the eggs. (I am assuming that they would also have gotten foamy in a food processor. Maybe I am wrong.) I tried to skim it off anyway but had no luck.

Thirty minutes in the oven made it look much better!

The pie was a success, even without whipped cream. (The recipe called for all 2/3 of a cup, which was a little more than what I had left in my house after the green bean casserole and a few cups of coffee, so there was nothing left for whipping today.) My friend, her son, Michael and I ate half of it (the two-year-old ate two pieces!), and I sent another quarter home with my friend (who I just remembered, while typing this post, said Friday that she said she prefers her pie with a huge heap of whipped cream on top. Not knowing that I would use all of the cream in the filling itself, I think I promised her lots of it. That's how I like my pumpkin pie too. Oops).

I have the rest of the pumpkin pureed in the fridge, waiting for Wednesday night. Now all I have to do is toast these pumpkin seeds!