Remember Thanksgiving? It Happened.

It was weeks ago already, and I've been totally missing in action ever since. Probably because I just came out of the resulting food coma. I know, I know, it's halfway to New Year's already, but I'm just now getting around to posting a wrap-up of the big day.

Ari, my cousin, made the turkey. He's been doing this for a few years now, and he's really good at it. Look at that turkey thigh! It's moist as can be. And I got a wing, which is always fun, because, you know, it's like a chicken wing, only HUGE.

I made the stuffing I talked about earlier, doctoring up some Whole Foods' brand stuffing mix with Dipaola turkey sausage (IT'S THE BEST) and a ton of fresh celery and onions. It was really good, just what I was hoping for.

I also made a bunch of roasted root veggies: blue potatoes, purple carrots, shallots, and jerusalem artichokes mixed with a ton of fresh rosemary and minced garlic, pimenton, salt and pepper. What could go wrong? Nothing, that's what.

There was also a lentil salad I brought along. It was really good--lentils cooked in vegetable stock, some chopped up carrots and shallots, lemon zest, sherry vinegar, mustard, olive oil, salt and pepper, mixed just til combined. This one's great to take to a party because it keeps really well, and it tastes even better if you make it a few days beforehand.

I also made an incredibly large--3+ gallons--batch of the Potato Leek Soup, a recipe that I've now made more times than I can count. How can just three ingredients come together to be so rich and satisfying? It's particularly good for tiding people over while various sides go in and out of the oven in preparation of the big feast.

So, that was Thanksgiving! Thanks to Aunt Susan and Uncle Jay for hosting everyone (I believe there were about 300 of us in total) and to everyone who brought or made some form of deliciousness, and especially to Mom for decorating the tables and making everything so pretty (that's her handiwork pictured above). I am truly thankful for such a large, loving family that I genuinely look forward to spending time with. And that's to say nothing of how thankful I am for all of you out there reading this. There's more on my list, but those two will have to do for now. Hope you all had a great holiday, and good luck with all the Christmas, Hannukah, New Years', and whatever else parties you all have coming up!

Do Not Panic, This is Only a Test: Bittman's Favorite Bread Stuffing

I've never made stuffing from scratch before, so when I said I'd do it for Thanksgiving dinner this year, I decided to get some practice in.

"This classic dressing is based on a wonderful recipe by James Beard," Bittman writes in the introduction to what is billed in the book simply as My Favorite Bread Stuffing. Fair enough. I'm not one to start second guessing Bittman, let alone James Beard himself. I went with the sausage variation, using turkey sausage.

Bittman's stuffing recipe is strange, though. First of all, the recipe calls for breadcrumbs instead of cubed bread. That was unexpected, but again, who am I to second guess James Beard? Nobody, that's who. I'd never had breadcrumb-based stuffing. Maybe it would be really good. This is just practice stuffing. Stick with the recipe.

So, you cook the sausage in its own fat (I added a bit of oil, as turkey sausage has a lot less fat to render than pork sausage) then add onion, minced garlic and ginger, and a teaspoon of cumin if you like (I skipped the cumin). Then you stir in the breadcrumbs and some chopped scallions. Then you bake it, either in the bird or in a baking dish. I opted for a baking dish, because that's how my family rolls, and I don't know if I'll be at Thanksgiving in time to get my stuffing in the actual bird. Now, every other stuffing recipe I've ever seen has you add stock or water to the breadcrumbs/cubes at this point. This one makes no mention of that.

I had a bad feeling about this one from the get-go. It was disappointing, but to be fair, it was stuffing with sausage in it--we had no trouble finishing it. Also, it turns out that shrimp and stuffing go well together, so there's that. I didn't get any pictures of the stuffing, but here's one of the shrimp we ate it with.

What's your favorite stuffing recipe? Let me know in the comments, I think I have time for one more dry run before Thanksgiving hits.

Pizza Party: Pizza Dough, White Pizza with Caramelized Onions and Vinegar, & Pizza with Tomato Sauce and Mozzarella

So, my mom's been wanting to make pizza for a long time now. The project seemed the perfect excuse, not that you need one: all things considered, it's a simple process and it yields great results even if you don't have a pizza stone, which *gasp* we do not. And it's really fun. And you can't argue with this:

So you take flour, cornmeal (optional, but makes the crust crispier), yeast, and salt, and put them in the food processor.

Turn it on, and add some water and olive oil through the feed tube. It will form a ball within about thirty seconds; if it doesn't add some more water. What you end up with looks like this:

Put it on the floured counter. Knead it a little bit.

Put it in a bowl, cover it, and let it rise for 1-2 hours. Sounds like a lot of downtime, but this is when we threw together our toppings. Each batch of dough makes two pizzas (or one huge one, I guess). On one we did just some caramelized onions and balsamic vinegar. The other, tomato sauce, mozzarella, mushrooms and turkey sausage (from DiPaola Farms at the Greenmarket--the best turkey sausage I've ever tasted). So, we caramelized some onions, over fairly low heat, for a pretty long time til they were nice and brown and sweet and delicious. Did pretty much the same thing with the mushrooms, which cooked faster. Browned the sausage (crumbled out of its casing), and threw together a batch of Fast Tomato Sauce.

And by then, the pizza dough was ready.

We stretched and rolled it out so it was as thin as we could get it, then laid it out on the baking sheets and got to topping. For the white pie we mixed a bit of the balsamic vinegar with the onions and just spread them out on top. For the other pie, I spread out a pretty thin layer of sauce, then the cheese slices, then scattered about the sausage and mushrooms. Sprinkled some grated parmesan on top of that, because why not, and our pies were good to go.

Bittman says that they need to bake for 6-12 minutes on 500 degrees. Ours took more like 20 minutes, but maybe that's because we like a nice crispy crust. Here's the finished white pie:

This one is definitely going into heavy rotation; let me know if you ever want to have a pizza party and I'm so there.