Thanksgiving

For food fanatics like us, Thanksgiving isn't so much a holiday as an event/food extravaganza. We look forward to this day all year long, and eagerly await the week's worth of turkey sandwiches afterward. After five years of Thanksgiving dinners together, we've got our family meal down pat, but this year we also branched out a bit and tried a few new things.

No one wants to spend all day putting together the meals and then doing dishes, so a significant amount of the prep-work actually gets done the day before. The green been casserole, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and deviled eggs are assembled and refrigerated until the next day.

To start off with, Megan slices up the maple bacon for the green bean casserole, which is pan fried for a few minutes.



While we're throwing thin slices of bacon in the pan, the eggs for the deviled eggs are boiling and we're cooking up the cranberries, which will be refrigerated over night. Don't use that gross canned cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving - bagged cranberries aren't that expensive and don't take much effort to cook up.


After the bacon has cooked up a bit, it's tossed with a whole lot of green beans. We also picked up a few tin pans at the store so there would be fewer dishes. They also serve as an easy way to store the leftovers without having to use an extra tupperware dish.


Next up is the cream of mushroom soup to finish off the green bean casserole. At this stage it's oven-ready, so it waits in the fridge until the actual day of Thanksgiving.


Here's the peeled and cubed sweet potatoes getting a nice warm bath!


Thanksgiving isn't Thanksgiving without eating more deviled eggs than is really necessary. Weirdly, Matt doesn't like deviled eggs - which just means more for everyone else! This year we actually didn't make that many, as our friends Glen and Cristal make two delicious varieties and brought them over for dinner.


Here Megan is filling a cooked egg white with the devil egg filling, which uses mustard and the liquid from the olive jar.


Slices of olive and dashes of paprika finished off our deviled eggs for a nice presentation.


After boiling, the sweet potatoes cover a layer of marshmallows.


On top of that goes a generous layer of brown sugar.


And then finally there's butter and pecans added. Like the casserole, it's now oven ready, and is stowed away in the fridge for the night.


The morning of Thanksgiving (after getting the newspaper for the Black Friday ads!) we start the prep work for the turkey. Inspired by the show "Take Home Chef," we changed up our turkey spices this year and decided to do a butter rub. First off we finely diced whole garlic cloves and fresh sage.


Here's the finished pile of herbs and garlic, which smell simply fantastic, and really got our appetites up for the big event.

The herbs are mixed in to melted butter so the whole mixture can be rubbed in-between the skin and the meat of the turkey, which seasons the bird and gives the skin a different texture than normal.


Here the butter and herbs are thrown together just before getting mixed up.


The final product (while looking deceptively like spinach and artichoke dip somehow!) has an amazing aroma and gives the turkey a flavor that's to die for.


We got our biggest turkey ever this year, weighing in at a whopping 22 pounds. Albertson's ran a sale where the bird was 49 cents a pound if you bought another $25 worth of food. That was a no brainer for us, since we needed other Thanksgiving supplies anyway.


Megan and the guys really aren't fans of the neck, heart, liver, etc, but I like them as a change of pace from the standard turkey flavor, so we stuffed them inside the cavity to cook along with the bird.


Here's the turkey after applying the butter mixture. We pulled the skin up (Literally just pull up the edge of the skin with your finger, and then shove your hand under the skin and push back until the skin comes up from the meat. It's messy, but worth it.) and rubbed the mixture underneath, and then applied the leftovers to the top of the skin as well. For better cooking and to retain more moisture, the bird got hog tied with kitchen string.


Normally the turkey is our only meat dish on Thanksgiving, but this year we wanted to spice things up and have something fun to snack on while cooking, so I also got a big platter of shrimp and cocktail sauce.


To go to another level entirely, we also picked up a spiral ham at Sam's Club, which comes with a honey glaze. Here's the ham before applying the glaze.


Things are starting to come together and the oven time is about to begin. Here's the table with some veggie snacks and some of the dishes getting ready to hit the oven.


Glen made two different kinds of deviled eggs: chipotle bacon, and garlic with herb mayo. These most definitely are not your standard deviled eggs, and pack a huge flavor not usually found in this classic dish.


There has to be mashed potatoes, of course, and here's an unbelievable 10 pounds of them peeled, cubed, boiled, and waiting to be whipped up.


Stuffing is another tradition that we gleefully follow. In addition to the bread component, we saute various vegetables in butter before baking.


Just before putting the green been casserole and sweet potatoes in the oven, the casserole gets topped with french fried onions.


Here's the finished casserole, fresh out of the oven. By this point we were out of counter space, so our gaming table got put to good use.


Here I'm applying the honey glaze in-between each layer of the spiral sliced ham.


Gadzooks! The food is almost ready and Jacob is bamboozled by it's glory!


The ham comes out of the oven first, glazed and baked to perfection. Slices of spiral ham make an excellent sandwich the next day with miracle whip and cranberry mustard.

Here's the turkey coming out of the oven, which it turned out was a two-man job!


We use a cooking bag with the turkey, which seriously cuts down the cooking time and also keeps all the juices inside. Rather than using store bought gravy, we cut a hole in the bag and pour all the juice out into a pan.

Here's the juice from the turkey, which is already seasoned to perfection. Some flour and a little simmer time turns it into some of the best turkey gravy you'll ever have.


And here's some shots of the turkey about to get sliced. If you've ever wondered the best way to slice a turkey - it's actually really easy. Slide the knife into the center and cut down so you cut the bone in half. The turkey will naturally segment into two sides so you can easily cut off diagnal slices on either side.








That's a whole lot of turkey, and as you can imagine, it didn't all get eaten that night, even with friends over to help out. Plates of leftovers and turkey sandwiches are the order for the next few days. When we get tired of that, Megan uses what's left to make a big turkey pot pie.

Now that all the Thanksgiving festivities have calmed down and the leftovers are gone, we can get back to our normal weekly meals. We're going to be trying out some new meals using vegetables such as spaghetti squash and corn in the coming weeks, so check back soon for more delicious adventures in cooking!

Sampling the foods of Portland

We're taking a little side trek from the Great Dinner Retrospective this week because we took a trip to Portland with Megan's brothers. Any trip to a town that amazing has also got to include some amazing meals. Unfortunately we didn't get to sample everything we wanted to, missing out on a fun restaurant we heard about that only serves variations on the grilled cheese sandwich and the Voodoo Doughnut shop, but still got to try a lot of amazing meals.

Living in Montana, there are a good number of fast food and chain restaurants we miss out on, so we wanted to hit some of those in addition to nice sit down places. Megan and I both share a love of Long John Silver's, although she's a fan of the chicken and I like the fish. We haven't had a chance to visit that particular chain for years, so we stopped in at one in Spokane and had some deep fried goodness.


When we finally arrived in Portland and got all settled into the hotel, it was time for a little dinner at Red Robin, which was right across the street from our room. Red Robin may not be too exciting for some, but it's another place we don't get access to very often. For anyone not familiar with this chain, it has the same general idea as Applebees or Chilis, but with a bigger emphasis on burgers and fries. Here's Matt and Jake enjoying some drinks.



After the extremely heavy fish and shrimp from lunch, I decided to go a little lighter than the standard burger fare and got a spinach wrap with whiskey BBQ chicken, which was exceedingly delicious, especially for a chain restaurant.


Megan went with the BLTA croissant. You can see in the picture below that they serve their meals with fries and melon slices, which is a fun twist on an old standard.


The next morning we headed over to a mall a few blocks from our hotel. All the shopping got me a little peckish, so I decided to try a sushi place in the food court (another staple of big malls we don't get to enjoy often). I went with a BBQ eel roll, which wasn't spectacular, but definitely a fun little snack before moving onto to something more substantial.


For our dinner that day we went to the Rogue brewery, which was picked specifically by Megan because of their great beers. We had the "need-a-mint" pizza (many apologies, but somehow we didn't get a picture of it!), which uses whole garlic cloves as a main topping. There is, of course, beer in the pizza crust. Megan and Jake also got the beer sampler, which consists of four beers from the 40+ menu options brewed right there. Some of the more interesting beers include one brewed with chamomile tea, one brewed with spicy chipotle, and one that tastes like dark chocolate.


On our last day we got brave and spent more time traveling the Max train and found another fun mall with an amazing food court. I went with sushi again, this time trying a Philadelphia roll, which uses smoked salmon and cream cheese.


Our lunch was just around the corner at the Rock Bottom Brewery, which was an unplanned stop at a place we randomly stumbled upon while wandering downtown. The "Titan Toothpick" appetizer immediately caught my eye, but I didn't realize until they arrived that "Titan Toothpick" wasn't just a cute name - it was a completely appropriate title! Matt is holding up his fork to show how big they are. I had the "Bourbonzola" burger, which uses a glaze of bourbon and Gorgonzola. The brewery gives four different options for any burger (beef, turkey, chicken, or veggie), and I decided to go with the veggie burger, which they make from scratch. I'm glad I went that route, as their take on a veggie burger was amazingly tasty and had just the right texture and consistency.


For our final dinner in Portland we went to Kell's Irish Pub. Megan and Matt enjoyed the restaurant immensely in our Seattle trip, so it was a place we really wanted to try again. Here we're enjoying a few drinks before our meals.


I tried the oyster shooters, which had oysters and cocktail sauce in shot glasses, and also got the Irish Double Decker, which has corned beef and turkey with a horseradish sauce.


Megan had the Ballycastle Sausage rolls, which were served over a bed of mashed potatoes. Talk about amazing pub fare!


On our way home we stopped in Spokane again, but this time wanted to go with a sit down mexican place. At the Azteca restaurant I picked the seafood chimichanga, which had just about every type of seafood you can imagine stuffed inside.


To make up for the missed pizza picture from the Rogue Brewery, we put together our own take on that delicious pie for dinner tonight. Usually we make our own crust and sauce, but today we decided to go with pre-made Boboli crust and sauce to make it a little simpler. To start off with, Megan put on slices of mozzarella and provolone, and fresh basil.

Next she layered on a few slices of pepperoni for color contrast and to get a little meat on a primarily vegetable based pizza.

On top of that went cherry tomatoes and garlic cloves, which were baked with butter and herbs prior to topping the pizza to ensure they wouldn't be to hard.

This is the beautiful sight that awaited us when the oven door opened and the scent of baked garlic and basil wafted out.

For a full meal we put together a side salad using some of the left over pepperoni and cherry tomatoes, as well as baked green beans and chili-lime pumpkin seeds I bought in Portland.

And that's all for our Portland meals! Check back next week for the next entry in our dinner retrospective.