There’s something satisfying about reinventing leftovers that makes me nostalgic for the single mom days. Granted, that’s about all I get nostalgic about from that time. But you know what I mean. Basically, I forgot to pull out a pork roast and now I’m trying…
I’m not sure what it is about cold rainy days that makes a body crave substantial food. It’s been raining here for days. Oregon, duh. I’ve spent so much time cooking for the past few days, that I’m kind of over it and I want…
Elizabeth is coming over today to do some communal holiday cooking with me. She’s back from Italy, she brought me presents, and it’s good to get back into the groove of working with her. We’re going to be having our seperate family dinners on Thursday and then we’re doing Friends Giving together the following Saturday. I’m cooking three turkeys between now and then. Sunday might be an all day in bed day. We’ll see.
If you’ve always just handled this meal completely on your own like I have, then it probably doesn’t occur to you to cook it with friends. But since I’ve moved down south, I’ve been involved in some all day food play adventures with some girlfriends. It started with Diane and raviolis. As you know, Amanda and I have played in the kitchen quite alot. And now Sage….AKA the elusive Elizabeth. I highly recommend it! Usually, your friends will ask, “What can I bring?” Right? Instead of bringing something…..come over and cook! It just might be my new favorite thing to do in life.
Update: Diane turned me on to an Oster twenty quart electric self basting roaster at Costco for forty bucks. Forty bucks! I should have gotten two. Talk about handy. Basil and Sage will work that thing to death. I used it at the outlaws last Thursday to roast the turkey. There was one caveat…the roaster doesn’t brown anything. No problem! I just threw it in Wendy’s oven on convect for about twenty minutes at the end. Ching!
Dinner at the outlaws house was quiet and quaint, very Americana. We all pitched in and Uncle Gordon, who is in his eighties, brought a date. Adorable! And she likes wine so she’s a keeper.
I cooked all day the next day so I would have less to do on Saturday. We had about twenty people over for dinner. Hubs smoked a turkey and we used the Oster roaster again so that the oven would be free. I got all the pies done before Elizabeth came over. She brought one of her daughters, Margaret, to help and she did a wonderful job on the table settings and some of the cooking. I was truly grateful. Ignore my hodge podge of chairs.
We had some fabulous wines, some amazing toasts, and it was shared with an amazing group of people from all walks of life and different backgrounds, cultures, and beliefs. Matt and Amanda just had their twentieth wedding anniversary. Twentieth! Lots of monogamy toasts happened after that. Between two turkeys there was not a lot of leftovers left. Phew! And Sunday was indeed an all day lounge day, defiantly ignoring the dishes. I mean, it’s Tuesday and I’m still washing dishes.
Yes. That is Franzia there in the background. See? Cooking wine. Can’t beat it. We didn’t get pictures of everything. The butternut squash looked strongly like male bits so I left that one out. Ha! But we missed getting pictures of at least five or six other dishes. Here’s what we did get:
Mushrooms.
Dressing with chanterelles.
Mashed potatoes.
Pecan streusel sweet potatoes.
Saged creamed corn.
Collard greens with our smoked ham hocks.
Parker House rolls.
Next stop…..Betty’s house for more culinary debauchery!
Sometimes, we find ourselves in the middle of a tough week, unable to even think about the rest of the week, wishing it was a Saturday. Some of us will find comfort in foods that might not be good for us. Personally? My go to…
One of my very best friends, Jenn, and her husband, Matthew, are coming down for the weekend. What this means is that there will be lots of craft beer….wine for me, thanks….and tons of food coming out of my kitchen. That will all be sprinkled…
I had some ground lamb leftover from the hand pie making adventure I embarked on with Amanda a day or two ago. We just ran out of time and never got to the ground lamb! I’m certainly not going to toss it out, either. So tonight is burger night. Hubs and I just went to Costco the other day to fix the cheese deficit in our house, so I have some goat cheese. Perfect! In fact, I have everything to make it except buns. And lettuce. I’ll fix that today.
A peruse around the intrawebs confirmed my suspicions….goat cheese lamb burgers are indeed a thing. I had, of course, planned on adding carmelized onions and bacon. How does the internet know me so well?! Many of the recipes incorporate mint into the patty. Pass. I want garlicky, not minty. Which reminds me I need to brush my teeth. And of course, I’ll be redoing my fried zucchini the tried and true way….with my breadcumbs. Hmph.
Do you not make your own breadcrumbs? You should. I stopped buying them when I discovered high fructose corn syrup in my favorite brand of Italian breadcrumbs. I looked at the other brands….they all had it, too. Why?! Why does there need to be that junk in there? It’s frustrating. So I just make my own and keep them in the freezer and that’s end of it. I know this a tangent, but I’m so sick and tired of gross things in processed products. It’s infuriating.
And NOW, the food companies have successfully lobbied to get the name of high fructose corn syrup changed to sugar. So when you look at a label and you don’t see high fructose corn syrup on the label? It’s probably still there! It just says sugar now. Jerks.
Back to the burgers….breathe in….breathe out. This particular ground lamb came from our whole lamb we got last lambing season. If you ever get the chance to get a whole lamb, do. It really doesn’t take long to get through a whole one and if you time it right….like during lambing season….you can get an entire lamb for less than half of what you pay for it retail in the grocery store in individual cuts. And the bonus, naturally, is you know where your meat came from.
We’re lucky in Oregon in the sense that we have lamb farmers and mobile butchers. Our meat never sees a giant slaughterhouse and is never trucked anywhere so it has a very low carbon footprint as well. Our lamb didn’t live very far from us and wasn’t raised in a giant production facility type farm. Instead, it was raised on a small family farm on open pasture and, more than likely, by a child in 4-H. Love is delicious.
So Hubs has had this two year long battle with tri-tips. I’m sure it started with me. I tend to criticize over cooked meat. I can’t help myself. Anyway, I’m going to go as far as to say that Hubs has really been working on…
If I had nothing else to do in life, but create amazing multicourse meals every single night, I’d be thrilled. Exhausted, but thrilled. The rest of the time, just like every other household in America….I slap something together. No frills and the less fuss the…
I can’t remember where I got this set, but it sat around awhile, unopened, while I clung to my old habits of doing various things. Like cutting biscuits! I always used a mason jar because that’s what I’ve always used for drinking glasses. Mason jars are amazingly verstile in the kitchen. Maybe this post should be about mason jars.
No! The round cutters can do things a mason jar can’t. Like processing pineapple. I amazed even myself with that one. The set I have has eleven cutters. The smallest one is fantastic for coring thick slices of pineapple for those upside down cakes. The largest one…well I haven’t used that one yet! But Christmas baking is coming soon, so I’m sure I’ll find something to use it for. And the sizes in between? Biscuits! The tin cover has all sorts of suggestions in teeny tiny print that I can’t read. Ha!
I love the rounded edge on the one side. It doesn’t hurt my hands when cutting something harder than dough. They’re super easy to clean and I love that nothing sticks to them, especially sticky dough. The little tin they all fit in makes it handy and compact to store. I find I’ve been pulling them out more rather than my trusty mason jars and I love that. Growth is good people.
Turkey Day is upon us. I would probably rail against this American tradition, considering it celebrates a not so shining time in American history, because of how badly the Native Americans were treated…if it weren’t for the fact that I like cooking for friends and…