Something I noticed between shoving piles of delicious food into my face at my Grandma's Thanksgiving dinners was that she always had the pies ready before anything else. In fact, she baked them the day before! Clever granny. As Dan and I embark on our first Thanksgiving together (and without the fam), I thought, "I too must implement this ingenious bit of time management skills!" And so, when I finally stopped working my 'real job' at 9:00 tonight, I set to work baking my first ever fresh-from-scratch-(almost) Apple Pie. So I cheated a little and bought ready-made crusts...it happens.
I peeled and sliced the apples, mixed the ingredients and threw them into the pie crust. On a whim I topped off the filling with a few dabs of Orange Blossom Honey. Then it was time to cover it up with the top crust. A few days ago I thought it would be cool to cut designs into the top of the pie. Then Dan convinced me to do a weave like you see in all those cookbooks from 1976. Now I don't so much give a shit. So I slapped on the top crust, sans any fanciness, only to discover it, uh, wasn't exactly proportionate. It seemed much bigger than the bottom crust. No bother! I just peeled off the excess and sealed 'er up. Cut a few slits in the top and into the oven it went for 40-50 minutes.
9:30 pm: Turkey-lurky for me, turkey-lurky for you
Time to brine the turkey! I did this once before with Champagne. It didn't really taste much different than any other turkey I'd had, but I decided to do it again merely for the cool-kid factor of cooking with Champagne.
9:40 pm: Ten minutes later
Realize turkey is still, in fact, quite frozen. No Champagne brine this year. But then I realize this means I can drink the Champagne, and I feel much better.
9:50 pm: Time to take a peek at the pie!
It looks lumpy. Quite lumpy. In fact, I didn't know pies could look like that. Even though I know it's nearly midnight in Kansas, I post the following message to my aunt's Facebook: I'm baking an apple pie right now, my first ever. The top is lumpy. Is the top supposed to be lumpy? I don't think so. And I put honey in it. The recipe didn't call for honey. But I put in some honey. Maybe that wasn't such a great idea. It's probably burning from the inside out. Crap. This is what you're missing.
10:15 pm: That's the pie?
I google "How to tell if an apple pie is done" and by the search results determine that my apple pie is done. I remove it from the oven and discover part of my crust has sprung a leak and the filling is seeping out into the pie dish. Perhaps that excess top crust I so hastily ripped off was there for a reason. This kind of shit would never happen to Sara Lee.
7:30 am: Thanksgiving!
The puppies let us sleep in a whole hour - yeah! First order of business is to call the fam back in Kansas to see if they're surviving. The phone gets passed around for an hour while I attempt to get the turkey out of the fridge, make some coffe and start cooking the appetizers (meatballs and deviled eggs!)
9:30 am: I forgot to get ice cream.
Open my laptop to update a few things and make the mistake of checking my work email. One hour and multiple angry emails later, work "crisis" is averted. (The use of quotation marks around the word crisis indicates that even though others viewed this as a crisis I, in fact, could not have cared less.)
Dan took the doggies to the dog park and stopped at the store to get vanilla ice cream for our apple "pie" (use of quotations around the word pie indicates that it doesn't really look like a pie.) There's another person already in the aisle grabbing a tub of vanilla ice cream when he gets there. They stop, look at Dan and say, "Apple pie?"
10:23 am: Let's eat turkey in a big brown shoe!
The turkey is finally thawed enough that I can clean it and take out the neck and giblets. According to multiple videos on You Tube, these are usually stored in a plastic bag inside the cavity that you can easily pull out. There's no plastic bag in my turkey's cavity. Shit. I make Dan shine a flashlight into the turkey so I can see what's going on down there. "There's the neck," he says, "grab it and pull it out!" Of course, like I do this all the time. I pull the neck out while simultaneously making a few gagging noises. "Where are the giblets?" I ask. "Look up it's ass," he said. Technically, I was already looking up it's ass, but I knew what he meant. I flipped the bird over and found another hole with a handy-dandy bag of giblets for me to pull out and throw away. That Dan, he's so smart. Into the oven goes the bird!
12:30 pm: As in Blanche Devereaux?
I decide to scrap the macaroni and cheese bake as nothing over 1" tall will fit in the oven with that bird in there. I prep the taters and get those boiling for mashed potatoes then move on to snapping the green beans. I purchased 2lbs of fresh green beans at the farmers market a couple weeks ago and put them in the freezer so they'd stay good until Thanksgiving. The idea was to thaw them, snap them, then sauté them like I do all the time with fresh green beans. But when they were done thawing, the beans were soggy. Whoops. Dan's mom informed us via phone from Pennsylvania that you're supposed to blanch vegetables before freezing them in order to keep them crisp. The only Blanche I'm aware of is the one on Golden Girls. Lesson learned. I make an executive decision to turn sautéed green beans into green bean casserole and send Dan back to the store for fried onions. Now I just have to find a dish to make it in that's less than 1" tall.
1:27 pm: Sorry 'bout that taters:(
I seemed to have inadvertently whipped the potatoes into submission. But, upon further inspection they are quite tasty. So I decide to pass it off like that's what mashed potatoes are supposed to look like.
1:42 pm: Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...hey, what's with the Green Bean Casserole?
Ok, so the executive decision to switch to green bean casserole probably would have worked better if I'd gotten new green beans. Apparently the soggy ones were retaining water and in the course of baking, transferred said water to the fried onions, which turned soggy, but the green beans ended up crisper than before. I find this odd, and very unappealing, but the dogs seem to love it.
2:15 pm: You better start googling it.
I inform Dan it's his job to carve the turkey. He plays it off like he has no idea how to do this, so I tell him to google it quick because everything is done. He knew exactly how to carve it...slacker.
2:30 pm: Time to eat!
We declare the turkey to be delicious and the potatoes to be perfect (as long as you close your eyes). At this point Camper has been trolling the kitchen for a solid 5 hours. I reward him with a piece of the delicious turkey and he takes 3 of my fingers with it. Ouch.
All-in-all they day seemed to be successful for my first Thanksgiving without the fam. I only ruined one dish and only sent Dan to the store twice. If only one of those times hadn't been to get an ingredient for the dish I later ruined:-/ Sorry hun!
Now, let's see about this deformed apple/pie/cobbler/baked thing-a-ma-jig...
