We hosted the Thanksgiving feast this year, which meant that I got to kick into high gear, plan the food, orchestrate what gets cooked when, and decide how to put my stamp on family traditions.

First off, and let’s get this out of the way – all holiday meals are DEEPLY steeped in family traditions. Food invokes so many memories that even though that green bean casserole is universally reviled, and you’d never think of cooking it any other time of the year, it simply MUST be on the table or else it isn’t Thanksgiving. The result is that regardless of culinary aspirations, sometimes you have to “take one for the team” and prepare food that may be emotionally filling if gastronomically devoid.

(For the record, both my parents and my in-laws are good cooks, and I have no issues with either family’s traditional holiday table. This is a challenge that has come up in every conversation I’ve had about the holidays, though, so it deserved some space.)

Enough philosophy. Let’s get to the food.

MENU:

1. Roasted butternut squash soup
2. Turkey with gravy
3. Mashed potatoes
4. Roasted sweet potatoes
5. Roasted cauliflower
6. Steamed broccoli
7. Glazed carrots
8. Bread stuffing
9. Cranberry sauce
10. Rolls / baguette
11. Apple Pie
12. Pumpkin Pie

Let’s meet the players. All photos are credit to Christine Tremoulet – thanks for holding up dinner and grabbing the camera so I could have photos for this post!

Roasted butternut squash soup
Straightforward with a bit of elegance. Take a couple of heavy butternut squash, and cut off a bit from the top and bottom. Stand up on the base, and halve vertically. Use a spoon to spoon out the inner webbing and seeds, rub down with salt, pepper, and a neutral oil (I keep canola on hand), and put cut-side down in a roasting pan. Put in a hot oven – 425F or so – until the flesh is soft to a fork and the edges have caramelized. Remove from oven, let cool, and scoop flesh away from the skin. Put the flesh in a pot, add about a pint of heavy cream (hey, it’s the holidays) and puree with a stick blender until smooth. If you want it thinner, keep adding cream or milk until it’s where you want it to be. Stir in some spices – cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, things like that – and taste for seasoning.

Turkey with gravy
This is easily one of the best turkeys I have ever eaten, if not THE best. It’s a little involved, but none of the steps are hard and the flavor is incredible.

One blessing is that we’ve never carved the turkey at the table, so none of our traditions involve a whole turkey as a showpiece. This is freeing as a cook. White meat and dark meat are fundamentally different, and need to cook to different times and temperatures. Many, many words have been written about how to manage this on a whole bird – cook it upside down for part of the time, ice the breast before cooking to chill it compared to the legs, all sorts of things to do with foil tents for the white meat to keep it from overcooking, and so on. If one of these works for you, by all means, have at it. I’ve moved on.

In hunting down info on cooking a turkey in parts, I came across this article that gave me the outline I wanted. I hadn’t thought of braising the legs, but it makes perfect sense; the long cooking time gives the added connective tissue in the dark meat time to melt out into the stock, and the breast only cooks for as long as it needs. Plus, you get an over-the-top gravy.

Here’s the outline:

• A day or so beforehand, break the turkey into parts – two leg/thighs, one big intact breast, and the back and wings. Make a stock from the back and wings. Rub the leg quarters and the breast with salt, pepper, thyme, garlic, and oil, and put in the fridge overnight.
• On the morning of, brown the legs in a roasting pan, brown some mirepoix, and braise the legs in the stock from the day before for about 3 hours. Strain and save the double stock for gravy.
• Put the breast on top of the leg quarters and roast at 375F for an hour and a half, until the breast is done (use a thermometer!)
• Let the meat rest before carving. Traditionally, slices are taken along the breast. This worked well, but if you can, take the breast off the bone and cut across it – perpendicular to the muscle fiber. This will give an even more tender breast. Shred the dark meat with two forks.
• While the meat rests, take some of that double stock, let it reduce (MORE! MORE FLAVOR!), and thicken with roux until it’s gravy.

The meat was all extremely juicy, tender, flavorful, nothing was dried out in the slightest, and it’s largely unfussy and unattended cooking.

Mashed Potatoes
This is one of my standby party dishes – I can put it together in under half an hour, and it always gets rave reviews.
Take yukon gold potatoes, peel them, and cut into chunks (maybe 1-1.5 in. in any direction at most – shortens the cooking time). Place in a pot of cold water, bring to a boil, and simmer until the potatoes are fork tender. Drain. Place the potatoes in the bowl of a mixer with the paddle attachment and beat on the lowest setting, adding a stick of butter, some cream, salt and pepper to taste. Finally, throw in a block of Boursin garlic/herb cheese. (Oops, the secret’s out.) It won’t taste cheesy in the potatoes, but it adds a lot of depth of flavor very quickly.

Roasted sweet potatoes
Sweet potatoes are a core part of my holiday tradition. However, having grown up in Kentucky (there’s a better family story on the origin, I think, that may have nothing to do with my home state) these were always a casserole of sweet potatoes, eggs, milk, sugar, and a LIBERAL lashing of bourbon. They’re delicious, but they’re perhaps on the strong side – not everybody’s taste. I can’t abide by marshmallows on sweet potatoes, they’re sweet enough as is. So, instead, I decided to roast them and let the natural sweetness shine.
Peel and cut the sweet potatoes into 1″ (ish) chunks. Toss with enough oil to coat, and some salt, and spread in a roasting tin on a single layer. Throw in the oven at 425F, shaking and stirring occasionally, until all sides are brown and caramelized. Take out of the oven, salt, and serve immediately.

Roasted cauliflower
Similar concept to the potatoes (minus the lore and the bourbon).
Remove the core and cut the cauliflower into chunks – remember, the cut sides are the ones that brown up and get sweet in the oven – and coat with oil, salt, herbs, and place in a single layer in a roasting pan. Roast, shaking occasionally, and serve.

Steamed broccoli
Break a head of broccoli into florets. Put in steamer basket over water. Steam until tender. ‘Nuff said.

Glazed carrots
Originally, these were to be roast with the cauliflower. However, they needed different cooking time and it was getting monotonous with the roast meat and vegetables. Plus, I frankly goofed and didn’t get them prepped in time, so I “called an audible” and went for the glace.
Cut carrots into thick sticks and place in a wide pan (bonus if it’s a single layer of carrots). Add just a bit of water – maybe 1/4 C – especially if the carrots are a little old or woody. Add a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar, a few pats of butter, and cover. Bring to a boil, then cut the heat to low and let the carrots cook for 15-20 min, shaking occasionally. Remove the lid and let the water evaporate off, leaving the carrots in the glaze. Optional – finish with a spray of lemon juice and some fresh parsley or herbs. The goal is to get the carrots cooked tender without overcooking until they fall apart.

Bread stuffing
Gladly outsourced. This is my mother-in-law’s recipe, and despite my best efforts (and meticulous attention to instruction), it never comes out quite right. I hadn’t picked up what I needed for the stuffing, so I happily asked her if she would make and bring it. Delicious.

Cranberry sauce
Look, tart foods and I don’t normally get along. I’ve never been a fan of cranberry sauce, whether canned or fresh. This year, I ate it and enjoyed it.
Zest and juice two oranges. Add water to make 1C of liquid. Pour over 12 oz. of cranberries and 1C of sugar, stir, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until the berries have all split and are getting soft. Stir in a bit of salt to taste. They are a bit tart, but the orange kick and sugar definitely help balance.

Rolls and baguette
Phoned it in, and went with King’s Hawaiian rolls (family favorite) and a Slow Dough baguette that I bought spur of the moment at the market the day before. I hadn’t worked into the schedule how I was going to get bread baked anyway, so I cheated a wee bit.

Apple Pie
Pie crust and I get along. I make a pretty good crust – won’t win awards, but it works out well. However, I’ve never actually made an apple pie, let alone a double crust pie. First time for everything, I suppose. On advice of counsel and friends, I used a mix of Granny Smith and Macintosh apples in the filling, with a bit of brown sugar, corn starch, salt, and lemon juice. Putting in the bottom layer was straightforward, filling the pie wasn’t a problem, and laying the top crust over went pretty well. Trying to figure out how to tuck the ends together (wife said over from top, recipe said under from bottom, quick scan showed an even split on the internet), I managed to create something that looked vaguely pie-like. It baked fairly well, although my adventures with making a foil collar for the crust led to Christine’s declaration that I would have failed as a 1950s housewife… Tasted delicious, which is really what matters.

Pumpkin Pie
No shame in canned pumpkin here – from what I understand, breaking down and cooking a raw pumpkin is a fair bit of work, and the canned product doesn’t suffer in quality or taste. Again, this was a stick-to-tradition item, so you can find the recipe proudly on the side of the Libby’s can (of pumpkin, not of pumpkin pie filling – there IS a difference).

And that, my friends, was our Thanksgiving feast.

The other trick was orchestrating all of this. Planning this meant not only setting up a menu, but working out shopping lists, prep lists, and most importantly the choreography of the oven – what dishes needed to be in or on top of the oven, at what temperature, and for how long. There was no way I was going to run into the issue of needing three things in the oven at different temps at the same time.

For grins, here (PDF) are the notes I took for getting this together. I know there are a few holes in the notes as the menu evolved – I think cranberry sauce made the item list but didn’t get onto the shopping list, for example, which almost caused a small crisis. But, for a big event like this, you HAVE to do some sort of preplanning to get your head straight about what to do. The net result is that Thursday’s cooking was easy, assembling final dishes, and only really got a bit hectic right at the end, trying to get everything onto serving plates and out of the kitchen.

In brief:

• Saturday and Sunday were spent obsessing over the menu, writing the notes, researching techniques and recipes, and so on.
• Monday was grocery shopping, breaking down the turkey, and maybe roasting the squash.
• Tuesday was making the turkey stock and par-roasting the vegetables. (Great technique. Basically, like par-boiling, you roast the vegetables until they have just started to color. Pull them out, cool, and they can hang out in the fridge until day of. Let them come to room temp, then throw in a hot oven to refresh and finish cooking – while the turkey gently rests.)
• Wednesday was cranberry sauce, making sure the turkey meat was rubbed down, and baking pies.
• Thursday – the main event. Cook the turkey, finish the sides, make the gravy, and serve.

And THAT, as they say, is that. I’d like to hear about your menus and preparations in the comments. If any of you try these out, by all means, let me know how it goes (or ask for tips first, since my shorthand above may not be complete)!

UPDATE: Comments are now working. They’re not displaying, but they are being submitted and stored. They’ll show up when the look and feel goes back to normal.

Happy birthday, coffee corner. It’s been ten years since I started blogging.

To celebrate, I thought I’d bring you all back to the original, Blogger-powered, wow-I-really-shouldn’t-be-a-designer layout. Compare to the web.archive.org copy – not bad for my first WordPress template, eh? Apparently, not using capital letters was all the rage. Or something.

Wow. A decade. Let’s see…

• In that time, we went from exchanging email addresses, to identifying ourselves by blog URL, to passing around Twitter names.
• In that time, I’m still with the company I hired into fresh from college.
• In that time, I went on a business trip to London that lasted almost two years. And met some really great friends, who I can blame thank for pushing me to meet Christine.
• Um, yeah. I’m now married, with a stepson who graduated high school, a mortgage, four cats, and I switched – partway – from PC to Mac.
• Ernie was the first person I can say I met through the internet. We’re still good friends today. There are innumerable others who all deserve a mention, but I won’t be able to do justice to it, only to say that I’m amazingly lucky to have so many people all over the world I can claim as friend.
• Gaming has given way to cooking.
• I started this blog as a group blog, before group blogging was in vogue. Chris is now a doctor in New England, while Stephen does amazing research foundation work in the Pacific Northwest. Both are married to amazing women, and have started insanely cute families. Amy is off doing, I believe, theater work in New York; I need to find out…

I can’t get away from this post without talking about food. I’ve been in early morning and long day workshops all week, and Christine hosted workshops at the studio, so I’m a bit off my game lately in the kitchen. For Father’s day, I got a new end-grain butcher block from Ikea (Exklusivt, for anybody who can speak Swedish) that you see in the picture above. Haven’t even had a chance to break it in properly yet. Putting the pictures together for this post, though, reminded me about everything that I’ve got lined up to post about, so it’s time to get cracking.

What I can tell you about is the salt-crusted eye of round roast I cooked last weekend. Our brains are very proficient pattern matching engines, so while salt-crusted roasts have been in my mental bookmarks to try for some time, I saw mention of it a couple of weeks ago and suddenly it showed up everywhere. The idea is simple – get a lot of salt a little wet, so it’s almost like a snowball to pack, and use it to encase a (herb-seasoned) beef roast. Really, a lot. I used three pounds of kosher salt for a two-and-a-bit pound roast, and that wasn’t quite enough. Since you’re not leaving it to sit for hours before going in the oven, the salt doesn’t make the meat overly salty; instead, as it cooks and dries it forms a hard crust that seals in the roast, its juices, and any steam that would otherwise escape. The result is easily the juciest and most tender roast I’ve ever cooked. Add some roast or sautéed potatoes on the side and a vegetable and you’ve got a great meal.

Traditionally, this method would be used on fish or other more delicate meats to prevent them from drying out and getting tough in the oven. Pork loin would be good for this as well. I don’t know about fatty roasts, like a pork shoulder, as I would expect to want to render out some of the fat.

I’ll close this post with the words that started it all:

Welcome to the coffee corner. my hope is that my friends and i can share coffee experiences, tips, tricks, et cetera with the rest of the world and hear your coffee stories in return.
a bit about me: i’m a software/web developer currently in houston, tx. originally from lexington, ky, i spent most of my high school years in coffee shops, particularly coffee times and common grounds. i came down to houston for college, and didn’t have much time to spend in coffee shops, but was rather dismayed by a lack of good ones that i could find. i’ve settled on diedrich’s as my home down here, but there’s a starbuck’s near where i work that’s good for an afternoon fix.
well, enough about me. on with the show.

Thanks for being a part of this adventure. Let’s see what another ten years brings!

I don’t have a picture to show – Christine is much more of the photographer than I am – but I can write a small memorial.

Murphy was put to sleep today. He had developed significant health issues including some fluid in his lungs and a severe loss of balance, as well as zero appetite for food or water. We took him in to the vet at the end of May, where he seemed to rebound on IV antibiotics and fluids, but since coming home had steadily declined.

Murphy was a part-ragdoll cat, about 10 years old, and very much Jason’s cat. His ragdoll tendencies made him ideally suited for being picked up, carried along, flipped over, and whatever other affections were shown to him. He was a very friendly cat (at the very least, he saw everybody as an opportunity to score food if he was charming) and warmed up to anybody who came to visit the house.

Jason has handled this very well, all things considered. While he is hurt, in his own words, “I don’t want to do it but I know logically it’s the right thing to do.”

Goodbye, Murphy. We’ll all miss you.

Rita’s a category 5 hurricane expected to smack into us late Friday/early Saturday. The family and I are heading to Austin either tonight or early tomorrow to stay with one of Christine’s friends. From there, we’ll play it by ear.

Cross your fingers, folks. Or, if you please, drink one each of these for us:

The Hurricane
The Margarita

Swirl them a bit, maybe, and have a Hurricane ‘Rita. If someone more versed in alcohol wants to venture into actually combining these drinks, please share the recipe.

Sorry for the impromptu hiatus. After the election, I’ve been working on us fleeing the country. (Ha, ha.)

Lots of mundane things have been going on at Chez Tremoulet for me; we had a wonderful Thanksgiving with my in-laws, great food and a few good games of cribbage to boot.

The big event is that, as of … thirty minutes from now, Christine and I will have been married for six months. They’ve flown by, and I couldn’t ask for a better partner (or partner-in-crime) than her. A few more pics from the wedding are up at her site; watch for more once we work out the sharing details.

(or “How I spent the night before my wedding”)

The wedding weekend went off quite well. The run up to the wedding was every bit as crazy and hectic as I expected; while I think we actually did a good job of visiting with the guests as much as we could, I’m sorry for everybody who I didn’t talk to quite enough.

I made it down to Galveston with two big guys and a whole lot of stuff crammed into my Golf, with seven minutes to spare before the rehearsal. It was a bonus treat that the timing worked so I could drive Chris, one of my best friends from high school, down to the island from downtown Houston. The first time I saw everybody from out of town in one place was at the rehearsal dinner later that night at Luigi’s, a fabulous Italian restaurant on the island. We surprised my aunt Charlotte, a nun from Florida, by asking her to say grace before dinner (hey, so we dropped a few details) which she did quite well. We had one usher who had to back out shortly before the wedding due to joining the Navy that phoned in his congratulations during dinner (and apparently, had started the celebration from afar in our honor). For my part, I finally understand (roughly) what Stephen does for a living and got a taste of “working the tables” for the reception.

Afterwards, back at the hotel, I pulled all the guys together to give them small thank-you gifts and to polish off a sentimental bottle of bourbon. Just after we’d poured the first round, I got the call from Christine that Kymberlie, who had not been feeling well and left the rehearsal dinner early, was writhing in pain in the room and needed to go to the emergency room. Poor Cari (Chris’ wife) had just made it into town, and her first impression of the bride was her speedtalking about Kymberlie’s probable kidney stone. I had given my card to the valet to go bring my card around and give me directions for the six block drive to the hospital, walked the pale Kymberlie out to the car, and left directions to finish off the bourbon without me, which the guys happily ignored.

To abbreviate this part of the story, we got there at 1 AM but didn’t get seen until 5 AM; although the waiting room was quiet and fairly empty, we had just missed the rush of trauma victims hitting the hospital on the holiday weekend, which had all the staff tied up. I really only got two sentences out of Kymberlie; “It hurts, it hurts real bad” and “Bedpan, BEDPAN” (don’t ask). Fortune smiles on us all at times, however, and Cari had brought along a deck of cards that Chris and I had asked for earlier in the day, so I had something to do for five hours. And that sums up the night before my wedding, spent in the ER next to a beautiful girl in amazing pain.

I did get about four or five hours of sleep, had brunch with the guys, and headed back to start getting ready. Heading down to the lobby began the steady stream of photo opportunities and picture posing that lasted for the next 36 hours. I must say, I have friends who can clean up quite well when needed, and Jason looked awesome in a tux. We got to the church about an hour and a half before the ceremony was to start, the idea being to get the group pictures out of the way beforehand. That ended up not happening, but we all got to wait in the somewhat air conditioned (it was, I promise!) church building. The ceremony was short and sweet, with really nothing major that went wrong and a few chuckles along the way, and then off to the reception.

I now understand what people mean when they say that that day is a blur. Lots of dancing, lots of talking, lots of pictures, and lots of fun. Instead of a groom’s cake (a Southern tradition, I’m told) we had Big Pink Cookies from Starbucks set out for friends – how apropos for us. The party went well into the evening, with a fantastic sendoff at the front of the hotel.

The next day, we got back into tux and dress and went out to take pictures on the beach. Late morning. Texas heat. Fully dressed up. The things I’ll do for love…. Seriously, though, we got some great pictures that morning and later that day (after driving in wedding clothes back into downtown Houston for even more pics). It was good to have brunch with the wedding party one last time, and say some proper goodbyes, before heading back to reality.

That’s about it for the wedding story. I can’t say thank you enough to everybody who travelled, everybody who came down from Houston, and especially to everybody who helped out in small and not-so-small ways.

Coming soon, the trip overseas! Also, pictures will be up soon; we’ve got at least 2200 to sort through so far – still waiting on more to come in.

We’re married.

[SO much more to say than that, but we're scrambling to pack for the honeymoon. It was one helluva party, and thanks to everyone for making it so special.]

So much to post, but the big news of the moment – Band Gap, Lager Rhythms’ 3rd CD, was released this weekend amidst much fanfare and celebration. Four years in the making. Wow.

T minus 2 hours 38 minutes…

Wow. WOW. We close on the house today. I didn’t get all giddy about it until I was driving to work today (I’m a slug in the mornings), but now it’s hard to focus on the work that I have to get done. We did a walkthrough last night, and as I’m not the best at envisioning furniture in the house, I just kept thinking “It’s (almost) ours”. [Rather, it's the bank's and will be for some time, but let me dream a bit here.]

We went up for an overnight trip to SXSW Saturday night, which was a total blast. Guerilla SXSW – show up, party, leave – isn’t a bad way to do it after all. I’ll put together the linkylove list later, but I’ll say that it was awesome to see everybody that was there.

T minus 2 hours 32 minutes…

We’re engaged.