Happy Thanksgiving - What are you doing?

[o.pwuaioc]

We hosted! First time doing so, and man oh man I'm with an amazing woman who put together an amazing Thanksgiving dinner!

[Luke]

Visited my family at my parent's mountain house/museum. I knew they did some redecorating, but I had no idea that they redecorated to the extent that they did. I took pics if anyone cares to see them, but in short my jaw dropped when I walked in. Floor to ceiling displays of vintage Roseville pottery, goofus glass, carnival glass, and china.

Great feast on Thanksgiving, and I was also able to meet up with some old friends. OH! Which reminds me, I tried something a bit unusual while dining with a buddy. It was a half pound angus burger topped with an over easy egg and pickled beets. I had never heard of the combination before, so I had to try it. It was absolutely delicious.

Only complaint about the visit was the weather. Way too warm for late November.

[Ziggy]

I ended up having a nice small Thanksgiving dinner at my brother's girlfriend's house with her family. I made cardone, for the first time ever, and only had to explain what it was about a million times. There was no Wiki article for it, that I could find, but here's a picture:



I'm assuming cardone is an Italian word for it, and it's proper name is something else, and that's why I couldn't find it on Wiki. Oh well. My supermarket only carries it around Thanksgiving and Christmas, we have it no other time during the year. Looks like celery, but it's absolutely not. As far as I know, it comes from the same plant artichokes go. I have no reason to dispute this because it tastes a LOT like artichoke. It's got spikes all over it, not unlike artichoke spikes. So you have to kinda peel it first. Then you have to boil it. Then at this point, most people bread and fry it. It's really good. It basically tastes like breaded and fried artichoke.

It was my first time cooking it tho, so I had to do a little experimenting. I breaded and fried a lot of pieces, but I also came up with something amazing. My brother was making stuffed mushrooms to bring, and he makes a some what elaborate stuffing mix. He uses the stems from the shrooms, breadcrumbs, and a bunch of other minor ingredients. On half of them, he adds imitation crab meat. Anyways, he had a lot of the stuffing left over. I ended up with a bunch of cardone pieces that weren't large enough to bread easily. So I came up with this idea. I minced up the rest of the cardone and mixed it together with the rest of the egg and breadcrumbs I had. Then I mixed it with the rest of my brother's stuffing. Then I pressed them into little cakes (like crab cakes) and fried them. They were absolutely delicious! So I think I'll make cardone again on Christmas. Only this time, I'll only make a few pieces of breaded cardone. The rest of it I'll make into cakes.

My brother's girlfriend's father cooked the turkey. He cooked it on a barbeque. I think it might have been smoked? Apparently if you read the cook book that comes with a Weber, it explains in detail how to cook a turkey this way. It's apparently very particular directions, right down to how to position the coals. It was absolutely delicious. So most. Probably one of the best, if the THE best turkey I've ever had.

After dinner, we ended up watching a movie called Goon. I've never heard of it before, but it actually wasn't bad.

[Ziggy]

2013 BUMP!

[Ziggy]

I feel like I have the same story year after year, and that I could almost just copy and paste my post from last year or the year before and it would still be true enough.

So this year, I'm still at the super market, but this'll hopefully be my last holiday season there. I have a new second job at the moment, I'm in training as a repair mechanic and will become full time with the company in a few months.

So yet another year where I can claim "I haven't been off since ___ day" but I honestly can't even remember the last time I was off. Since September I've only been off one day every two or three weeks. Luckily, I'm off today and tomorrow. I wanted to sleep in, and I really could have, but I had to force myself up. I have a few food items that need prepping.

I'm making my cardone again, but I'm doing it a little different. After last year's Thanks Giving, I had another chance to make cardone. I made those "cakes" that I described. This year, I have a small deep fryer that I'll be using. First, I'll be making potato chips. Then, I'm gonna deep fry my cardone cakes.

I think I'll put the stupid parade on, and play a little Super Mario 3D World. First, and most important, I'll have to put up a big pot of coffee.

[brunoafh]

I'll be deleting Black Friday related spam from my inbox all day.

[Ziggy]

LOL. I actually have my Amazon cart filled with tools I need for work, I've been waiting almost a week to see if the price will go down a little tomorrow.

[CRTGAMER]

I already posted the 28 pounder in the other Thanksgiving Thread.

Maybe the Threads can be merged to avoid the extra posts and going thru two Threads?

EDIT Turkey Update
Three more hours to go. Holy crap, the bird is rolling over!

[Ziggy]

I just finished all my cooking. The potato chips came out awesome, and I had to keep myself from eating them all. I made the cardone into fish stick shapes, so I'm calling them cardone sticks. They came out great. Time to go munch on them!

I just wish I would have thought to pick up some calamari. I could have breaded them and made fried calamari since I have the deep fryer all set up already. Oh well, I'll have to remember that for next year. I try to get the most out of the deep fryer whenever I use it since it costs roughly $10 in oil to fill up, and the oil pretty much gets wasted afterwards. I do have a bunch of slivers and unusable pieces of potatoes from the chips I made, so I plan to make hash browns tomorrow with the deep fryer. Then after that, I'll just dump the oil.

[CRTGAMER]

Hope everyone had a great feast!

Another Turkey done, get to do this again next month for Christmas. A tradition, I do Turkey traditional bake twice every year and always use Butterball with good very juicy meat results. Over pack the bird with a ton of stuffing and a lot of basting. Four Boxes (eight bags) of Mrs. Cubbisons Stuffing usually enough to go around. Looks like baby barf inside and all around the turkey, but that stuffing is very moist and yummy. Have to check my cholesterol count though.