kthxmas

[corvi]

juli  and I went nuts with the American Thanksgiving menu this year. Planning and cooking a gajillion things with my beloved was actually more fun than eating them (though that was good too.)

Homecooked / brewed stuff:

Drinks
Cinnamon quince brandy
Dry pear cider
Tej with juniper berries and bitter orange peel
Ginger lemonade

Starters & Salads
Sourdough bread
Gallows bread (potato bread made with purple potatoes, creepy pallid color)
Cranberry almond bread
Truffle butter
Manchego cheese
Fruit salad
Sesame bean sprouts (sookju namul)

Mains
Brined tandoori-spiced turkey
Carolina shredded pork

Sides
Stuffing with chestnuts and wild mushrooms (chantrelle, matsutake, and truffle!)
Kabocha soup with ras al hanout
Collard greens with homegrown garlic
Swiss chard with truffle butter
"French carrots" with rosemary (I dunno what Trader Joe's means by "French carrots")
Alu ko achar

Storebought stuff: blueberry soda, fancy-butt cheeses, champagne and buckeye ice creams (2 different icecreams, not the same one. :) )
Stuff we planned to make but ran out of time:  sunomono, garlic mashed cauliflower
Family traditions someone else made: corn and chestnut travelcakes, dried cherry relish, beet and fennel salad

We have truffle-flavored everything this year. Our local farmer's market has been selling some Tuber oregonense truffles hunted, as you might guess, in Oregon. They're not as well-regarded as the French Tuber magnatum by fancy-butt chefs, but I personally have never had T. magnatum in a large enough quantity to taste the difference between it and its redneck American cousin. I think we put at least three entire truffles into the meal.

I'm especially delighted about the tej. We put honey, water, yeast, and spices in a couple of bottles 24 hours before the dinner, and got some really nice, mildly alcoholic liquid for dinner. Booze! Whenever I feel like it! Yay! Someone invite me to a dinner or something.

For KTHXMas, the goats got a bunch of fermented apple slop left over from cidermaking, the sheep got some pumpkin (which they didn't care for) and some high-calcium animal crackers (which they loved), the chickens got turkey bones to take out their aggression at the peacocks on, the peacocks got CHEESE YAY CHEESE IS THE BEST, the feral kittens got turkey-flavored wet cat food. Not sure what to give the ducks.

Awesome waterfall-shaped mushroom spotted on the traditional post-prandial hike. (Well, traditional in my family).

Comments

[corvi]

Heh, that second pictures looks exactly like the carrots we ended up with. We called them "those snooty orange spheres" all evening. Thank you for your consultation on the Case Of The Misshapen Carrot, inspector.