Thought I’d report back on the outcome of the Thanksgiving recipes– sort of post-mortem, although that always makes me think of dead people... and, thankfully! no one died from anything I cooked; or a debrief, but that always makes me think of taking my underwear off, which also did not happen. Not at dinner, at least. Lessons learned? Yes, let’s go with that. So, as you might imagine, most of my ingredients were Australian, and thus metric. And, as you can see, all of my recipes are American. Most of my kitchenware is also American. Oven excepted, which is metric and convection (they say “fan forced”). So, I not only had to convert F to C, but also tweak the temp and time to compensate for all that air blowing around in there. This proved stressful for the pumpkin pie, or at least for me as relates to the pumpkin pie. (The pie itself was fine. Delicious even. Guy ate the one leftover slice for breakfast the next day.) Yes, after all that chatter about crisp and bread pudding I did decide to do a pie. I had cans of pumpkin in my pantry in Seattle apparently, as they turned up in a box here. I used the Libby’s recipe on the can. The pie was probably the most stressful item. Did you know that 8 TBSP of butter is 113 grams? Now you do. Even electricity had to be converted for the pie.
Pumpkin pie requires a leap of faith in any circumstance, seeing as how you’re pouring totally liquid batter into your crust and hoping some alchemy will occur at 425° F (minus 25° for convection and converted to 204° C) and then at 350° F (minus 25° for convection and converted to 163° C) and turn the glop into a consistency that can be sliced and look pretty on a plate. Plus: the leaves. I made these pretty leaves out of the leftover crust and of course you can’t put them on the pie in the beginning since that would mean putting them in the pie (remember: liquid) so you have to wait until the pie has firmed enough... but not too long, then they won’t brown. Anyway, the result, as I said, was fine. (Thanks OCD!) Other recipe notes: Cranberries: I have this one as a hard-copy in my recipe binder with a handwritten note that it takes way longer than 10 minutes to reduce. And it did. More like 20 minutes. The only thing to note about the turkey (ah, the turkey, can you hear the chorus of angels singing?) is that it browns fast in that first high-heat stage and you need to get foil on the legs ASAP then ultimately you’ll need to tent the whole thing with foil – once it reaches the perfect beautiful brown-ness that you want. This will vary oven-to-oven I expect. And when you flip the bird to breast up you’l notice shocking trenched when the now amazingly moist breasts (jeez, wonder what kind of Google search hits I’ll get now) were resting in the rack. I am always alarmed by this. They will go away as the bird cooks, trust me. It’ll be beautiful. I’ll reiterate that that is the best turkey recipe ever. It is so good – moist and so flavourful (you can taste the apple). If I had a $ for every time Guy told me in the last few days how great the turkey was I wouldn’t need to get a job and I could write blog posts all day long. (I know, people do have that as a job! But with only, what, seven? readers I’m not sure who’d buy advertising here.) Here are some shots throughout the day, just like one of those fancypants cooking bloggers (actually, I did the cranberries and crust prior – so this is a fancypants multi-day retrospective). We invited over friends from school – dad is American, mom is Japanese, L is one of Zoe’s best friends and C is in fourth grade. They brought wine, yams and a cheesecake and we talked about how great our school is. We did this on Friday, by the way, when you all in the States were sprawled on your respective couches in tryptophan-induced comas having finished your dinners a few hours earlier.
(The turkey in the brine.)
(Shallots and balsamic.)
Ok. Enough uploading for me. You can see the whole set on my Shutterfly page here.
