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Thanksgiving Wrap Up

I always thought it would be fun to be a chef. Now I know otherwise.

My cousins and I were charged with the responisbility ot making Thanksgiving dinner for the whole family. So being the ambitious food lovers that we are we decided to make lots of delicious food.

-Prime Rib with a rosemary/tyme rub and a dipping sauce (I would spell it, but it's french)
-Duck stuffed with onions, garlic, and leek
-Goose stuffed with onions, garlic, and leek
-Mashed Potatoes with roasted garlic and leek
-Stuffing
-Chinese Vegetables with mushrooms
-Clam Chowder
-Christmas Rice (it's sticky rice with chinese sausage, green onions, dried shrimp. called christmas rice cause it's green and red)
-Baked yams
-Tiramisu

Naturally, we made everything from scratch, from the lady fingers in the tiramisu to the rub on the prime ribs. Everything was freshly made (except for the bread in the stuffing cause well... you're supposed to use stale bread).

So to get a head start on the cooking, we prepped Wednesday. We made the clam chowder, prepped all the meat and just generally planned for the next day which we knew was going to be hectic.

Thanksgiving roles around and it's showtime. Tiramisu was the first order of business. With it out of the way, we would have more counter space. First problem arises, no lemon juice. Shouldn't be a problem, right? Wrong. Egg whites won't hold without the acid from the lemon juice, so we wasted our first batch of eggs. Good thing we bought 36... So we run out to get lemons and the tiramisu is on its way.

Next in line is the turkey, which needs a nice heat treatment. It's prepped from last night and is ready to go into the oven when... crap... no rack to put the goose on... We run home and pick up a rack and problem 2 is solved.

Once the goose is almost done, we take it out and put the duck in. We intentionally left the goose half done so we could reheat before serving without drying it out. That, my friends, is called planning ahead (of course all the timing stuff was done by my cousin, not me. I'm not that cool). Next, the duck cooks and dinner is coming together pretty well.

Finally, in goes the prime rib in all it's rosemary glory. While it was in the oven, we made our extremely creamy whipped mashed potatoes. Our stuffing came together with the wonderful binding agent we call chicken stock. And the vegetables got a good pan frying. The yams rented some space in the oven with the prime rib and everything was set to go.

All in all, everything came together quite well. It was a long a tedious day, but it was lots of fun. Being together with the family is simply wonderful.

posted by Edward Young @ 5:47 PM