We're supposed to eat turkey or something

We celebrated this year's Thanksgiving with our wonderful friends the M family. Yesterday's dinner menu included:

• Roast Turkey (Traditions must be observed)
• Catherine M's Chestnut Stuffing 
• Green beens with lemon
• My dad's Pommes Anna
• My brother's Ginger Cranberry Sauce
• Cornbread
• Hazelnut and Fuyu Persimmon Salad
• Pumpkin Pie
• Sara M's Maple Pots de Crème

I read Bon Appetit Magazine, and in their Thanksgiving issue this year they found issue with using stuffing as stuffing because it prevents the bird from cooking or some other nonsense. They even decided to call their stuffing recipes "dressing" to discourage putting them inside turkeys. This name change doesn't even make any sense because, at least in my experience, dressing is a flavorful sauce. I do not believe that bread mixed with various vegetables/meats fall in that category.
In any case, if your stuffing is hot when you put it in the turkey, it isn't going to prevent the turkey from cooking, and the turkey juices will make the stuffing that much better.

Enough ranting. For the potatoes, my dad found a recipe in that same Bon Appetit magazine for "Mini Herbed Pommes Anna" , which are basically cakes of potato slices layered with butter and herbs. This recipe turned out delicious, and it can be easily made into advance, so I recommend it to anyone who needs a showstopper side.

My brother is the family cranberry expert, and he found a recipe for ginger-lemon cranberry sauce. The sauce came out strong and savory, not as sweet as more classic recipes. The ginger complemented the the rich gravy quite well. 

I made the Hazelnut/Persimmon salad and the pumpkin pie. For the salad, I first toasted some hazelnuts in the oven at 400F for 10-15 minutes (stirring them often). According to Catherine M's instructions, we peeled the hazelnuts by rubbing them in a dish towel.

We then sliced up some fuyu persimmons (the ones with rounded bottoms: they're not astringent) into a cider vinegar-olive oil-mustard-black pepper vinaigrette and added some mixed greens and arugula. The sweetness of the persimmon was nicely complemented by the tartness of the vinegar and the bitterness of the arugula.

For the pumpkin pie, I used Cook's Illustrated recipe, which can be found here http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2008/11/cooks-illustrated-pumpkin-pie-recipe.html . I really like this recipe because it combines canned pumpkin with fresh sweet potato to give a complex flavor. Compared to the pumpkin pie from the dining hall I had eaten last week, this pie tasted full and complete.

Thanksgiving Dinner

I am back at school from a very nice Thanksgiving break. Food at home is so much better than food in college. For thanksgiving dinner my family had a turkey (prepared by my dad)

 

but it looks tastier cooked.

 

We rubbed the turkey with herb butter and stuffed it with chestnut stuffing that my mom and I made.

We based the stuffing off of this recipe from Epicurious, but we also sautéed the turkey's liver and heart and added it to the stuffing along with some chicken broth. And, like every year, we decided to cook the turkey with stuffing in it because in my family's opinion, it makes the stuffing taste so much better.

To compliment this, I made Brussels sprouts with bacon and my brother made cranberry sauce.

 

To prepare, the Brussels spourts, I first steamed the halved sprouts in a pressure cooker for 7 minutes and fried some cubes of thick bacon. Then I added the sprouts to the bacon and let them caramelize for a bit.

My brother's cranberry sauce was actually Cook's Illustrated's Cranberry Chutney with Appple and Crystallized Ginger. It had all of those ingredients as well as cider vinegar and brown sugar.

Since we don't have much family in the US, we celebrate thanksgiving with another French family. Our guests brought more delicious foods including corn bread, green beans sautéed in garlic, delicious apple tart.

And so we had a belly-happifying Thanksgiving meal!

The Thanksgiving Chronicles, Part 2: The rest

I'm finally getting around to part 2! I have been busy growing cobaltous chloride hexahydrate crystals and such, but today is Friday. Fridays are good.

 This is the pumpkin pie after being assembled and before entering the oven. Admire the smooth custard: it was achieved through much effort filtering (and eating the filtrand, aka anything delicious that did not pass through the sieve).

 The onions and celery for the stuffing with parsley and other herbs.

The beautiful roasted turkey. We did in fact cook the stuffing inside the turkey because turkey juice is what makes stuffing taste so amazing.

 Mashed sweet potatoes! No, there is not a volcano inside the potatoes, I just happened to take the picture while my dad was mashing them.

 The marshmallow crust on top of the sweet potatoes.

 The carved turkey meat.

 My favorite: the chestnut stuffing! We made it with chestnuts, celery, onions, staled herb slab bread, 2 apples, turkey liver, and some of the turkey stock I had made the day before.

My plate. Noteworthy items are Virginie's garlic-sautéed green beans and cornbread, as well as my brother's orange-cranberry sauce.

Unfortunately, I did not get pictures of the desserts, but we had pumpkin pie, apple tart, and some pumpkin flan my dad made by adding milk to some pumpkin pie filling that didn't fit in the crust. All were delicious!

Chestnut Pie

The same weekend Virginie made her paella, Florence (a family friend from Chicago) and I made a chestnut pie (actually, we made two). The recipe was from a French cookbook for quiches, quick breads and pies. It was called Quiches, Cakes, et Compagnie, literally: Quiches, Loaf Cakes, and Company (as in "We have company for dinner tonight.") I decided to make the pie because I had seen a can of chestnut purée in the cupboard.
The recipe goes like this:
Blind bake a pie crust. Mix chestnut purée with cream and honey an almonds. Pour filling into a crust, bake again. The first picture is the recipe in French, clique on it for a larger version to practice your French!
Since I was lazy, I used a pre-made pie crust. It was ok, but too salty for the recipe, next time I'll make my own crust. Also, I made 2 different pies. One of them had almonds and the other didn't. This is because Virginie is allergic to nuts. The one with almonds was better because it had a thicker consistency, but this may be because the other one was slightly undercooked. Oh well, next time I'll do better.