Thanksgiving!

I worked again this year on Thanksgiving, and the day after. Normally our work meal is quite impressive. This year it consisted of Honey Baked Ham's ham and turkey breast, pre-made mac & cheese, pre-made potato salad, my homemade cranberry, and cafeteria food. It was not the picturesque day, but it was a nice day as far as the actual work was concerned.

Family Thanksgiving occurred yesterday. Nick and I rubbed our 16 pound bird, stashed it in the smoker, and commenced the cooking. I made a pumpkin pie and corn bread. Nick worked on prepping the green beans, arugula salad, potatoes, and stuffing. While he finished the later, I finished the former. Mom brought the cranberry, and Melissa brought wine and herself. (She's studying for finals!)

While the first Thanksgiving might have been riddled with unpleasantries augmented to smooth the rough edges of British settlement, I believe the present day celebration is different. With the passage of time, Americans have turned Thanksgiving into their own day. I believe the focus on family time is a central theme. No matter what you serve, or who is there, the together-time fills the special day with grace.

We had quite the spread. I have to say, and I really looking forward to eating the leftovers for lunch the next week. I think the pumpkin pie recipe I made was pretty fabulous, so here it is.

Olivia's Easy Pumpkin Pie
Ingredients:
pre-made pie crust
1 can pumpkin
1 can evaporated milk
3 eggs, lightly beaten
2 tablespoons brandy
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon (1 pinch) clove
1/3 cup tightly packed and a little bit mounded over brown sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Combine all of the ingredients in a large bowl. Using an electric mixer, whisk until the ingredients are well combined. Pour into your pie shell and bake for about an hour, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

Smoked Turkey

I almost always work Thanksgiving. This year is no exception. Instead of celebrating on Thursday, Nick and I host GF Thanksgiving on the next available day. Since we have this wonderful smoker, we thought we would start practicing our turkey cooking skills. For tonight's dinner, we had turkey, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce.

We did not marinate the turkey overnight, as we decided this morning to fix a bird. We used the same rub as GF Thanksgiving 2008. Then we placed the turkey in the smoker and cooked it on medium-high for about 3 hours. I think we overcooked it just a bit. Next time we will cook it a bit differently. I am thinking about cooking it at a lower temperature with hourly basting, and making sure the meat thermometer is in it. (We forgot the thermometer this round.) We also did not stuff it with extra herbs or fruit. This may have helped the turkey to have more moisture in it's environment and for the drippings to be less fatty.

Making gravy GF is still a bit of a mystery. The gravy seems to turn out thicker. The rue just is not the same. I'll have to do some more research. I'd really appreciate anyone's comments. We saved some of the drippings to mess around with later on.

In the spirit of fall, I also made pumpkin bread. I guess what I really made was a loaf of pumpkin bread and 6 pumpkin break muffins. The recipe seemed a little odd to me, because of the seeds, but it is just great. My favorite part is the "crust." I needed 2 cups of flour, but only had about 1.75 of the Arrowhead Mills All-purpose baking flour. I topped off the last bit with GF Bisquick. The Bisquick might have helped the loaf to come out a bit smoother. I find that the Arrowhead Mills leaves a trace of grit or aftertaste or something. I also used 1/5 cans of Libby's pumpkin. The rest of the pumpkin will be re purposed for breakfast parfait. You should try out this easy recipe, complementary (again) of FootNetwork.com/Alton Brown. If Alton Brown happens to ever read this, I would like him to know I have a little crush on him. He's charismatic, smart, and cooks amazingly well. (Too bad it couldn't work out between us.) Oh, and for the record, this bread goes great with a cup of spiced mate tea. Mmmmm!

Pumpkin Bread
by Alton Brown

Cook Time: 1hr 15min Level: Easy Yield: 1 loaf or 1 1/2 dozen small muffins
Times: Prep: 20min Inactive Prep: --

Ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 3/4 cup vegetable oil
• 3 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3 cups shredded fresh pumpkin
• 1 cup toasted pumpkin seeds

Directions

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.

Sift the flour, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together.

In a separate bowl, mix the sugar, vegetable oil, eggs, and vanilla. Combine both mixtures and fold in the shredded pumpkin and pumpkin seeds. Once the ingredients are all incorporated pour into a non- stick 9 by 5 by 3-inch loaf pan. If your pan is not non- stick coat it with butter and flour.

Bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes. At this point a knife inserted into the middle of the loaf should come out clean. Cool for 15 minutes and turn out onto a cooling rack. Cool completely. For muffins temperature should also be 325 degrees F., but bake for 30 minutes.

Pumpkin Parfait

I really am not a fan of always working 3 12-hour shifts in a row (the exception would be if I worked nights). Really, one 3-in-a-row week here or there is fine with me, because it means a longer weekend (even though I am useless on my first day off afterward). I worked Wednesday through Friday this week. On Friday I changed into street clothes as fast as possible, layered myself in smell-goods, and drove off into the sunset for dinner at Ted's Montana Grill and a concert at the Civic Center.

My chicken soup and salad held me through lunch, and the pumpkin and granola parfait I made for my afternoon snack re-energized me while I was charting admission assessments or between med passes. I stole the recipe from the February issue of Fitness magazine and made it gluten and lactose-free.

Pumpkin and Granola Parfait
1 container (6 ounces) plain [or vanilla] low-fat [goat milk] yogurt
2 teaspoons honey
1/4 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice [*see my combo below]
1 [handful of GF granola, or about the same amount as one crumbled granola bar]
1/2 cup canned pumpkin

Mix together yogurt, honey and pumpkin-pie spice. In a bowl, layer yogurt mixture, granola bar crumbs and pumpkin.


Pumpkin Pie Spice
make a little container of this, and save some for future creations.

1 part cloves
2 parts ginger
4 parts cinnamon

(Ex: 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves)


The remaining part of the weekend was a typically busy weekend in A-Town. Saturday we laid low, ending the day with pasta night at a friend's new place. I tried the Tinkyada white rice spaghetti, which is quite good. It tastes just like gluten-containing pasta, imagine that. While the white rice version is good, I am smitten with their spinach spaghetti. GF Italians everywhere are declaring it molto bene, I'm sure.

Sunday we went to my favorite brunch spot, R. Thomas, for another amazing brunch. Nick and I ran a few errands in Buckhead, took the scenic route by the mansions off Paces Ferry home, danced in Nick's living room, saw seeing STOMP (ah-mazing! in-credible!) at the fabulous Fox Theatre, and topped it off with the second half of the Superbowl. Now that it's Monday all over again, I have to come down from such a great weekend slowly, and ease myself into preparing a few more delicious meals this week.

Gluten-Free Thanksgiving

On Friday, Nick and I had our first Thanksgiving together- we cooked a full dinner.

After doing a few weeks' worth of research, we came up with recipes for turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. We chose to make green beans as our vegetable, and my roomate made mashed potatoes.

I let out 14 pound bird brine in salt/sugar mixture in a cooler in my refrigerator over night. In the morning, we made a spice rub with coriander seeds, white pepper corns, and fennel seeds. Since we'd never cooked a turkey before, we had to overcome a few hurdles. None of the recipes we read included the key "hints" necessary to bake a flawless turkey, such as:
1. Covering the bird with tin foil during the first few hours, and leaving the thighs/wings covered most of the time, holds in the moisture.
2. When you put a rub on the turkey, be sure to do it on a prep surface separate from the roasting pan, as the seeds use in the rub burn when left in the bottom of the pan and may smoke up your entire apartment.
3. Somewhere in the low 300's is an ideal temperature. (Nobody seemed to agree on this.)

None the less, our turkey was delicious, especially the skin. Nick's gravy was made from the turkey broth we boiled with the neck and giblets, the drippings, and a rue. It turned out a little lumpy, but still tasty. Our green beans were steamed and buttered. Sarah made the mashed potatoes with butter and G-F chicken broth. (Thank you Pacific and Imagine companies for inventing pre-made G-F broth.) The cranberry sauce was a bag of fresh cranberries, a cup of orange juice, a cup of sugar, and a tablespoon of orange rind. For dessert, we ate pumpkin pie and cider. I made the pie following the Libby's recipe on the back of the pumpkin can, substituting the Carnation milk with condensed goat's milk (using extra brown sugar and vanilla to cut the goat taste), and baked it in a G-F pie crust from Whole Foods. I made the cider in a crock pot- 1 bottle of apple juice, 3 cinnamon sticks, and an orange/clove ball set on high while we ate.

I am still loving the leftovers; extra turkey dinner will go with me to work the next two days. I can't wait until next year when we can do it all again! Even my mother called me the next day to compliment us on our presentation, good cooking, and a wonderful time.