Here’re the words to go with the pics above:
Turkey - that was a garlic-herb turkey breast, where I loosened the skin and rubbed Boursin cheese all over the breast. I had my doubts, and it was a messy PITA to put together, but it was excellent!
My favorite, just because of my stupidity paying off, has to be that sausage stuffing. That’s it with the sage leaves on top.
What happened was, I was looking for an easy stuffing recipe, and saw that one on BBC Good Food and I liked how it was sliced, instead of just loose. Glanced at the recipe…sausage…onion…bread…yeah, it’s just a basic stuffing, that’ll do.
Went to make it, and I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t bread stuffing with a bit of sausage in it (very common here), but was instead sausage stuffing with a bit of bread(crumbs) in it.
Yeah, it’s essentially sausage meatloaf, but I was a-ok with that. It was lovely! Sage sausage, apples, spiced up with some mace…loved it.
Garlic-baked mashed potatoes were excellent as well, nice little mix of breadcrumbs and Gruyère cheese on there.
Funny thing - it called for fresh thyme leaves, unchopped, sprinkled over, I did that last night, and when it went to put the plastic wrap over it (prepped last night to bake today), the static electricity caused some of the thyme leaves to jump about randomly, and I thought, “Oh
, there’re bugs in my thyme!”
I took the wrap off, went over it, couldn’t find anything amiss, put the wrap back on…there go the bugs again!
Bad eyesight and all, it took me a good four tries to realize it was the thyme moving all over.
Carrots were glazed in apple juice, butter, and hard cider, and the cabbage was cooked in orange juice and had golden raisins added in. Both were flavored up with cinnamon, star anise, things like that.
To the left of the turkey are bread stuffing patties, just like our grandma used to make. Remember that sausage stuffi-, er…
meatloaf? I’d asked my sis to make some patties in case my stuffing didn’t turn out, and I’m glad she did. Thanksgiving ain’t Thanksgiving without a lot of that stuffing.
The bread sauce…first time making it, and it’s excellent. That’ll show up again and again. I thought for sure my sis would turn her nose up at it, but she loved it - “It’s like Cream of Wheat, but with Christmas spices in it!”
That’s it for the meal rundown - everything was just about perfect, foodwise, if I do say so myself. Nothing dry, nothing over or undercooked, everything ready at the same time…it all worked out really well.
Now…off to plan Christmas dinner…
She's so sweet. She knows that I'm a foodie; that I take photos of all of the food and make sure that this town knows about them ... they cater now and I want to give them free publicity!
