Cooking for a Holiday - Thanksgiving, Part VIII - Three Days Before

Today I'm going to do one thing.  I'm going to roll out the pie crusts with the dough I made about a week and a half ago.

First thing this morning, I took the dough out of the fridge, where it's been waiting.  It should be at, or near, room temperature.  This takes about an hour or two.

The next thing I did was pull out the two new 9-inch deep dish pie plates I bought last year at Mariano's for $10 each, which was a quarter of the price that I saw them going for at the fancy kitchen store.  Pretty much the same dish, so why so cheap?  I'll tell you why.  Because I just spent a half an hour peeling off all the labels and price tags which were stuck on there like they wanted them to survive a zombie apocalypse.  Can someone please explain to me why companies do this?  It's like, why do they put scratchy tags on the back of the neck of a shirt?  And why are there seams on socks?  Right at the toe?  

Never mind, I just figured out it was water-soluble.  Too late for my nails, though.

Now, for those of you who hyperventilate at the thought of rolling out a pie crust, relax.  I've got some secrets:  

Secret #1:  I never put a crust on top of my pies.  I don't have the patience.  Fortunately, I make pumpkin and pecan pies for Thanksgiving, and neither of them need a crust on top.  So the only visible part of my pie crust is the rim and that's easy.  Seriously, NOBODY is going to see the mistakes, only taste the deliciousness.

Secret #2:  The King Arthur All-Butter Pie Crust.  If you made this, per my recommendation (you should listen to me), rolling out the dough is the easiest thing you're ever gonna do in your life.

You need a rolling pin.  If you don't have a rolling pin, you can use a wine bottle.  If you don't have a wine bottle, we're not friends.  Stop reading this and go away.

I roll out my dough on a big cutting board.  Put some flour on the board and rub some flour on the rolling pin.  Put the disk of dough on the board.  Now, working in one direction, from the center of the disk outward, go around the disk forming it into a big circle of dough.  It has to be about four inches across bigger than your pie pan, so about 13 inches across.  Gently wrap the circle of dough around your rolling pin and carefully unfold it on top of the pan.  Put some flour on your fingers and push it down and against the sides and rim.

Dip a fork into flour and press the dough down around the rim.  Keep dipping as necessary.  It should look pretty, and this helps to keep the dough from shrinking down into the pan when the pie is baking.  

Now take a sharp knife and trim off any excess dough.  Wrap the pie pans in Saran wrap and put them in the fridge.

Ecco!  That's it.  Aren't they things of beauty?  Could Martha Stewart do better?  Well, yeah, maybe.  But I could crochet a better poncho.

Tomorrow we bake!

  

Cooking for a Holiday - Thanksgiving, Part VII - Four Days Before

Roll up your sleeves.

Today, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, begins the real work.  I'm going to make the cranberry sauce, and while that's cooking, I'm going to chop up the bread for the turkey stuffing. 

I finished shopping for ingredients, including the cranberries and the bread, on Friday and good thing I did.  Because yesterday, in addition to FINALLY getting the freaking stitches removed from my (first) oral surgery, we got hit by the biggest November snowstorm in 120 years.  So it would have been a bad day for shopping, but that didn't stop me from going to the store on my way back from the periodontist's to pick up a bottle of whiskey.  (Don't judge, unless you've ever had half your mouth stitched up for two weeks.)  Unfortunately for my capodost of a husband, Anthony, my mouth was then free to yell at him for not buying a new snowblower this year.  Right on time.  

But now I am ready.  In theory, I shouldn't have to leave the house until December 1st.  At the earliest.  Which is fine by me.  Everything's at my fingertips.  Including the whiskey.  

Cranberry Sauce

Put 2 1/2 cups of sugar and 3 cups of water in a big pot.  Cook and stir the sugar water over medium high heat until it goes from white-and-cloudy to clear.  Then bring it to a boil.  Turn down the heat a little and let it simmer for 10 minutes.  Rinse 3 bags of fresh cranberries (remove the really deformed ones and any sticks/twigs/spiders you might find) and put them in the pot with the water.  Bring to a boil and turn down to a simmer again.  Cook the cranberries for about an hour, uncovered, which is about five times longer than any other recipe will tell you.  Stir now and then.  The sauce thickens up, but don't wait for it to turn into jelly, like the canned stuff, because it won't.  Now, turn off the heat and stir in a big bag of frozen raspberries, the ones without sugar.  Ladle the sauce into some plastic containers, let cool, cover the containers, and put them in the fridge until Thanksgiving.  Done.

While the cranberry sauce is cooking, you can chop up your stuffing bread.  I chop up 3 big loaves of cheap white bread, into 1-inch cubes.  More or less.  Depends on my mood.

I'm going to lay out two options on how to do the bread:

Option #1:  You can cut it up into little squares and toast it.  In baking pans.  Then tie it up in plastic bags and set it aside until Thanksgiving morning.  I never do this.  It's boring.  And just one more thing to go wrong.

Option #2:  This is what I do.  I get two big brown grocery bags.  I put my cut-up bread into one of them and put the other bag over the top of the first one.  Like a condom.  Then, once or twice a day I go into the bag and toss the bread around a bit with my hands.  The paper bags let the bread get nice and stale by Thanksgiving morning, without going moldy.

Your choice.  And just so you know, Anthony has brought it to my attention that people who live in the American Midwest (which includes us) have taken to chopping up White Castle sliders and using them (instead of bread) for their turkey stuffing.  Personally, I never heard of this, but I confess that, after an initial wave of revulsion, it occurred to me that it would taste good.

One more thing.  If you cooked and froze your pumpkin in 2-cup containers, take one of them down and put it in the fridge.  Pie-baking is Tuesday.  It should be defrosted by then.

Me, too, I hope.

Cooking for a Holiday - Thanksgiving, Part VI - The Schedule

At this point, the pumpkin is cooked, pureed, and waiting in the freezer for its moment of glory.  Half the shopping has been done.  The pie crust is in the fridge.  The turkey is on order.  And starting next Saturday, the pace picks up, and that means we need a schedule.  Seriously, write it down on your calendar.  It'll give you a sense of control.

The schedule:

Saturday before Thanksgiving:  Shop for perishable ingredients i.e., everything else on the shopping list that you haven't already bought.

Sunday before Thanksgiving:  Make cranberry sauce.  Chop up the bread for the stuffing.  Take a container of pumpkin out of the freezer and put it in the fridge to defrost.

Monday before Thanksgiving:  Roll out pie crusts and line pie pans. 

Tuesday before Thanksgiving:  Bake pies.

Thanksgiving Eve:  Pick up turkey from the butcher.  Prepare sweet potatoes.  Prepare vegetables for stuffing.

 

Don't worry, I'll tell you how to do all this stuff.  Now, if you do it all according to the schedule, here's what you have left to do on Thanksgiving Day:

Put bird in oven.

Assemble and bake stuffing.

Make mashed potatoes.

Make succotash.

Make gravy.

Bake sweet potatoes.

Whip cream (after dinner, while enjoying a nice Sambuca) for pies.

Make coffee.

This sounds like a lot, but it's not, because you've prepared everything ahead of time and you're (mostly) just assembling the ingredients and throwing stuff in the oven.  The succotash isn't much harder than cooking frozen vegetables, gravy is fast and brain-dead easy, my kids can whip the cream, and my husband, Anthony, can peel potatoes and put them in a pot of water before the football games start.  Yeah, there's a few things to do, but overall you should be on cruise-control.  I don't even have a lot of clean up at the end of the day, because I bake everything in aluminum foil baking pans which go right from the table into the fridge after dinner.  I don't give a damn about how my "table" looks.  If you're looking at my dishes instead of my food, you're missing the point and I'm going to guess that happens to you a lot.

Anthony does the dishes (at halftime), since he won't buy me a dishwasher.  Well, he would, if I really pressed the point, but he would view it as moral weakness.  I kid you not.  If we ever meet up for a drink, I'll tell you the story about the electric can opener.

 

Cooking for a Holiday - Thanksgiving, Part V - Two Weeks Before

Okay, let's do a recap.

Thanksgiving is 13 days away.  So far, I've got:

1. the menu planned;
2. the non-perishables bought;
3. the pumpkin cooked; and
4. the turkey ordered.

And today I'm making pie crust.  Not rolling it out, just making the dough.  It's easy.  I promise.  Why would I lie? 

Apologies in advance:  I should have told you to buy a pastry cutter, but I didn't.  If you don't know what a pastry cutter is, forget about it, it's not strictly necessary.  You can get the same result using two butter knives and - literally - cut the butter into the flour.  And just to show you what kind of person I am, I'm going to use the butter knives, too, in solidarity.  Pastry cutters are a pain in the ass to clean, anyway, and slicing stuff up with knives is always a good time.

I used to use the all-purpose pie crust recipe from the Joy of Cooking.  Then, last year, I stumbled on the freaking HOLY GRAIL of pie crusts:  the King Arthur Flour All-Butter Pie Crust recipe, and damn! I am never going back.

You could just Google this recipe, but I'll give it to you here, too.  It looks a little weird - 16 tablespoons of butter??? - but trust me.  It rolls out like a dream and tastes like heaven.  I consider finding this recipe (thank you, St. Anthony!) one of the high points of my life.  Which tells you something about my life.

Here are the ingredients:

2 1/2 cups of unbleached, all-purpose flour

1 tsp of salt

16 Tbl of cold butter (real butter, please)

1/4 to 1/2 cup of ice water 

(Notice that most of these ingredients are cold.  It makes for a flakier crust.)

Now here's what you do:

Put the flour in a big bowl.  Stir in the salt.  Cut the butter into little pieces, and put it in the flour.  Work the butter into the flour (using a pastry cutter, two butter knives, your fingers, whatever) until it's all crumbly.

When you've got a bowl full of crumbly butter and flour, sprinkle the water all over it.  Start with the 1/4 cup and use more if you need to.  Then take your rings off and start playing with the dough until you can make one large dough ball.  Knead it a few times.  (If it doesn't come together right away, add a little more water and keep smooshing.  You'll get there.)  But as soon as you get your ball, stop kneading the dough and form it into a disk.  That way, you're halfway there when you roll it out for the pie.  Wrap the disk up real good in plastic wrap or something, put it into a plastic container with a tight seal, and put it in the fridge.  It'll be fine in there for about two weeks or until you're ready to bake your pies, whichever comes first (you can freeze it, too, no worries).  When you're ready to use the dough, take it out of the fridge and let it warm up at room temperature until it behaves.

I make a double recipe because I make two pies.  Two 9-inch, deep dish pies.  Don't made dinky pies.  They're not impressive.

That's it for today.  I got other things to do.  Like have a glass of wine, which I richly deserve, because I am a righteous, Thanksgiving-dinner-cooking sister.

I told you this would be easy.

 

Cooking for a Holiday - Thanksgiving, Part IV - Go!

It's time to go shopping.

Actually it's always time to go shopping.  And thank God for thrift shops because if they didn't exist I'd be living in a cardboard box by now. 

This is guilt-free shopping, though.  It's everything you're going to need to cook your (my) Thanksgiving dinner.  I save my list on the computer and just print it out every year.  I was going to divide it into two parts for you, perishables and non-perishables, but I'm just going to assume that you're smart enough to figure that out on your own.

If you're not smart enough to know that you shouldn't buy the fresh parsley three weeks before you make the stuffing, then you need more help than I can give you.  Likewise, the following list takes for granted that you already have basic things like salt and pepper in your kitchen.  And bowls and spoons.  If you don’t, call your mom, and ask her advice.  She’ll be thrilled. 

So print this out, start buying the stuff as soon as it's reasonable, and check things off as you go along. 

 

Connie Staccato's Thanksgiving Shopping List

Turkey - 16 to 18 lbs.  Order a fresh one at least two weeks ahead.  (To be honest, if it were up to me, I would just buy a multitude of turkey legs, wings, and thighs, and skip the whole carving routine.  I get pushback on this, though.)

Turkey gravy – 8 pkgs (for your leftovers; no, you are not going to serve this stuff on Thanksgiving)

Large foil roasting pans - 2

Medium size foil roasting pan

Small square roasting pans - 4

Cheap, nasty white bread - 3 large packages

Onions - 2 large

Celery - 1 bunch

Parsley - 1 bunch

Unbleached white flour

Canned pumpkin - 1 large (in case you didn't feel like cooking your own)

Chopped pecans - 1 large bag

Light corn syrup - 1 bottle

White sugar - 1 bag

Brown sugar - 1 package (you're not going to use much)

Baking potatoes - 8 (or more, if you're feeding an army)

Sweet potatoes - 3
Lemon - 1

Marshmallows - 1 bag

Baby lima beans, frozen - 1 large bag

Sweet corn, frozen - 1 large bag

Cranberries - 3 bags

Raspberries, frozen - 1 large bag

Whipping cream - 6 small cartons

Butter - 4 lbs

Half and half - enough for all the coffee

Booze - wine, whiskey, Galliano, whatever (I buy this last, or I'd drink it all)

I bought all my non-perishables last week.  Good thing, because I had oral surgery yesterday.  After that I was flat on my back all day, cursing the saints and the woman who gave birth to my periodontist, and today my right jaw is swollen up to the size of a grapefruit.  Which might cause people to wonder if my husband, Anthony, decked me, though people who know us wouldn't think that for a minute, because his face is still intact.

Oral surgery or no, I'm still on schedule.

And that's how it should be.

Cooking for a Holiday - Thanksgiving, Part III - The Menu

Just so you know what you cooked all that pumpkin for, here's the menu:

Connie Staccato's Thanksgiving Dinner

Roast Turkey

Nanna's Stuffing

Gravy (for the bird, not what the Napolitani mean by gravy)

Mashed Potatoes

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Succotash

Cranberry Sauce

Pumpkin Pie

Pecan Pie

Whipped Cream 

Coffee

Vino

Sambuca, Galliano, Amaretto, etc.

That's what we're having.  You can do whatever you want.  Shopping lists and recipes will be provided.  I don't do appetizers, because people usually want to bring stuff and that's a good thing for them to bring.  I don't have the patience for appetizers, and Lord knows with all this food you don't really need one, although my son, Nino, once made this really nice stuff with figs and goat's cheese and honey that I wouldn't mind if he made again.  But usually the anchovy-stuffed olive from my martini is enough for me.

Speaking of martinis:  I think it's only fair to warn you that, if you're the cook, you should save the drinking for later.  Maybe a little wine, but that's it.  

Vodka doesn't mix well with knives.  Especially if you're Sicilian.  My husband, Anthony, stabbed me in the leg with a carving knife last Thanksgiving and he wasn't even drinking!  True story.  It was an accident.

So he said.

  

Cooking for a Holiday - Thanksgiving, Part II - Get Set

In the United States of America, Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of November.  If that's confusing, take heart in knowing that someday Thanksgiving will be moved to a convenient nearby Monday, to take the mystery out of whether your stoonahd of a boss is going to let you have a four-day weekend or not. 

I'm not insulting your intelligence when I tell you this.  You obviously can read.  But I’m not taking any chances.  Not once, in the 34 years of my marriage, has a year gone by that I don't have to tell my husband, Anthony, when Thanksgiving is.  And he always acts surprised. 

Anyway, Thanksgiving will be here in just a little more than four weeks.  I start cooking today.

"But Connie," you might ask, "what kind of an idiot starts cooking Thanksgiving dinner four weeks ahead of time?"

This kind of idiot.  Right here.  In fact, I recommend getting started on your first day off after Halloween.  Every year.  It's psychologically important.  I always feel like I'm getting a jump on the holidays, instead of letting them sneak up on me.  It keeps the panic to a minimum.

Look, it's a BIG freaking meal.  I got enough agita.  And I'm busy, because Christmas is coming, too.  You gotta take it slow.  One small (but brilliant) step at a time.  The whole point of "Connie Staccato Stuffs a Turkey" is to learn how to do holidays with as little grief as possible.  Because, you know, you might actually want to enjoy them.

So that means we've got to start now.  Trust me.  Remember those pumpkins I told you to buy?  

Go get them.

First, wash them in the sink.  Just to keep dirt from flying around in your oven.  I don't know if dirt does that, but just in case.  Pat the pumpkins dry.  And roll up your sleeves.

You're going to need a big cutting board, a couple of your biggest baking pans, and a BIG-ass pointy knife.  Lay the pumpkin on its side and cut it in half, width-wise, along the equator.  This is the hard part, and the first cut is the hardest (just sort of stab it, but carefully).  Then slowly work your way around.  It kind of breaks in two after a while.  Now, scrape the innards out of the pumpkin halves.  If you've got kids, or a husband whose got nothing better to do, they can separate the seeds out of the slimy stuff and you can toast them in the oven with a little salt.  I'm not doing that this year, since the kids are grown and not around, Anthony wants to watch the game, and my hips don't need pumpkin seeds. 

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees.  Line your baking pans with foil and spray the foil with some non-stick stuff.  (If you want to skip the foil and be "green", go for it.  But don't say I didn't warn you.)

Put your pumpkin shells, skin-side-up, on the baking pans (if they don't fit, cut them into smaller pieces, but they should fit).  Put the shells in the oven and cook the shit out of them.  About 2 hours, or even more.  They're done when they feel real soft when you stick a fork in, and they collapse.  

Take the pumpkin out of the oven and set aside to cool.

It's cool?  We're in the home stretch.

Get the largest bowl in your kitchen and a big metal spoon.  Scrape the cooked pumpkin away from the skin, into the bowl.  Scrape it good, you should only have a thin, floppy skin left (throw that away).  Now take a potato masher and smash the living daylights out of it, fishing out any pieces of pumpkin skin that might be lurking in there.  I mean really smash it.  Take your time.  Get it as smooth as possible.  This is good exercise and good therapy.  Sure, you could use a blender or a food processor but, personally, I like to smash things. 

Last step:

Get a bunch of little containers, with lids.  Tupperware, Rubbermaid, Ziplock, the little plastic containers leftover from the olive salad at the deli counter, whatever.  Measure out two cups of pumpkin into each container and put them in the freezer.  Pumpkin freezes really well.  Most recipes (a pie for Thanksgiving, for instance) use two cups of pumpkin, so one-and-done.  You've got some treats to look forward to.

This year I got 11 cups of pumpkin for my efforts.  That made four containers of two cups each, and one container with three which I'll use for soup.

And, damn, am I proud of myself.  I've got this.

A word of warning:  home-cooked fresh pumpkin looks a lot different from the stuff in the cans (it's gold, not orange) and your Thanksgiving pie will have a different texture, lighter and less dense (in other words, perfetto).  If you've got some people in your family who are absolutely addicted to the recipe on the back of the can of Libby's (the one with the condensed milk), you're going to get some push-back.

That's fine.  They can go do Thanksgiving at McDonald's.