What's your Thanksgiving timetable?

omg, cranberry/quince relish with port, cassis, black pepper and tiny smidge of ginger!

The aromatics for the stuffing are chopped. The water is coming to a boil for the brussel sprout immersion. The turkey is in an obscene position in the roasting pan on the dining room table (only place there was room). Potato scrubbing commences shortly. And the oven is heating up.

LOL turkey JUST went in oven! Timetable gone!

Cranberry gin-n-tonic is apparently quite tasty.

how it went down:
100 called raga indian & ordered
200 broke out the naan and rice and coconut lamb and chicken vindaloo
230 laid down arrrghgurggurgglegurg
245 popped up a minute to post, gonna be flat on my back watching the Seahawks get trounced as soon as i hit submit

Wife set the cooked turkey down on a table and went into another room and we chilled out for awhile and I called my ma and when the turkey was checked-on, it was missing a leg except for the bone. There are 3 furry suspects.

There are 3 furry suspects

!!!

our two stomped noisily around under the table and head-butted every calf and shin they came across. The turkey, salumi, and cheese were all too well guarded for them to sneak any this year.

turkey was done to a T, but nothing else could fit in the oven with it. So the dressing and brussel sprouts baked/roasted while the turkey was resting and I just gave up on the roasted fingerling and redskin potatoes, but that was okay.

cranberry-quince sauce made with port & cassis - A++++ will make again. Also, dressing with fennel, shallots, and pecans.

3 bottles of wine (rose of sangiovese (x2) and cotes du rhone) / 5 people over 3 hours = just the right amount of buzz and no excessive anger from anyone. Not a bad day.

Pinot noir, champagne with creme de cassis, gewurtztraminer, salas with blue cheese and pomegranate, turkey, rosemary mash, kale with garlic and cranberries, stuffing with apples and sausage baked in tomatoes, the weird pea/carrot thing, oh yeah, and some turkey. Woah. We ate at 930. Hah!

Deep fried turkey is awesome, I'd never done it before. Especially if you are sitting around splitting a couple of Ommegangs with a friend while it cooks. Though now I have a giant vat of oil in my backyard that I have to deal with tomorrow.

But wife's coworker drinking 8(!) of my New Belgium Abbeys and Deschutes IPAs plus random glasses of wine over three hours and being rambling and crazy is certainly not at all awesome and actually very very annnoying and kind of sad.

We're having our Thanksgiving party tomorrow (American-stylee). Back in Portland, when I did Thanksgiving parties, no one cared if there was a turkey, but suddenly it was a big deal here! OK, so my housemate, who is not a vegetarian, is in charge of that. Except: He can't cook.

Well, we picked up a do-not-thaw type bird, pre-stuffinged, and I guess he's going to give it a go, and I will do what I can to help, which is pretty much nothing. I have no idea. Any tips? Should I have had him get a meat thermometer? I don't want my bread thermometer going into a carcass. It's just a thing. You know.

Yes, get a meat thermometer. I don't know what a do-not-thaw, prestuffinged bird is, but if you can, have him make sure the skin of the bird is dry before putting it in the (hot) oven. That will both crisp and brown the skin. It doesn't hurt to leave it uncovered in the fridge to dry it out some. Don't baste it, don't bother it at all once it's in the oven, just cook for the allotted time less about 30 minutes, then check the temp. It's done when the temp hits 165 deg F in the meatiest part of the thigh. Check the temp once every 8-10 minutes, no more. Take it out and let it sit for at least 15 min before carving.

mini version of the usual - tiny turkey, veg/herb stuffing, wine/vegetable sauce, wild rice, non-homemade cornbread, cranberry-orange relish, non-mom (ie wholly inferior) apple pie, pinot noir

The instructions say to brush vegetable oil on the bird first. The temp tip is handy.

I'm an antibaster.

How do you do the wild rice, gabbneb? I've always mixed it with white in a sort of pilaf (cooked w/ stock) and am looking for something different to try.

Holy crap, all the food I made came out great. That doesn't usually happen. Jaq's cranberry relish survived being made with pear instead of quince, tho I bet the quince would have been better. My rustic loaf rolls were some of the best bread I've ever made, or at least the best in ages, especially since I didn't have my KitchenAid. Weird!

The turkey was apparently good too; thanks for the advice.

How do you do the wild rice, gabbneb? I've always mixed it with white in a sort of pilaf (cooked w/ stock) and am looking for something different to try.

all i do is eat. my Dad is responsible for rice. it was unadulterated with domesticated rice, though onions or shallots were involved. he may use chicken stock.

personally, i would go for vegetable, it being grass and all

Finished up the last of the leftovers this morning (pumpkin pudding for breakfast) and made a quart of solidly gelled stock from the carcass on Monday. If I can find some more quince, I'm going to make up and can a few pints of relish.

Yay for rustic loaf rolls sans Kitchenaid. Presbyterian rolls turned out well, even the pan that sat out rising for too long.

I made a pot roast! I realize pot roast is kind of a no-brainer, cooking-wise, but it was delicious. Now I want to do another one with some adjustments, but let's face it: the eye of round was $15 and a bottle of wine to reduce for sauce would be at least another $10 so this is not actually a cheap meal.

It's that time again. Picked up the turkey from our farmer yesterday - I'd ordered a medium, but it's pretty large at 15 lbs.

I'm doing Thxgiving for my husband and a friend (and maybe any other stragglers we know who want to stop by). First time doing this shit – any timetable tips? I am going to cook a goose.

Prep as much stuff as you can beforehand.
If you want to cook things together in the oven, test the pans out first to make sure they all fit.
If it's cold enough outside (<40 F), it's a spare fridge.

I am excited about this year's menu. Tonight I made the cranberry sauce, potatoes, dessert (flan!), and herb butter. Tomorrow I will make cinnamon rolls and quiche (breakfast), fennel-beet salad with citrus vinaigrette and butter rolls (with herb butter) for lunch, and turkey/taters/cranberry/sauteed green beans for dinner, then flan/limoncello/apple pie for dessert. This meal is for three people btw.

i plan on eating more than i normally would in 2 full days so watch out

Ok truth I haven't made the flan yet. I'm a little nervous.

The beet salad sounds awesome! You will be able to swing flan, no worries. Custards & their kin are less challenging than their reputation suggests.

Today I made tzimmes (hope it tastes ok reheated), pecan pie bars, lemon bars & cut up a bunch of veg. Is it just me, or are shallots way more overwhelming in the tear-inducing department than onions are? Have to wipe my eues 2x while slicing up just one of those little things.

I also rubbed orange liqueur all over a raw goose.

The menu:

Drinking throughout the day:

Hell of bloody maries

Lunch (around 1 p.m.? I have this stuff premade too):

Butternut squash soup
Hummus & pita
Steamed asparagus

Dinner (around 7 p.m. – friend's working @ Wal-Mart & shift ends at 6:30...hopefully she'll be assertive abt getting out on time):

Goose w/orange sauce
Wild rice stuffing w/mushrooms & chestnuts
Corn on cob
Tzimmes
Brussels sprouts w/shallots
Mashed Spuds
Gravy

Dessert in bar form = lemon bars & pecan pie bars

Sounds lovely! I've never made a goose.

in terms of bevvies, i'm having beer with lunch, wine with dinner, and limoncello for dessert. at some point i may have a rosemary-lavender lemonade from the simple syrup i made a while ago

to be perfectly honest, i'm a little distracted because my dog just bit my husband and he (husband) is really mad at the dog.

sorry i mentioned dogs ;_; it was kind of a bad day

yesterday went alright though. my flan was A MESS but everything else turned out alright. had a bit of a headache though

Bump!
Planning on stuffed pork tenderloin. Brussels sprouts. Serviettenknödel.

Ah dear god this year I swear I am making things much easier on myself. I feel like last year I cooked a meal for 10, and three people ate it. Actually I hardly ate at all – I had been puking out of a combo of grief/bad beaujolais and had to take an anti-nausea pill to even eat. Also we realized none of us knew how to carve a bird at all. It was a weird day.

OTOH I feel like Thanksgiving is the day it's acceptable to go all Cookie Monster on a pile of mashed potatoes, so I have to take advantage of that. What I;m making besides mashed potatoes, I haven't figured out yet.

Not sure what is happening this year. The turkey from last year is still in the freezer, poor thing. We ended up eating one of those store-bought everything dinners at MIL's, may do the same this year.

advice on cooking a goose? for christmas, not thanksgiving, but i like to plan early...

Oh man, every advice I read was like "get as much fat off that football-shaped fowl as you can." I made a goose last year and I followed that advice to the T! If you have looked at your goose already, it's obv you can just rip handfuls of snowy fat off that shit, so do it! After that, what some said to do was to pierce your goose's skin with many pricks (like in the Biblical sense) and then to submerge the whole thing in a giant pot of boiling water. IIRC for a minute or two? Like not long enough to blanch it. More rendered fat than you anticipated will float to the top.

Another thing to do, to get crispy skin, is to leave the thing defrosted/defatted/uncovered in your fridge for 24+ hours to let its skin dry out. This worked way better with ducks I have cooked in the past, tbh – I would not describe the goose I cooked as being crispy skinned. You're on your own there! Make sure you flip the thing over at some point while it's drying out in the fridge. They just have so much surface area!

Even after doing this shit it made so much fucking fat when it cooked. Not quite waterfalls, but notable amount. I had it on a little rack above a pan w/water in it to catch all the fat. God, that thing exuded so much fat. Empty the pan out often, it is said, or your oven will catch on fire from a goose fat spatter. Yuck! I don't know how big a threat that is but that's the kind of threat I try to avoid. Some things I read said, "Don't remove the v hot floaty fat from the pan with a baster because it could melt the baster." Scary!

In all honesty, I would never cook a goose again. Like I said above, I didn't know how to carve the damn thing. They are also pretty expensive imo, for what you get, which seriously feels like 70% fat. It was maybe enough meat for 4 gluttonous people (who, unlike me, could carve its meat and make the most of it) but cost over $50. Actually, I loved cooking with the goose fat, I loved the split pea soup I made where I cooked the goose neck in it instead of ham hocks like usual – delicious. The goose itself? I think I would rather have eaten any other meat except maybe ground beef.

I would say ducks are about 6x easier to cook and so much more rewarding + tasty.

i mentioned this maybe on another thread but i think i am going to do a turkey test run on a whole chicken this weekend... will this help or will i encounter all sorts of crazy surprises when i try to do a turkey?

Turkeys are put together the same as a chicken, so carving a chicken is similar to carving a turkey (the leg and wing joints are built the same, the rib cage/wishbone is the same). Is that what you want to test? They cook a bit differently.

i meant cooking, not carving. i've never prepped and roasted an entire bird before.

i have never gotten all science on a chicken and my chicken has always turned out delicious
do it once and you'll see how easy it is

the carving can get wacky, but who cares. that also depends on your knives, i guess.

The prep is similar - clean, truss, dry, season, roast. Trussing for a turkey might include cutting off the wing tips, depends on how tight the wings hold to the body - if they don't I leave the tips on and fold them under the back of the bird. Otherwise, the tips go in to make stock for the gravy. You might brine a turkey where a chicken generally doesn't need it - chickens have more fat under the skin in proportion to the amount of meat than a turkey does. Some loosen the breast skin on a turkey and pack butter under it, to try to increase the fat and keep the meat from drying out. With a chicken, I just clean, truss, dry, season (usually thyme and cayenne) and roast. With a turkey, I clean, brine, truss, dry. When I roast, I start it breast down, then flip it breast up about 2/3rds of the way through the cooking time. Use a meat thermometer and check temps in both the thigh and breast on a turkey (breast meat cooks faster) - internal meat temp will climb at least 10 deg after taking it out of the oven. Let it rest for at least 15 min before carving.

Here's an interesting take on turkey: confit.

http://www.salon.com/food/eyewitness_cook/index.html?story=/food/francis_lam/2010/11/17/turkey_leg_confit

We're having a smaller group than usual for Thanksgiving this year so if I'm not barbecuing the bird, I might try this.

Roasted a chicken today for chicken salad sandwiches for lunches tomorrow and Thanksgiving lunch (because you do need to eat lunch on Thanksgiving, that is unless you're eating at 2). Chicken carcass thrown into a pot with water, salt, pepper and leeks for a broth. The broth gets used for gravy and stuffing.

I removed the legs and wings off of the turkey this afternoon and am now curing with salt, pepper, herbes de provence and a tiny amount of ground cloves (I hope this works -- the herbs and spice smelled good together). Will confit these in olive oil tomorrow.

I then dry brined the remaining parts of the turkey carcass with salt, pepper and sage. I've only ever wet brined a turkey before so I'm interested to see how this turns out. Anyone tried dry brining before? How did it work for you?

It's a timetable thread right?

oh lord i am already behind. i'm doing thanksgiving tomorrow. was gonna make my chocolate mousse (i don't do pumpkin pie!) tonight, but we got back from hiking around 7:45 and i have not had the energy. so... big day tomorrow!

Some of my family members will probably take charge of my grandma's kitchen for part of Thanksgiving. My grandma will keep walking into the kitchen (despite people trying to shoo her out) making sure nothing wrong happens and I'll probably hear he say "Ai-Yi-Yi" a couple times throughout the day. Then we'll eat Thanksgiving dinner around 5 pm

i'm working all day, then coming home to make a vegan (oh lol) thanksgiving dinner and share it over skype with our family in chicago, since we can't be there with them all.

Pumpkin pie finally in the oven! Tomorrow, all I have to do is bake the zucchini casserole (pre-made Tuesday), and prep some mashed potatoes (gonna try Julia Child's version, wooo, potato ricer and everything)...then cart them all over to my in-law's house.

Been using the Cook's Illustrated recipe for pumpkin pie every year for about 3 years now, and every year as I'm pouring hot pumpkin filling into a running food processor I think, "I really need to find another recipe." Love America's Test Kitchen but godammit they know how to make their recipes OTT.

Confited the legs and wings in olive oil yesterday. It is now cooled and in the refrigerator. My son has started getting into 'Good Eats' and saw the pumpkin pie episode with pie made with fresh pumpkin. He and my wife baked a pumpkin yesterday evening, cooled it and turned it into puree. The neat thing about the Good Eats recipe is that there is extra filling. When I saw that, the first thing that came to my mind is pumpkin ice cream!

VegemiteGrrl -- Too late for this year, but I know in the Alton Brown recipe and in the latest CI recipe they don't use a food processor, but the more traditional form of making a custard -- making the filling on the cooktop, tempering the eggs with the filling and returning to cook until thickened. They get around the food processor by straining the filling.

All that's left now is roasting the turkey breast (my wife will not knowingly eat confited anything) and yams, making the cranberry relish and my part of the T'day labor is done!

gonna light the smoker in 30 minutes, doing two birds; been brining them since Monday night (not just brine, but Jim Beam + fruit also). The chaos is underway.

It felt weird not to cook anything on T'day (I am doing the restaurant thing this year), so I made chocolate chip pecan cookies.

Hope there is something PUMPKIN at the restaurant! Turkey I am OK without, but I do really love stuffing and PUMPKIN confections.