Thanksgiving dinner 2009

This year, in  A slight Departure from the Norm, I have not bought a whole turkey but have managed to secure a heist of turkey legs and some breast meat to be served alongside. This is because I find that we get (well, I get, really) bored more quickly with endless turkey meals than I do with chicken. So, as we're only four to dinner this year, I'm playing to my strengths.



We will be having

Roast turkey drumstucks with whole garlic cloves in their skins
Roast potatoes
Sage and onion stuffing, which to a Southerner would be dressing. And, as I am not serving it inside a bird this year, it will be cooked to one side anyway.
Carrots
Collards (actually, savoy cabbage -- and it will be well cooked with a little bacon in there)
Turkey gravy
Cornbread

NO PUMPKIN PIE.  I know, I know. But this year, just some good vanilla ice cream with, for those who want it, baked apples to one side.I will have cooked them with sugar and spice, and a sparkler and possibly a small flag will be stuck in the top somewhere.

No presents. Just family, sad and happy stuff, this being real life, lots of food, a fire, a walk, board games, a film on telly. Everyone off work and school..Calls to and from America and God Bless It.

RECIPES TOMORROW!

Further pre Thanksgiving Thoughts: mulled wine

This year, in a splendid diversion from the norm, I am starting a pre Thanksgiving tradition. This means that, while we will be creating a square of Georgia in Wiltshire on the day itself (Thanksgiving, by the way, is always the fourth Thursday in November), the night before, folks get to come over and have some untraditional mulled wine. Which will be made thusly:

For each bottle of red wine (you can go cheap here, although I rather have the diktats of Elizabeth Davuid and Keith Floyd in mind here: do not cook with wine that is not goo enough to drink.....), I add about two heaped tablespoons of demerera sugar (you could try soft brown sugar, which gives the wine a bit of a toffee note, I suppose), a sliced orange (scrub it first: oranges are very promiscuous, you know), a small handful of whole cloves, a  shake or two of dried nutmeg (or about four goes against the side of a grater with a whole nutmeg) and three cinnamon quills, or the same of cassia bark. Bring the wine very gently to a high heat and then simmer it gently for a couple of minutes. You must not boil it. Taste and taste again and serve.

As you can see, I like to make a mulled wine which is richly aromatic, but I wouldn't kick you out of bed (see: I'm giddy with Thanksgiving excitement!) if you made it just with a hit of nutmeg and sugar.

CODA

And here I am going all home-made on you to say that, while on Thanksgiving itself we get the US flag and that of Georgia out, my husband says that, this year, I will be allowed to fashion one of his flags into a dress as long as I do no sewing. This will be interesting. Also, that I'll take great pride in festooning the house with candles and tea lights, lighting the fires in two of the fireplaces and putting great jugs of autumn foliage everywhere. Because, you know, I may have a job (or two, really) to do and a family to shout at, but home is where it's at. That's the zeitgeist in the recession, apparently. NO! It's always like that. Derr.!

A nearly thanksgiving thought.

Now, I don't mean this to be a rant, but I am married to an American and, as such, have become more sensitised to the rude comments that folks seem to make about America and Americans. Well, I shall not bore you with details*, but I will say that AMERICA IS A HUGE PLACE AND IT IS FULL OF CONTRASTS. The thing is, though, this is food writing, so I'll also say that, while the US is still in thrall to big national producers -- it is hard, for example, to get really good cheese --  the situation is not the same everywhere. There are changes and there are AND HAVE ALWAYS BEEN artisinal producers in the U.S. When the next book comes off the shelf, I'll be showing you all about that.

For now, I'll just quote verbatim what my fine and resourceful mother in law (Mrs Claudia Ballard Ellis -- born in Virginia, raised in South Carolina, married in Georgia, married a more appropriate man and eventually moved back to Virginia!) had for a  dinner with friends and tell you what else just happened in her little corner of Virginia. And we DON'T SASS MOMMA!

"Tonight, we just had rutabagas, just pulled from a friend's garden. We cooked the greens with ham and served them with hot (as in spicy) vinegar, with cornbread to one side. Very Southern and economical."

Rutabaga is a swede to a Britisher, although I have also heard people refer to them as yellow turnips! Note that the greens refers to the swede tops. If they are long cooked, they are soft and delicious. Try it some time, or do the same with turnip greens.

I also quote:

"Lots of interesting things are happening with local food around here: butchers' shops, fresh seafood brought in from our coast, several new farmers' markets. Not much is going to waste."

The mom is happy about that. And if momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. (Although note point 3, below.)

*Oh hell: I cannot resist offering some corrections to Britishers out there.
1. Not everyone in the South is a bible basher, but, yes, proportionately, a lot more folks in the US go to church than in the UK. Over to you for discussion of whether going to church is a bad thing. Me, I'm Cof E.

2. Not all Southerners sound like Dubya. There is quite a difference between the voice of someone from Georgia and, say, someone from East Tennessee.
3. It is rude to do impressions of Americans in front of them.
4. There ARE farmers markets in America
5. You can get excellent food made by small producers
6. Proper Southern food is some of the best I have eaten
7. It is not wrong to think that your country is the most glorious in the world. This does not make you a xenophobe or a Christian fundamentalist. It might just mean you are a patriot and since when did it become wrong to be proud of your country?
 8. I've not even got started here, but I  promise I won't go on about it again even so. I also roundly agree that Dick Cheney is, clearly, a nutter. xxx

Pancakes for yours truly.

Now, I had decided to do the full works for Sunday dinner tomorrow and knew I would have to prep ahead, so I made a vat of Yorkshire pudding batter and then, between chores, sat in the kitchen and cooked some pancakes from  a few spoons of the batter all for myself. The house was at peace and the light had dimmed; there was wild weather outside. One child was at a football match (Bath City won -- and in gale force conditions, I might add) and another was happily exhausted but calm and still damp from dog walking in said gale and getting blown over in the field. So, if you are ever wet, cold, a bit over-extended, trying to get ahead and then find, unexepectedly, a few silent minutes to yourself, you could do worse then make yourself a few pancakes. get them just right and then sit at the table and eat them or, hell, swallow them like a Boa Constrictor standing up at the stove. Not that boa constructors ever stand up or cook. But..you see my point.

Take two free range eggs
1 pint of milk
8 rounded tablespoons of plain flour

Then I mix them for a good three minutes in the blender, push the sides down with a spatula, blend again and, if it's for Yorkshire pudding, just leave the batter for a while. Or even overnight. For your Yorkshires, the key points, I think, are that the batter has time to settle and that the fat into which you put them must be blisteringly hot. I bake the pudding in either individual helpings in a muffin tin or in one vast dish and I don't mind if they sre soft or crisp. Same goes for Toad in the hole.

But the pancakes for now....just for me, I cooked two in a pan, keeping them very thin so that they were just a little crisp and lacy at the edges and then I ate them like a woman possessed, with copious lemon juice and soft brown sugar. And it wasn't even Shrove Tuesday.

Thank you to fionaandneil at flickr for tjhe picture. 

Why you should get yourself some thali dishes (part one)

Oooh: look at these. This is a stainless steel shop in Chennai (Madras) and, I must tell you, I have a splendid collection of stainless steel dishes, plates and tumblers. Favourite of all, though, would be my thali dishes.

Thali are large silver platters which are either flat -- for you to place little matching silver pots full of different dishes on the platters-- or the thali dishes have different sections into which you put your food. It is the latter I favour and, reader, I use them day in and day out and not just for curries.(Although you can see a selection of curries and fresh pickles in my last entry -- a regular dinner in our Anglo-American household, curiously enough...)

So here's an idea: why don't you pop over to Spices of India at http://www.spicesofindia.co.uk and find yourself some dishes like these; you'll find them listed as dinner plates and then use them for all sorts of things? For example, dinner last night for assorted under 8s. A thali dish into which went little handfuls of crisps, carrot sticks, cherry tomatoes, peanut butter sandwiches cut into stars, cubes of cheese, some chipolatas and a big mango hedgehog. The mango hedgehog is, as you might know if you've been reading this for a while or have read my book, simply a fat slice of mango, skin still attached, scored and bent back on itself. Looks like a hedgehog, see? Well, sort of. My point is, the dish looks novel and hugely cheerful, like party food every day, but is practical and a good way to eke out odds and sods and make them look special. Ker-ching!

And for our dinner tonight, the thalis will be used by Mr Nedved and me and they will be heaped with a prawn curry (curry leaves, cumin seeds, fresh coriander, chopped red chilli, garlic), in the central section will be a mound of basmati rice, in another, some Greek yoghurt, just slightly flavoured with some 'chaat' powder and in another section, a little fresh pickle of finely chopped cucumber with sea salt, black pepper and fennel seed. Fire lit (have you looked outside? My five year old got blown over in a field just now while we were dog walking); dinner on lap. Try it. We might be watching --against Mr Nedved's will, the X factor: awful but I cannot seem to look away. I digress. The thali dish, by the way, tends to be native to Southern India (see the beautiful thali of Southern Indian vegetarian food above), but you do see it elsewhere. And I've given you (to left) another stainless steel picture (how I love these shops) and one of my own thalis. In the dish below, you can see a nan (or naan) bread, which is speckled with kalonji -- the spice you might know as onion seed or nigella; there is a rather thick massor (red lentil) dhal with curry leaves, some aloo paalak (potato and spinach curry), a hot lime pickle, some cucumber batons which I had barely sprinkled with anardhana (pomegranate powder), some fresh lime slices, a hot lime pickle and a little fresh pickle (or you might call it a salad) or tomato, green mango, onion, saunf (fennel seed), fresh mint and dred chilli. These are North Indian foods.Get cooking. x

Many thanks to McKaysavage and LadyJake at Flickr for, respectively, the stainless steel shots and that of the South Indian thali, about which I will tell you in a more scholarly future chapter.