Feasting

Happy Thanksgiving!

The organic, free-range, anti-biotic-free Turkey was twenty-point-oh-one pounds, smack in the middle of the eighteen-to-twenty-two range that we had slapped our twenty dollar deposit on.  There were about five pounds of Brussels Sprouts, soon to be seared and dressed with a fig balsamic vinegar.  The Lord only knows how much potato was mashed.  For lunch there would be soup made the previous day, a creamy butternut squash puree, which took up all the carrots that needed to be used for the skillet carrots with onions and garlic.  There were two pies; pumpkin, made from a cheese pumpkin, that all the farms at the market said were the best for pumpkin pie (they were right) and apple-cranberry, to be topped with a pumpkin ice cream.  Surprisingly, the cranberries were found fresh at the market.

Carrots had to  be brought in by a guest, as did dish detergent.  But in the end, everything, apart from the carrots and the canned pumpkin for the ice cream had its origins within three hundred miles of our house.

We could go into detail about how J. Kenji Lopez-Alt convinced us that Brussels Sprouts could be amazing, if only just seared in the pan.  We could outline that we needed a veggie, and Molly Wizenberg’s recipe for skillet carrots came to the top of the list.  We could even wax poetic about the meaty flavor of the turkey, a flavor impossible to get from store-bought turkeys that only seemed to make turkey sandwiches better.

We could do that.  But that would only serve to miss the point.

Thanksgiving, for us, was a feast.  An absolute feast,  a long table, nine people, enough wine and beer to flood a small Guatemalan village, and more food than most of us would see in at least another year.  It was a feast in honor of tradition and autumn bounty and the hardships of our forebears.  It was a feast honoring the trials that we all undertook.

It started off at five o’clock in the morning.  Hannah, her mother and sister all went out to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade out by Central Park.  They sat on the wall on 65th Street and watched cartoon characters, inflated likenesses of puppets, and assorted shapes and colors dance across the skyline, painting the holidays across the gray buildings.

Kermit the Frog was able to be puppeted! Even that size!

When they returned home, there I was, two cups of coffee in me, cutting cubes of bread for stuffing.  When our friends Heath and Gen arrived, we had lunch: a Jamie Oliver butternut squash soup recipe that I had made the day before.  Of course, at that point, there was one last cup of coffee in me and no breakfast.  As I was in the midst of cooking parmesan toasts, the cheese started to stick to the pan (which is what cheese does) and I freaked out.  “GAH!  The cheese isn’t…it’s sticking to the pan!  The soup!  There’s…It’s not good enough and there’s…the Turkey isn’t even in the oven yet and…”  To which Hannah calmly (read: irritatedly, as she also hadn’t had breakfast yet) asked me to leave the kitchen.  I did, paced a little, calmed from my caffeine and hunger inspired tantrum, had some soup and immediately felt better.*

The turkey (20.1 lbs) was fresh, picked up the day before and jammed full of bread, mushrooms, onions, celery, apples, cranberries and butter, rubbed with butter, salted and peppered, and was thrown into the oven.  There it lived for the next four hours, looked at only once, to check it’s status.  It came out, golden, moist and finished.  Nine people couldn’t even finish half of the bird, there were probably a quarter of the breast left for sandwiches.  There is another five pound whole breast in the refrigerator.  As I write this, Hannah is making another loaf of bread for sandwiches.

Oh Lordy Lou.

But in and among the cooking, which is important for a food blog to note, there was community.  Clare (of BeerGoggins) brought a couple of beers and her fella Adam (also of BeerGoggins) showed up later with piles more beer from the Beer Room at Whole Foods.  There were probably six growlers of draft beers, two bottle of lambic (a raspberry and a cherry), and a Saison.  There was wine, oh was there wine!  There are cases upon cases of Nero d’Avola, Blaufrankish, Gavi and Gruner Vetliner.  There was hot buttered cider with bourbon.

I'll fix this caption when I know what this beer was.

Clare learned Backgammon on our brand new backgammon board.  Heath ran around with our camera snapping the photos you see here.  Albert amused himself with Heath’s stories of God-only-knows-what.  The air was thick with lies, fibs, stories, turkey, liquor and celebration.

Clare learning backgammon

There were snacks:  leek confit, goat cheese and baguettes and a hot pepper balsamic chutney with pita.  We ate all day and when it came time to have dinner, everything came right together.  We sat down, passed food, pigged out, slathered our insides with cranberry bourbon sauce and gravy, clogged our maws with stuffing, lusted after the sprouts, fell into ecstasy at the smells and tastes that mixed beautifully.  We grew heavy.  When we tried to engage Adam in conversation, he said, “Can’t talk.  Eating,” and returned to his hunched posture and his face firmly planted in his plate.

Fit for kings

We rested for an hour, drinking and talking.  Abbie did the dishes, Paula dried, Gen cleared.  I regretted the amount of food I ate that night, knowing that I had to eat all the more in an hour.  And when that hour was up, when the dishes were all done, we dirtied up more.

Before we started in on the pie, we tried Adam and Clare’s inaugural homebrew, named “Rye Are You Mad At Me.”  You will have to keep a weather eye on BeerGoggins.com for details on that.  My review:  Outstanding considering the issues that went into it.  I was there at the first and considering what we witnessed, it’s a miracle there was even a bottle of anything other than anger to pour.  But on a serious note, for their first go at home brewing, they made a very drinkable beer that indicates they will have huge success in future beer-speriments.

Mad Hops earns his title

Then there was pie.  Pumpkin made from a for real roasted pumpkin topped with homemade whipped cream and an apple cranberry pie with pumpkin ice cream.  I had the pumpkin pie.  Hannah had the same.  Adam and Heath, in an effort to out do each other, had one of each.  I can’t imagine they were terribly comfortable.  I certainly wasn’t.

Piiiiiiiiiiiiiiies.

In the end, Heath and Gen had to head out, Adam and Clare stuck around a bit to try to finish up the beers.  They ended up leaving with most of the beer they brought.  Albert and Paula sacked out on the couch and Abbie took to knitting.

We did what you do at Thanksgiving.  We rung in the holidays properly by celebrating.  We got full and drunk and happy and had wonderful food and camaraderie.  This is something that we feel many food blogs seem to forget about.  The meal as social event.  They talk about how to caramelize the sprouts, or how to get your cookies just right on the bottom, or what they feel like when they eat their waffles, but they seem to forget that we are social creatures and that our meals should reflect that.  In our dinner, we honored the food traditions from all over the world: Eat together.  Drink together.  Make merry.  And we did.

BUUUUHHHHHHHHH!

And I hope you did too.

*Remember:  If you’re cooking for 9 people or more, be sure to eat breakfast and plenty of it.  You’re working hard.  Otherwise, you’ll throw a pan out the window and scald your elderly neighbor who’s off to see her grandkids and possibly could call the police on you, which would not make for a happy Thanksgiving whatsoever.

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Weekend Foodstuffs: August 8 & 9

Editor’s note. Oh, people. Were you expecting pictures? How about an update on the excellence of homemade ice cream? We’re sorry. It’s the best I can do to muster typing without errors. Thanks to a cheap-o wine glass turning into a razor sharp weapon in my right hand, mangling two of my fingers, I am out of commission in the kneading, dish-doing, and photography departments. Matthias is busy taking care of everything. We will be back as soon as I am back at 10 fully functioning digits.

This weekend sour cherries just went out of season at the Greenmarket and Hannah got three pints for $4 and four lbs. of cucumbers for $5. That means syrup and pickles!!!! Full list is below:

* Sour cherry syrup
* bread and butter pickles
* garlic dills
* blueberry jam
* eggplant parmesan with homemade sauce
* ciabatta bread
* mint juleps

And most importantly:
* ice cream.

What are you making this weekend?

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Sazerac and Roll

In the broken heart of New Orleans, there stands a public house that goes by the name, The Pirate Alley Cafe.  There are sandwiches and drinks and colorful characters that exist, just off the beaten path, two blocks from Bourbon Street and directly next to the landmark Presbyterian Church.  It was here, several years ago, that I was first introduced to Absinthe, or rather a pastiche of the elixir, known colloquially as “Absente.”

A poster, a parody of a 19th Century painting advertising the absinthe-like drink, caught my eye, and I, along with my companions stopped in for a drink of the mythical muse of the artists.  My love affair with the green fairy began with a bang and a whiz and the assumption that I was hallucinating, when in fact there were no hallucinogens in the faux-absinthe.  There are no hallucinogens in real absinthe.  But that’s a tale for another time.

I’ve tried several kinds of Absinthe in my day.  Absente.  La Fée.  And a brand that hadn’t been branded yet.  It was an absinthe that a friend of a friend, a distiller, was making at behest of his boss.  It was a powerful beverage.  It was terribly herby and had so many essential oils in it that it made our paper cups that we so classily were drinking from by the time I had finished one serving, I was actually speaking to myself on 23rd Street all the way back to my apartment in Astoria.  This is actually a good thing: if you’re talking to yourself, people tend to leave you alone on the train.  It also works if you smell bad.

This absinthe has since been refined. It is called St. George Absinthe.

Hannah and I bought a bottle of it, at great expense, though it is taking us a very long time to get through it.  Why would this be?  So we don’t have to buy another bottle of it?  Because we aren’t big drinkers?  Because it’s not great?

Nope.  Well, maybe so we don’t have to buy another bottle.  But mostly, it’s because of the Sazerac.

The Sazerac is a terribly romantic drink, named for a cafe in New Orleans in the 1850s.  You have one sip and can imagine Poe in his Baltimore haunts drinking until his brain thought up the “Cask of the Amontillado” or “The Gold-Bug”.  It has the sort of properties that will let you sit down on a Sunday afternoon, have one (or two, if you’re feeling particularly like you’d like to be numb.  It is pretty potent), and do the New York Times Crossword.  This may, as we later discovered, be the precise reason why we could not complete it this week.  Perhaps that is neither here nor there.

The Green Fairy is but an element to this very strong drink and it’s barely there.  If you want to drink Absinthe of it’s own merits, by all means, but this is neither the time nor the place for it.  This is the place to talk about the herb undertones swirling through the bittersweet whiskey; to talk about how that first swallow burns, even though you’ve given it a few good sniffs before imbibing; to talk about how the licorice mixes ever so subtly with the lemon essence, which mixes ever so gently with the bitters and the sugar and the whiskey.  It is the place to talk about a complex drink that is terribly simple to make and even easier to drink.  It is the place to tell you how to make it:

The Saint George Sazerac

Yield: 1 glass

•    1 sugar cube
•    6-7 dashes of Angostura Bitters
•    1 tbsp water
•    2 shots, St. George Whiskey
•    splash St. George Absinthe
•    Lemon peel for garnish
•    Equipment:  A muddler (the end of a wooden spoon will suffice) and an extra glass.

Place your spare glass into the freezer to start on a good chill.  While that glass is chilling, you can start on the drink.

In your unfrozen glass, place your sugar cube, bitters and water.  Bash that all up with the end of your wooden spoon until the sugar has either dissolved completely, or mostly dissolved.  Pour in the whiskey.  Stir to blend.

Once your other glass has gotten a nice layer of frost on it, pull it from the freezer.  Pour the splash of Absinthe into the bottom and swirl, coating the sides of the glass.  I would now say pitch the remaining absinthe, but that seems terribly wasteful so I’m going to tell you to find a Hannah and give it to her.  It’s not even a shot, so it’s no big deal.  Pour in your Sazerac from the other glass.  Spritz with the lemon peel and garnish.

Be merry.

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