Haiku

Happy Thanksgiving 2010 Haiku

47 Comments

The table is set
brined turkey smokes on the grill.
Happy Thanksgiving.


Menu

  1. Turkey brined in maple syrup then smoked.
  2. Garlic mashed potatoes.
  3. Gravy.
  4. Cranberry sauce.
  5. Green salad (whatever my brothers-in-law bring).
  6. Rolls (also brought by brothers-in-law.)
  7. Way too much wine.
  8. Other spirits
  9. Sparkling water ( reduces wine consumption.)
  10. Brussel sprout beet dish Jim read about.
  11. Squash with some sugar and way too much butter.
  12. Apple pie.

Missing traditional appearances: Mini marshmallows, green bean casserole, something with corn in it. (Hmmm… maybe I should make corn bread.)

Cranberry Sauce
I think commercial cranberry sauce is too sweet. Here’s me recipe with 1/2 the sugar. It uses 2/3rd a bag of cranberries. I bake the remaining ones into “T-day recovery” oat bran muffins to eat on Saturday and Sunday.

  1. 1/3rd cup sugar
  2. 2/3 cup water
  3. 2 cups cranberries

Mix water and sugar in a sauce pan and heat over high heat until boiling. Dump in cranberries. Stir occasionally while heating until cranberries pop, then gel. If you like chunky, stop when you still have chunks. If you like less chunky, continue heating and mash some cranberries on the side of the pot. If you like really smooth, use an immersion blender to totally pulverize the last few stubborn skins.

Allow to cool about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Pour into a serving dish, refrigerate. Serve cold.

Serve with Turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes. You know the drill!

47 thoughts on “Happy Thanksgiving 2010 Haiku”

  1. Happy Thanksgiving and enjoy your turkey.

    I am waiting for a general haiku thread to post my series of haiku about a horse. 🙂

  2. Anna v– Well… I have to go do some cardio to wear off about 10% of the wine calories and pie calories I intend to consume.

  5. You should try replacing some of the water with orange juice and add some orange zest to your cranberry sauce recipe and maybe taking out some more of the sugar to correct for the sugar in the juice.

    Happy Thanksgiving,

    DeWitt

  10. Turkey brined in maple syrup then smoked.

    That sounds… filling! 🙂

    Fruit with meat? Are you insane!?!!!

    In France we cook rabbit with dried plums (examples), and duck with oranges. Cranberry sauce on meat is pretty mild in comparison!

  13. Duck with orange is an abomination. An abomination I tell you. The eternal paradox of the French is this: how can they create confit de carnard and then eat it with oranges? It is a riddle, wrapped in bacon, inside a case of flaky pastry.

  14. BTW, the doors of my truck were frozen shut this morning. The Global Warming must have gotten stuck in between the door and the rest of the truck. You Warmers never talk about how Global Warming has glueish properties.

    I should have showed my truck a graph with a squiggly line that slopes drastically upward at the end. Maybe if she had known that we are in the midst of unprecedented warming, she would have been more cooperative.

    Andrew

  15. Andrew_KY (Comment#62459) November 26th, 2010 at 8:30 am
    Wow, has that ever happened before to your truck doors?
    Global Warming has hit Surf City, Ca. this morning too. My thermometer is reporting 32°F. Funny how the official temperature on my browser,for my city, says its 42°F. I am sure the homeless and other people who can’t afford heat will appreciate the extra 10°F of warming they are handing out for free. (it is not even officially winter yet too) 🙁

    TerryMN in the other thread yesterday wanted to trade me for an overall high of 1°F. No thanks Terry! 🙂

    Hope everyone had a warm and good day yesterday!

  16. Hi liza! 🙂

    Hope you and the fam had a Happy Thanksgiving. Anyway, my truck doors have been unopenable before, but I was always told it was due to ice. It’s never been stuck by Global Warming before. Or has it?

    If any of you Warmers have any advice on how to deal with these unprecedented changes, please help a brotha’ out. 😉

    Andrew

  17. Andrew_KY–
    I’m glad it finally got cold. Now I can keep all the extra food in the garage! We do 2 days of thanksgiving around here. Yesterday, we had a 12 lb turkey. Today, I’ve got a 16lbr in the oven– for “Turkey Alfredo Day”. (This is how my sisters and I deal with all the competition for days with the in-laws vs. We all eat with the inlaws on thursday. “Our” clan is at my house on Black Friday. My older sister does Christmas day. My younger sister does… never! 🙂 )

  18. Lucia,

    We are having another Thanksgiving today too. My little brother and sister-in-law are coming in. I have to work today though, so no feasting on new/old turkey and related goodies until later! 😉

    Andrew

  22. Tom Fuller (Comment#62781)

    Glad to see you coming around. Hope the new job is everything you hoped it would be.

    Mark:

    My turkey is brined with salt, chicken base and honey and then baked with an apple, orange, onion and celery in the cavity. Spread your wings… there’s more to poultry then buffalo wings and KFC!

    liza (Comment#62460)
    November 26th, 2010 at 8:38 am
    Yeah, I’ve noticed that public thermometers here in Connecticut seem to read about 5-10 degrees too high… I live on the shore and my thermometer is attached to the house… if it reads 35 here, the thermometer at the bank, a mile inland and 50′ higher reads 42…. I’ve been wondering if there is really a thermometer at the bank or if they are simply displaying a number from some remote location….

    Lucia, enjoy your holiday and drink as much wine as you like.

  23. My brother and I working on a way to produce something like Peking duck in the home kitchen as an addition to the holiday dinner. I think we’re getting close. Our ideal is succulent meat with a skin so crisp and fragile that it dissolves in your mouth. I have a dinner scheduled at Sun Wah Bar-B-Q (5041 N Broadway in Chicago) for my sixtieth so I can set the baseline. I’ve also heard the Peni$ula serves it.

    Anyone know what this guy is saying?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3KjDs4yYpU&NR=1

  24. Hank,
    I’ve forwarded your question to a friend who lived in China for a few years. Like everyone, she has family visiting this weekend, but eventually, we may get an answer.

  25. Re: HankHenry (Nov 28 10:37),

    I remember watching a cooking show many years ago, Joyce Chen perhaps, where Peking Duck was prepared. As I remember, the skin was separated from the duck before baking by inflation using a hand air pump like a bicycle tire pump.

  26. I only eat Duck when my nephew cooks. 🙂

    I’m going to try the orange in the cranberry sauce next year. Now… to make turkey and bean soup!

  27. “11.Squash with some sugar and way too much butter.”

    I find it difficult to use too much butter in cooking. Did your mashed potatoes contain more butter than your squash? I have always found myself turned on by two of my favorite cooks, Julia Child and Ina Garten, when they unapologetically use copious amounts of butter in their recipes.

    I find your place setting and TG menu very much to my liking even though the traditional cranberry dishes are something that I have never found to fit my personal tastes.

    Do you have recipe for the turkey brined in maple syrup then smoked? How long did the smoking take?

    Would that be brown sugar in the squash and would that be butternut or acorn squash or something else?

  28. DeWitt. yes, exactly. Some say you can just use a blunt knife to separate the skin instead of getting out the air compressor but when I tried that I found it difficult. I have the compressor, I just need to go find one of those needles used to blow up a football. The classic recipe also calls for parboiling, drying, and a wood oven. The wood oven is going to be the thing we have to get around.

  29. Kenneth–
    I mean much more butter than the health authorities advise. 🙂

    My squash contained more butter than the mashed potatoes. I’ll post the turkey recipe monday. (I was fiddling with the auto-close comments plugin today. I discovered that a lot of spam was getting submitted on attachments pages, which never closed. I think I’m going to have to submit the tweaked plugin to wordpress for others. I’ve made enough changes to make it worth it!)

  34. Lucia:

    Sorry to go off topic and post about something climate related, but I wasn’t sure where else to ask this.

    Have you seen this post from RC about a week back:

    http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/11/so-how-did-that-global-cooling-bet-work-out/

    Here is a non-pay wall link to the paper in question:

    http://www.usclivar.org/Pubs/2May08Keenlyside.pdf

    I’m confused because what appears on Gavin’s graph is different from what appears in figure 4 of the paper. It looks like Gavin has taken the forecast (2000-2010) and hindcast (1995-2000) and connected them at different points. Is that proper?

    If you or anyone else care to explain I’d be interested…

  35. It looks like Gavin has taken the forecast (2000-2010) and hindcast (1995-2000) and connected them at different points. Is that proper?

    Actually Gavin’s presentation seems quite kind to K08. If the hindcast was directly connected to the forecast, the graph would “look” even worse for K08, because you would see two clear, well-defined lines diverging from each other with a growing gap in between. Gavin has charitably “chopped off” the hindcast from the forecast line, reducing the apparent difference.
    .
    Of course this is all cosmetics, which is why I use double quotes. The actual data is the same as in Fig. 4 of K08. The gap is real and really growing.
    .
    If you want to make Gavin look bad here, I would suggest a different question: where’s the prediction from model simulations, which was included in K08 Fig. 4, but not in Gavin’s figure?

  36. Robert E. Phelan (Comment#62787) November 27th, 2010 at 8:59 pm, Thanks for your reply. This morning it is 32°F (I am on the coast too) and the official temperature says 42°F. Like I said, I am sure the homeless and folks who can’t afford heat in So. Cal appreciate the extra free degrees. 🙁

    A few years back we were in Hawaii for Thanksgiving. (the climate has not changed on those islands!) My father in law’s home is a duplex and he usually rents the other half of it to soldiers who are stationed at the bases up the road. We made them and their friends-boys and girls ( some of them were shipping of to Iraq in a few weeks) a big Thanksgiving dinner/luau. Along with the traditional fixings (Hawaiian and American) I made Paula Deen’s “pineapple cheddar casserole”. Super yummy!

    Wish I was in Hawaii now. The house is very very cold this morning. Global Warming where are you?

  37. In light of the news that HADCRUT will be adjusting temperatures upwards, I will be taking their measurements and cutting all of their numbers by half.

    I cannot wait to hear of all the bogus reasons why they need to adjust the temperatures.

  38. “In light of the news that HADCRUT will be adjusting temperatures upwards”

    Doesn’t strike anyone as odd that Climate Science doesn’t even know how to correctly measure temperature at this point, such that they need to adjust after-the-fact?

    Andrew

  39. Hope everyone had as much to eat as I did.

    Could we have a report on the betting for November UAH? (I didn’t miss it, did I?) The falling channel 5 temps have me interested.

  41. Bradley (Comment#63170)
    I never paid much attention to Keelyside, because it was obviously already off track “predicting” when published. I would not have shifted the “forecasts” the way Gavin did– but I agree with Toto, that not shifting would make Keelyside look worse than Gavin showed.

  42. HankHenry, we used to make peking duck by blanching it twice in boiling water and hanging the duck a day before cooking. Make sure to put some maltose in the boiling water when you dunk the duck for that crispy orangey type skin.

  43. Mark, thanks, I had concluded the the blanching and drying was essential. Now I will go searching for maltose. Some insist you must not dunk in boiling water but baste with a ladle. In the end we may have something we will give our own name to – we are moving toward something between peking duck and tea smoked duck. This all started when my brother and I watched an episode of Heston Blumenthal’s “In Search of Perfection.” As far as we were concerned what Heston came up with is big time fail.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvAJeJ5B5Ms

  44. Re: HankHenry (Nov 29 13:26),

    A video I found used cornstarch in hot water to baste the duck before roasting. The final skin color appeared to be fairly dark red. The same sort of thing happens when making bread using a slow fermentation (refrigerate the dough overnight, for example). The enzymes that break down starch keep working but the yeast is slowed down enough by the low temperature so sugars build up and the Maillard reaction during baking produces a darker color for the crust.

  45. liza (Comment#63191)
    November 29th, 2010 at 7:41 am

    My son John did three tours in Iraq, I really appreciate your efforts. He’s been in South Korea since August…. wish the #^&%$#*&^! Army would send him, just once, to some place where there was no gun fire!

    Yeah, we got global warming here… the La Nina seems to create warming in New England…. uh… the temperatures are 50’s to 30’s now, as opposed to 40’s to 20’s…. but the damn public thermometers seem to read about 7-8 degrees too high.

    The American Sociological Association Task Force on Sociology and Global Climate Change is looking for input. I’m biting my tongue at the moment …..

  46. Robert E. Phelan (Comment#63258)
    T’was nothing to make dinner for them. Now playing beer pong with them, that was rough. 😉 Give your son a shout out and big thank you from us. We will wish him safe,sound and home soon. My husband is retired disabled US Army (now an environmental scientist …ha!) served on the DMZ also; my father in law West Point grad (Vietnam) and my father Marine, disabled/purple heart Korean War.

    So if it’s warmer on the East coast and colder on the West coast…”globally” the cold and warm is not really new or gone is it? Silly wet wobbly planet. LOL

  47. I know Andrew, thank you for pointing that out. Imagine if scientists said they would be adjusting the MWP upwards just because…well because. Also, did you watch the congressional debates? That quack from Penn State basically endorsed Mann’s graph, claiming that today’s temperatures are warmer than they were in the MWP. I don’t know why they do this. It is very obvious that this scientist and his colleagues are very afraid of admitting historical facts. Notice that they will never tell you that we are below the average levels of co2 in earth’s history. Plus, they will not tell you that we did have very much more co2 in the atmosphere, like during the time of the dinosaurs. I am convinced I could go debate many of these people, especially Heidi Cullen. All she does is trumpet the company line, she has done zero analysis on anything she reports and I could carve her up!

Comments are closed.