cooking madness

Tonight was my usual !!!Night-Before-Thanksgiving Cooking Extravaganza!!!  which in some happy years is the whole DAY before Thanksgiving instead of the night before, at least when I remember to ask off work before Aggravation Receptionist (who has NO days left to ask off so I’m not sure how exactly that worked but whatEVER) beats me to it … but oh well. We got to leave at 3 so I had time to go to the grocery store (I went to the grocery store yesterday but of course I forgot a couple of vital things. Like beer.) and to the post office (which oddly took twice as long as the grocery store) and still got home by four. And I was done by 8:15, with a shockingly minimal amount of disaster and drama. I love to cook, and I always look forward to the Holiday Cooking Festivities, but it is rare that I don’t experience some sort of massive disaster. Last year I ended up having to buy a pie from our local bakery at Thanksgiving-Highway-Robbery prices because TWO desserts I attempted crashed and burned (not literally burned but went up in figurative smoke in a way that I fail to recall now). So I always expect it to not go very well. 

This year, though, was quite unusual. It all went… smoothly. Mostly. Even though the very first thing I did was drop half a cup of flour all over the floor. After THAT it went smoothly. Except that I made Ginger Cookies and wasn’t paying attention to the amounts of spices I was putting in (imagine me not paying attention! Hahahahahah….shiny thing!!!) and I put a whole teaspoon of mace in instead of half a teaspoon. And trying to fish back out half a teaspoon didn’t work very well. Not surprisingly. So I ended up having to just toss that and start again (only a couple of cups of flour and some spices- luckily not my LAST cup of flour, as it ordinarily would have been). And then after the Ginger Cookies had been in the oven for several minutes and I was congratulating myself on how well everything had gone (other than the mace), I realized I’d forgotten to flatten the balls of cookies into discs of cookies with a glass before putting them into the oven. Fortunately it was not too late, and I hastily flattened them and they turned out fine. 

The Onion Bread went without a hitch. And it’s the most important thing – Onion Bread is our Tradition, and it would not be Thanksgiving without Onion Bread. I am the Traditional Maker of the Onion Bread, which is great because it’s really not difficult but LOOKS like it took massive effort, so I get lots of points for creating the Onion Bread like a magician every year. 

Ummmm, yes, that cookie sheet DOES look dreadful. It… adds flavor! Yes, that’s it!!! Look at the potholder instead — Cousin E made me that potholder! It has blueberries on the other side! It’s a really cool potholder! 

Ginger cookies: complete with lots of crumbs. And my ugggggly countertops! They are VERY 1970s. And not in a good way. 

That’s sugar in big clumps on a couple of those cookies. Not hunks of flour. I added crystalized ginger to the recipe since I had a box of crystalized ginger and needed to use it so I will quit eating it. I rolled the balls of dough in the crystalized-ginger-sugar-leftovers that I’ve been saving from the many boxes of crystalized ginger I’ve bought. 

Cranberry Jezebel Sauce! I’ve made it several years now. It has horseradish and dijon mustard in it. It’s spicy and delicious. 

Chocolate Mint Bars. Best dessert EVER. They are minty and chocolately and delicious. They’re a Cooking Light recipe (actually all of this is from Cooking Light except the Onion Bread, which is in no way light and came from a 1970s edition of Mother Earth News). Oddly the original recipe was AWFUL.. the brownie part called for egg substitute and it was eggy and weird and spongy and nasty. So I used a different brownie recipe from CL and put the mint and chocolate layers onto that. It’s delicious. 

Baker B demonstrating proper cooking techniques. 

Happy Thanksgiving to all the Americans, and Happy Thursday to everyone else!