Our third and final Thanksgiving dinner was at the home of the Molloys, just a week after the real T-Day. Darcy outdid herself with a beautiful pancetta-wrapped roast and other guests contributed all kinds of traditional yummy side dishes. I’ve been making the same side dish to bring to all of these dinners and it’s consistently a hit, always requested over and over again. Of course, it’s the simplest, easiest thing to make: roasted squash. Want a recipe? Here you go: slice squash, drizzle with salt and oil, roast at 435 for 15 minutes. Done. If you want to get fancy, sprinkle some sage over the top.

delicata

beautiful pork roast with a halo of pancetta

Darcy’s fab cacao nib bread pudding

Whew! what a dinner! Now that our Thanksgiving dinners are over, we can start preparing for the onslaught of December holiday dinners — bring it on!

Our second Thanksgiving dinner of the season was at the home of friends of ours. One of them is a doctor and was scheduled to work all day Thanksgiving so they decided to postpone dinner a couple days and invited some friends and family over. And who wouldn’t accept an invitation to an extra holiday dinner?

They had the turkey covered this time so I focused on dessert. I skipped out on making desserts for our own T-day dinner so I looked forward to the opportunity to work on a few pie recipes I’d been eyeing. I made two pies: one was Linda Padia’s award-winning Himalayan Blackberry Pie and a Maple Hazelnut Pie. Okay, so blackberries aren’t very autumnal nor are they really T-day traditional, but it was a special request and, really, I’d be happy to eat this pie any time of year.

Both turned out really well. I was experimenting a bit with the crusts. For the blackberry pie, I used chilled vodka for my liquid instead of water. I understand that this is supposed to make the pastry flakier by preventing gluten formation. IT also keeps the dough colder when you’re working it. In the Hazelnut Pie, I used half butter, half lard from the lard I rendered from Drusilla the Pig earlier this summer. Again, lard is supposed to make for a flakier crust, though I’m not exactly sure of the science behind it.

In any case, both crusts turned out wonderfully well. But the lard crust I thought was especially good — so tender and flaky and with a little extra flavor. It wasn’t porky, really, which was something I was afraid of, but it just had a little extra umami oomph, especially against the nuts and maple syrup. Next experiment? Vodka AND lard. How do you like that?

Follow the links for the recipes, and here are the pics:

Himalayan Blackberry Pie

Maple Hazelnut Pie

A mere fraction of the whole T-Day II spread

This year we’re lucky enough to have not one but *three* Thanksgiving dinners to attend. The first one, on the day itself, was held at our house. All of Chris’s family was in attendance as well as several friends making a grand total of 18. Everyone contributed to the meal so it was a true family experience.

We were responsible for delivering the centerpiece of the meal, the traditional turkey. This year I decided to get the turkey from a local farm. I’d bought beef, eggs and pork (a whole hog, a whole hog) from them before so I knew that they raise happy — and tasty! — animals. Check ‘em out if you get a chance:
Taylor Mde Farms

But here’s the thing I didn’t really know about raising turkeys. If you raise a turkey from a spring chick until it’s Thanksgiving time, they get big. Really big. So it’s great that you’ve got a very fresh, very local bird, but that bird is going to be 30 pounds or more. Yow.

too bad I don’t have more to give you a sense of scale, but just know that that’s my *big* roasting pan.

Having such a large, deceased animal in my possession caused some logistical problems. The primary one was that according to the time and temperature charts, a bird that big would have to roast for 7 HOURS. Hmph. Not wanting to either wake up at dawn or serve dinner too late, I decided the right thing to do would be to spatchcock the turkey.

Spatch-what-now? It’s a term for removing the backbone out of a bird and cooking it flat so as to reduce the cooking time and encourage even cooking. Only problem is that it’s usually meant for smaller birds, but I’ve done it a million times with chickens, so it shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Well.

It was a bit of a challenge. You see, a 30 pound turkey has much stronger bones than a 5 pound chicken and I wound up having to get through the pelvic bone with a heavy cleaver and some primal scream therapy. But I did it! And kept all of my own digits.

The next step is to flatten the bird which I couldn’t quite manage so I called in the muscle. Chris stepped in and attempted a CPR-like maneuver to break the bird’s keel bone — no, I’d never heard of this either, but it turns out to be a real pain. He tried the operation bare-handed, but eventually had to resort to bashing it with a cast iron pan.

action shot of Chris flattening our dinner

That accomplished, the bird went in the oven and the spatchcocking process paid off by cutting the cooking time in half. If anything, it cooked a little too fast, as I wasn’t really expecting it to be done as soon as it was. Still it was a beautiful, succulent bird. I used elements of these two recipes to put it together:
Russ Parson’s Judy Bird
Hardlikearmour’s Special Occasion Turkey on Food52

Oh, and believe you me, we had plenty of other food, too. We had two kinds of stuffing, cauliflower puree, butternut squash, Brussels sprouts, kale, a brilliant arugula salad topped with bacon wrapped dates — wha-wha?! I made some fresh bread, too, which turned out rather well, I thought.

And then there was dessert. I wish I’d had my act together enough to get pictures of it all, but the offerings included: a caraway apple pie, flourless chocolate cupcakes with pumpkin goat cheese frosting, traditional pumpkin pie and pumpkin truffles. All were wonderful, but probably my favorite was Liane’s lemon sponge pie pictured below. It was at least as delicious as it was lovely.

After all that eating, we had the traditional post-dinner loll about with lots of chatter and running about with the kidlets. It was a perfect part one to our three-part Thanksgiving week. Thanks to all!

Uncle Chris and the girls.