What better holiday for a food blog than Thanksgiving? This was my first year cooking, even though I've spent past Thanksgivings without family I've never cooked the meal. We wanted to invite classmates, but it seems as though most everyone is out of town with family, extended family, or friends so we said "To hell with everyone, we're still going to cook the full meal!" I was inexplicably excited about cooking a turkey. I should point out that I've never cooked a whole chicken, just chicken parts.
At about 9:30 a.m., I rolled out of bed and trundled downstairs to dress my turkey. He was a 9 pounder Butterball and after going through the motions (you know, remove giblets and neck, wash, pat dry), I stuffed him with carrots, onions, cloves of garlic, celery, rosemary, sage, thyme, cloves, allspice, pepper, basil, and oregano. I gave him a dry rub with some of the same spices and then rubbed on some olive oil and it was into the oven for 2 hours.
Then I did my mother's infamous holiday rice. Best stuff ever! And so simple. You get Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage. It's precooked, they're these little turds of a sausage, but they're delicious. Dice them and pan fry them up, add onions, green bell peppers, and mushrooms. Finally finish it with day old white rice, seasoned salt, and pepper. It sounds so boring, but it's the combo of the flavorful sausage and the salt that really make it shine. You can nuke it for a week, have it for breakfast or enjoy it as a side dish.
I steamed some green beans in the rice cooker and tossed them in lemon juice. Aaron made yummy candied yams: he took canned yams and cooked them with butter on the stove. Then he put them in a casserole dish with sweetened condensed milk and brown sugar and used a cake mixer to stir it up but good. Pop it in the oven for a while and top it off with marshmallows under the broiler for that amazing burnt sugar campfire nummy taste.
I cheated on the new potatoes, gravy, and cranberries: Trader Joe's. I chose not to have a salad with it because we had so much food already, but one thing remained: Red Lobster-style cheddar bay biscuits. I had made the batter last night because it's better if you refrigerate it overnight. Bisquick, buttermilk, garlic powder, cheddar and butter went into the batter and while they baked I made a garlic butter with parsley flake glaze for the biscuits.
All in all, a very successful Thanksgiving meal! I'm making turkey soup at the moment and Aaron made brownies for dinner. I've been thinking a lot about our next Thanksgiving since it's still unclear where we'll be living, but I'm 99.9% sure it will not be in the United States. So then I look forward to two years from now and I'll be finishing up my degree, back in South Carolina. We have less than a month before we're packed up and out of South Carolina and I still have so much to write about the place.
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