Thanksgiving Weekend

We decided to host Thanksgiving at our house this year. It's been quite a while since we've done that, since half the years I am assigned to work that holiday, and the other half we've taken a couple trips to Pennsylvania to visit Tim's brother John and family lately. Actually this was my year to work (Wednesday night), but having everyone over Friday gave us a day to get ready. So I got holiday pay, plus got to have everyone over. I need that kind of turbocharged motivation to get the house cleaned and make a houseful o' food.

I even found some spare minutes and motivation to do some minimal decoration. I bought a cheap dozen roses at Meijer's and filled them out with the weird orange berries from our ground-cover shrubbery and my leftover teasel from stuffing the window boxes. I used the brown custard cups we found at the farm for vases. I've had some Indian corn for years (from my parents-in-law) and decided to deploy that in the center of the basement island, which always serves as the buffet. Green ivy is always a good accent, and we need to cull about a thousand times more than the few tiny sprigs I picked from the front of the house and flung over the corn circle around the rustic root bowl (pic of that is too blurry to use, sorry).

I was delayed joining the festivities a bit due to last minute pan-searing of the brussels sprouts with chestnuts and bacon (thank you Elise for helping with the bacon), and preparing the gravy from the turkey drippings. Gravy...whoda thunk I'd come to like gravy so much...homemade is so good when you've got decent stock and drippings. I had made some stock with turkey wings and frozen it  the week before. Note for next time:  brown them in a pan on the stovetop, because they didn't take on much color roasting in the oven. I was slightly worried about the anemic color of the final product.  I forgot to employ Ellen's trick of pureeing in veggies, which would have been slightly healthier than the all-roux thickener.

And the local Hartland Farms turkey did not disappoint. Raw, the bird has an impressive bone structure and rosy colored skin. Tim questioned the doneness when he was carving some meat that probably would have been  beige-white on a normal store-bought turkey...it was a dark dusky pink near the keelbone. Probably myoglobin from being allowed to freely run around. On Sunday he decided to attack the carcass and remove all the meat so we could make the stock that day. After some initial browning, 4 hours of simmering yielded collagenous liquid gold. And the best-smelling house on the planet. This is to be frozen for later uses, or made into turkey chowder.

We decided to skip the usual, somewhat tired cheese platter for appetizers. I made some candied nuts using an improvised goo of maple syrup, brown sugar, sea salt, melted butter, worcestershire sauce and Chinese 5-spice powder.  And we served flaky onion and sage tarts. Tim found the recipe in our Herbfarm cookbook. I should look through that book more often. Brought back memories of our epic 6-hour dinner there just days before 9/11, and meeting chef Jerry Traunfeld himself. And of our table-mate's groupie-like enthusiasm when she got up to hug him when he circulated around the room after the meal.

Several weeks ago a second shift coworker took the time to make caramel apples for EVERYONE in the lab. Individually packaged with our names on them. We were all quite impressed. 'Oh, it was a good day's work', she casually said when I asked her how long it took. I got inspired to try making my own.  Even though I knew sister-in-law Ann was bringing a pumpkin cheesecake (which was delicious and coincidentally also contained 5-spice powder), I made half a dozen apples. There can never be too many desserts. I found a good basic recipe here at Chow, as well as ideas for doing even more obscene things to apples, like stuffing them with ganache.

As with most gatherings, I look back on this one and am surprised at how fast the afternoon/evening goes. And how minimal the input is needed from me, once the event gets under way, to keep people content. And how tired (a good kind of tired) I am afterwards.

Early the next morning, Mom, Tim and I hit the road before 7am and headed to Eastern Market. Hirt's is no more, and is now called DeVries. But it looks almost exactly the same inside, just tidier. You can still choose from the huge array of cheeses and find all sorts of obscure food items. There are still the same baskets and household gew-gaws on the upper floors, along with the same creaky wooden stairs.

I had impulsively offered to put together a gift basket for our supervisor the week before. Which just gave me even more of an excuse to run amok in all our favorite foodies stores grabbing things left and right. I've known this guy for 25 years, but after all this time know very little about his personal likes/dislikes. I got some clues from a few people, but this guy keeps his personal life to himself. Which is, I suppose, as it should be. And as much bitching and moaning as I do about my job, I have to say we have about the best boss we could ever have. He does a lot for us, and gets piled on day and night from above and below. So I solicited donations and had fun spending over $100 on things I thought he would like. His face turned a satisfying shade of red when I carried all the booty into his office during one of our daily post-shift huddles the following week.

We didn't do too badly on ourselves, either. We slowly worked our way back north and west toward home. Holiday Market, Cloverleaf, Westborne, Papa Joe's, Trader Joe's...the usual hit parade. And we checked out a new eatery for lunch, Vinsetta Garage. It's been a fixture along Woodward Avenue for years. The same people who own Clarkston Union and Wood Shop bought the empty building and turned it into a casual restaurant, leaving as much of the old auto repair and racing fixtures as possible. The big garage doors with their tracks and pulleys, the skylights; the restroom entryway is wallpapered with old repair invoices. The bathroom floor is completely tiled with pennies. All Lincoln side up. The menu is short and sweet. The Vinsetta burger is one of the best I've ever had. Ever. The mac and cheese is redonkulously rich (more nutmeg and bechamel than what the Clarkston Union serves). Fries with the potato skin on. Unique pizzas (coney dog...yes, it's delicious). Their next project is an empty firehouse in Fenton. Looking forward to what they'll do with that.

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Onion and Sage Tarts ( adapted from The Herbfarm Cookbook by Jerry Traunfeld)

2 pounds yellow onions, (3 or 4 medium) sliced
2 ounces bacon (2 slices) finely diced
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 to 3 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh sage
Freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 large egg
4 7-inch or 2 10-inch Free-Form Tart Shells made from Flaky Pastry dough

1. Caramelizing the onions

Peel the onions and cut them in half from root to tip. Cut out the dense core at the root end, and slice the onions 1/4 inch thick, again from root end to tip. Cook the bacon, stirring often, in a large 4-quart saucepan over medium heat until almost crisp. Add the onions, sugar, and salt and cook, stirring often, until  they cook down by two thirds, about 10 minutes. Add 2 teaspoons vinegar, reduce the heat to medium-low, and continue to cook until onions are an even golden brown and softened to a marmalade consistency, 15 to 30 minutes, depending on the onions. Stir often and scrape up any brown bits clinging to the bottom of the pan. The onions need almost constant stirring near the end to prevent them from sticking and burning. They'll let you know they need attention by giving off a sizzling sound. Stir in the sage, allow them to cool slightly, then taste and season with black pepper and additional salt if needed. If the onions seem overly sweet, stir in another teaspoon of vinegar. (The onions can be caramelized up to 2 days ahead and stored covered in the refrigerator.)

2. Filling and baking

Preheat the oven to 350F. Stir the cream and egg into the caramelized onions until thoroughly combined. Divide the filling among the tart shells and spread it evenly with the back of a spoon. Bake in the upper third of the oven until the filling is set, about 15 minutes (for 2 10-inch tarts, 20-25 minutes). The filling should be soft, but not runny. Let cool slightly then transfer the tarts to a cutting board using a large spatula. cut each into 8 wedges (12 wedges for 10-inch tarts) with the downward pressure of a sharp chef's knife. Serve warm or room temperature.

Flaky Pastry

2 cups bleached all-purpose flour (spoon and level; 9 ounces)
8 ounces (2 sticks) unsalted butter, chilled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 to 8 tablespoons ice water

Place the flour, butter and salt in a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Pulse about 24 times, then open the machine and lift a handful of the crumbs. The largest pieces of the butter should be the size of raw grains of rice or barley. If there are larger pieces, continue to pulse the mixture. When the butter pieces are the correct size, transfer the mixture to a large mixing bowl. Sprinkle 6 tablespoons of ice water onto the dough. Spread the fingers of one hand as if you were about to grab a large ball and using your rigid fingertips as if they were a large fork, stir the dough quickly and briefly until the liquid is incorporated. Squeeze a handful of the dough in your palm. If it seems dry and crumbly, cautiously add more water, a few teaspoons at a time until you can squeeze it into a ball that will not crumble when broken apart.

At this point I divided the dough in half and tightly wrapped it as two disks for a day and a half. For the prebaked tart shells, I rolled out to about 11-12 inches on a lightly floured surface, docked with the tines of a fork and rolled up the edge. I had trouble following the instructions to get a nice twisted rope edge, but I got a sturdy crimped edge in the end. I baked on parchment at 375 for at least 15 minutes (I think it was more like 20), since my oven tends to run a little low, and I made 2 larger tarts. The shells did puff up a little, and the instructions say to press the center down with the back of a spoon if that happens. I baked directly after rolling rather than refrigerating for 30 minutes like the instruction say, and I forgot the egg wash on the edge. Holiday-company's-coming amnesia and my usual finesse in following written instructions (how I manage to successfully cook or follow any procedure at work is truly a wonder). Oh well! Still wonderfully, decadently delicious, and shatteringly flaky as the recipe promised. Well worth doing again.