Thanksgiving: The Inedible

The very first thing that I set out to make on Wednesday morning actually went wrong. It was my mum's cranberry-orange relish which - let's face it - is just cranberries and oranges and doesn't even involve any cooking. So this did seem like a Portent of Doom. It just came out too orangey - inedibly orangey.

Then there was this...



Yes, my gravy was inedible too. Thought I was being so clever doing Mark Bittman's Make-Ahead Gravy the day before. But something went astray with my roux - even though I cooked it for about 15 mins, the gravy still tasted floury. What did I do wrong?

So at the last minute I pulled out my backup can, and went with that instead - though did add some of the very impressive pan juices that a less clueless and terrified person would have been able to use... :(

Last on the inedible list were the roast potatoes, which I cut up too far in advance and turned black while I wasn't looking. I hoped they'd still somehow go crispy and golden in the oven, but nope.

But still...

We give thanks for the fabulously fun company.

And I give thanks for Jack and his incredible patience.

And for leftovers!



Thanksgiving dinner - done!
All in all, it was a blast.

A Tale of Two Soups: Curried Squash & Fiery Coconut Tofu

It was the best of soups... it was the worst of soups...

Yes, one soup was gorgeous, the other was the first truly inedible thing I've made this year.

Bad soup first.

The Recipe: Fiery Tofu & Coconut Curry Soup
From a copy of Cooking Light magazine that appeared in our mailbox.

One thing I've (re)learned through all this cooking is just how trusting aka gullible aka dimwitted I am. Oh, what a lot of curry paste that is, she says to herself as she obediently dumps it into the pot.

When, of course, what a sensible person would say is: A quarter-cup of curry paste?!! That can't be right! And would then cross-check in some other recipes and find that it is right only if you never want to feel your lips again.

The bizarre thing is that, if the comments are to be believed, people have fed this to their children!!

As for us, we picked out the tofu and vegetables, nibbled on them as best we could, and sadly threw the soup away.

I dunno - maybe our curry paste is just much stronger than the stuff they used... But the idea of the soup was nice, and maybe one day years from now when the memory of nuclear-holocaust-mouth has sufficiently faded (and Jack has forgotten what he delicately called his "ring of fire" the next day) I'll try it again with some crucial adjustments.

Now - the nice soup.

The Recipe: Curried Butternut Squash Soup
From Emily Weinstein on the NYTimes Bitten blog.

I actually first made this back in January, at the beginning of this whole enterprise, but didn't take any pictures. We were excited to have it again - it's really delicious, with just a light curried flavor :)

Made about 3/4 of the recipe, which is more than enough, and used some parsnips and sweet potato to supplement the half a butternut squash that we had - the parsnips especially turned out to be a nice addition.

It did come out a little thick, as Emily says, but we liked it that way, and you can always dilute it.

Pix

Weird Brownies

OK, so part of the reason I've been a bit absent (diffusion/confusion aside) is that I've been on the opposite of a roll - rolling down the gutter, really - recipe-wise. Case in point:















There it sits, all innocent.

Brownies. Pretty straightforward, one might think. I had some lovely raspberries and had seen a recipe for raspberry brownies on a BBC website.

That, says my cousin Kathryn, was my first mistake. To me, the BBC is a pillar of wisdom. But, as she wisely pointed out, they are British, and the British know nothing about brownies. Clearly.

The Recipe: Raspberry Brownies
Strongly disrecommended, but here it is anyway.

Thoughts/Tips/Mistakes

My first misgivings came when the recipe said to put in 9 oz of butter - that's two and a bit sticks! And then you're also using chocolate, not cocoa powder, so there's all the fat in the chocolate too. But I'm obedient. And it looked OK - pretty, even:





























It took a while to bake, and when it came out seemed... sweaty. Maybe it's the silicone, I thought. Lots of people don't like silicone. And the recipe did say that it'd be fragile and should be allowed to cool.

So we waited. Finally, the big moment. They were greasy to the point of slimyness. And the raspberries, which had seemed like such a wonderful idea, were actually a little distressing - they're hairy, of course, and encountering a hairy pink thing in the middle of your brownie, I dunno, maybe it's just me, but there was something a bit horrifying about that.

I had made weird brownies. More than that (it hurts to say it) I had made repulsive brownies. An achievement, I suppose, just not the kind you hope for.

But it's a testament to the awesome power of chocolate that we couldn't throw them away. They were incredibly rich and almost tasted good, in a "call the ambulance right now" fashion. They sit in the freezer, and occasionally when we're feeling incredibly sluttish we bring one out and eat it with reddi-whip.