Saturday, December 5, 2009

Cooking My Way to Thanksgiving, Part Two

I survived! But more importantly, so did my Thanksgiving-food eaters.

This year's eaters included: my mom, dad, brother, brother's fiancee, brother's roommate, aunt and uncle (and of course me). It's safe to say we had a full table.

Preparation started the day before. My aunt and uncle came over to my apartment at around 9 a.m. to make our family cinnamon rolls as a surprise for my dad's birthday which happened to land on Thanksgiving this year. I got up early to get some of the cooking done ahead of time so I could talk to my relatives without neglecting my food babies.

I frosted the turkey birthday cake (it only looked like a turkey, I didn't think the family would be ready for a cake that tasted like turkey, but maybe next year...), boiled and mashed the sweet potatoes and started the pumpkin torte. That's when I encountered my first problem. I couldn't understand the recipe, it seemed like steps were missing and for all I know, it could have been written in another language. Luckily, my aunt is fluent in confusing recipes and explained it to me a language I can understand: simple-ese.

Later that day on the eve of Thanksgiving, I decided that our spread was lacking something. Sure, we had turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, corn, green bean casserole, squash, sweet potatoes, cinnamon rolls, cranberry sauce, fudge (oh yeah, I made that too!), turkey birthday cake and pumpkin torte. As I was driving away from my parents house to the grocery store to pick up some things I forgot to buy the other three times I was at the grocery store, it dawned on me: we didn't have any pie. I'm not sure why I didn't think of it earlier, my mom subtlety mentioned it several times before because that's one of her favorite desserts.

Standing in the grocery store, I googled "easy pie recipes" on my phone. I wanted to make something with blackberries but I thought my mom would want something with apples so I compromised with a blackberry-apple pie with a latticed top. How hard could that be?

The next five or so hours were spent peeling, washing, coring, slicing, dicing, folding, kneading, mixing, spreading, baking and cooling (not necessarily in that order). There also was a lot of spilling, standing, sweating (not in the food of course), tasting and maybe a bit of swearing. Then I scrubbed, washed and dried the messiest kitchen I'd even seen in my life.

The food turned out delicious, my family was full and satisfied so in the end it was worth it. I took a bunch of pictures of the food and saved them here. I forgot to get quotes from our guests so I'll end with this one:

"This Thanksgiving food was the best I've ever tasted. It must have been cooked by highly skilled chef." ~Alissa