dinner discourse

I started this blog after our Thanksgiving, but I did want to review it here for all to see. Matt and I took this holiday pretty darn seriously this year, and, well, we’d really like to gloat a little about our accomplishment. ;-)

We started planning our menu early, and narrowed down our menu options from about a million ideas (honestly, I lost count of how many things were on our brainstorming list) to twelve.

So the final plan was a four-course meal:
First Course: Green Salad with Dried Cranberries and Candied Walnuts
Second Course: Butternut Squash and Pear Soup
Third Course (Dinner):

1. Herb Roasted Turkey Breast with a an Apple Pan Gravy (with apple brandy and apple cider)
2. Classic Popovers
3. Apple and Onion Stuffin’ Muffins
4. Cranberry Relish
5. Cranberry Sauce (The scary, canned, jelly stuff – so I guess we don’t really get any credit for that. Just needed it for the sake of tradition.)
6. Potato Gratin (with red, yellow, purple potatoes, sweet potatoes, and yams) infused with thyme, sage and rosemary
7. Chive Corn Pudding
8. Green Beans with Apple Cider

Third and-a-half Course (Intermezzo): Pear champagne sorbet
Fourth Course (Dessert): Apple Pie (Provided by the lovely Mrs. Barbara Titelbaum, so no credit to us there either.)

We should give credit to Rachel Ray and her Thanksgiving in 60 show from a few years ago. Items A, C, and H came straight from the show and partially inspired the Gratin. We did take a cooking class from Whole Foods a week before Thanksgiving that was for Vegetarian Thanksgiving (Which you can see above ours wasn’t, even though I have gone veg now. Had to have it for everyone else.) that emphasized mushrooms, and it did include a multi-potato gratin.

I totally nerded out on organizing the cooking. I had this excel spreadsheet where on the first worksheet I tracked each recipe, where we sourced it, how many it served, (so we knew if we needed to double it) what pans/dishes we needed to cook it, serving dish, oven temp it needed to be cooked at (so we could figure out what could go in together) and any other info (like if it needed the food processor, so we didn’t try to make two things that needed the same small appliance at the same time). Then I made a second worksheet for the ingredients list and knocked off the ones we already had so I had my grocery list, with check-off boxes and all.

Oh-so-nerdy, but it makes me so happy!

I got a binder, and the spreadsheet (below) was the first page. Then I photocopied each of the recipes and put them in plastic sleeves and put them in the binder in order. So we knew we had each of them, we wouldn’t have to get our cookbooks dirty (or use up counter space with them) and they would stay clean too. Did I mention I got all kinds of nerdy on this?

I can’t say we actually used the info we had to make the cooking go as smoothly as it could have, but we learned a lot and it will go even better in the future.

Enough about the cooking. The actual dinner went very well. It was lovely having the whole family together around our brand-new (delivered just the day before Thanksgiving) dining table. (I also loved the centerpiece I made – I used a lovely Nambe crystal rectangular bowl-thing and filled it with cranberries. Then I nestled three votive holders with red votives in to it. Very simple, didn’t take up too much room on the table, so there was plenty of room for the food. I think you can make it out in the photos, at least a little.

After dinner we even sat around the table and played Scattegories. It was so quaint! I felt like we were in one of those TV commercials for Hasbro. We also played a lot of Quiddler over the long weekend our families were here, and a tiny bit of Boggle. Yay for real interaction with the people you love!

Lots to be thankful for – especially that there is a whole year until we have to do all this again!