TracyFood

Monkey Monday: post-Thanksgiving edition (with obligatory pictures) 26 November 2007 10:46 pm

Posted by Tracy in : CSA, baking, cooking, dessert, eating, friends, garden, local food, pictures, seasonality , trackback

The very short version goes like this: we ate sooooo well last week! First, and completely unrelated to Thanksgiving, I feel obliged to brag about the fact that Peter and I made éclairs:

I made the pastry cream and chocolate glaze from recipes in The New Best Recipe; Peter made the pâte à choux from a recipe he found online, and cut a corner off a plastic bag to make an impromptu pastry-filling thingy (the backup plan was to use a turkey baster, but we’re really glad it didn’t come to that). The results? Delicious. Not unlike our awesome Thanksgiving dinner, which (being vegetarian) also did not involve a turkey baster in any way, as you’ll see if you click past the break:

I really recommend clicking through to the photo page on Flickr and checking out the larger version of that picture for an experience closer to the full effect of so much deliciousness, but um, maybe not on an empty stomach. What you’re seeing, by the way, is:

Curried Lentils With Sweet Potatoes and Swiss Chard in the big black Dutch oven, front and center;
Shallot Mashed Potatoes from my beloved Moosewood Restaurant New Classics to its right;
behind that, my wacky brown-and-wild-and-Thai-black-rice concoction (more on my no-longer-secret shame in a bit)
in the middle in the back, Turnips With Greens (again from Moosewood New Classics)
and finally, Winter Squash Braised In Cider in the orange casserole dish. Holy cats, was this stuff good.

Those of you keeping score with my predicted menu may note that our big spread did not include either a salad or Brussels sprouts; we didn’t need them one bit, and I am still eating leftovers even as I write this post — mystery rice and the magical squash, thanks for asking! What’s shameful about the rice dish is that I totally didn’t even check if we had enough wild rice in the house before buying other ingredients for it (mushrooms, celery, walnuts, and cranberries). It turns out we only had about 1/4 cup of wild rice, which is just enough to be insultingly little. So I added some Thai black rice to the mix, which turned everything a spectacular shade of purple. Oops. Best to save that stuff for sweet sticky rice pudding in the future, I guess, and be glad that the dish was funny-looking, but by no means ruined. ANYWAY. Enough about my incredibly miniscule teeny-tiny failure, which completely pales by comparison to the rest of the food’s stirring success.

We started the evening with the (obviously) new Georges DeBoeuf Beaujolais Nouveau, which was very tasty indeed; Victor provided appetizing cheese and crackers and more wine; Kevin and Laurel brought yet more wine and also brought delicious rolls and even more delicious mincemeat pie, with real homemade mincemeat (OMG SO GOOD!) Not to be outdone on the dessert front, Peter made cheesecake and a pumpkin pie, and it might be a good thing that I did not get a picture of the desserts, or you would all be incredibly envious right now.

It was a low-key and lovely evening: nobody brought any baggage of the “It’s not Thanksgiving unless I eat (insert something overrated here)” persuasion. Although the Brussels sprouts had to wait for a later date, I got to use food from my garden: rosemary and oregano, and my mystery volunteer delicata squash, which joined more squash from our CSA farm, Groundwork Organics, who also provided the shallots for the mashed potatoes. Here’s to a great year of food, and the fact that it’s not over yet!