It has been brought to my attention that Thanksgiving is three days away, and yet there has been no sign of the annual PTMYB Pointlessly Long Countdown to Thanksgiving Dinner, with accompanying Exhaustive Discussion of Every Dish Being Served. Well, heavens, I certainly don't want to disappoint. 
I will, however, keep it short, mostly because it's pretty much the same dinner we had last year, and because I don't want to come over all foodporny and obnoxious. As my beloved Graham Chapman once said, there'll be plenty of time for that later.
Once again, it will just be me and Lloyd, and once again, no matter how much I try to scale everything down, we will still have plenty of leftovers. I have ordered a domestic turkey, which tends not to run smaller than 15 pounds, but the only smaller turkeys available from my poultry guy are wild turkeys, which are more expensive and don't have much breast meat. (In general I'm not picky about breast meat; in fact, I'm a bit spooked by the specter of industrial turkey farms raising birds with breasts so big that their legs snap underneath the weight, but I do like enough white meat for a couple of days' worth of sandwiches, and I've yet to find it in a wild turkey.) We will be stuffing this birdie with cornbread and prosciutto stuffing and serving it with mashed potatoes, maple-glazed sweet potatoes, marinated brussels sprouts, and cranberry sauce. Hard cider for drinking, celery root remoulade and Stoned Wheat Thins for hors d'oeuvres (which, in our house, is French for "the course we nibble on all day until the turkey is ready"
, pumpkin pie for afters.
I used to be a fan of the recipe on the back of the Libby's solid-pack pumpkin can, and I still am. Then one year, in the interest of comparison, I made Rose Levy Beranbaum's pumpkin pie recipe from The Pie and Pastry Bible, the one that requires you to cook the pumpkin and sugar together on the stovetop before blending them with the eggs and cream, pouring everything into the pie shell and sending it all to the oven. This woman is nuts, I remember telling Lloyd. Who's going to cook a filling twice? Dear friends, do you really need me to tell you the answer to that? That twice-cooked filling was the best pumpkin pie I'd ever had: creamy, custardy, emulsified, not at all tight or watery. I'm never looking back.
If you're ever down in Brooklyn (or Queens), look us up. All dramatic devices aside, it *is*a fun pie to make, almost as much fun to make as to eat. But to my mind, even more fun than making it is to have a big nerdy enthusiastic conversation with a fellow pie baker about how much fun it is to bake a pie, and last Saturday, the conversation couldn't get much bigger or more enthusiastic than the one I had with the lovely and delightful Stephanie, a/k/a Pie Queen. Dear New York City-based friends, if you ever get the opportunity to do a food crawl with Stephanie, or even to just get coffee with her, snap it right up. She is a treasure trove of information -- her book about honey is a veritable seminar -- and a savvy, astute, just plain damn fun shopping partner. In less than 90 minutes we managed to sample tartlets, palmiers, coconut cakes and almond horns at Patisserie St. Honore; pick up some cheese and bottled sour cherries at my favorite Turkish deli; oo and ahh over the fresh ricotta at my favorite Italian deli; buy tiny, non-greasy, still warm mini spanakopitae and tiropitae at Artopolis (which, in addition to a staggering selection of Greek cookies, also makes a passion fruit miroir that tastes the way a really good slow kiss feels); and take a quick pass at the new Mediterranean Foods, where, in addition to the usual collection of superb foodstuffs, we also found an impressive display of California Girl Brand Canned Squid, product of Peru. When Stephanie picked up a can from the display and mused, "I wonder how hungry I'd have to be before I'd consider eating this," I knew that I was in the presence of a like-minded soul. Go visit her blog. Tell her that I told you to ask her when she'll be posting her essay about her trip to the Southern Foodways Conference. Feel free to ask her about this a *lot*. >
Compared to where I was this time last year, when for about 20 awful minutes I was sure that I missed our turkey-ordering window of opportunity, we are in good shape for this Thanksgiving. This year we do actually have a turkey on order, although, sadly true to form, I'll be damned if I can find the receipt. (It's not necessary to have the receipt to pick up the turkey, any more than it is to pick up my dry cleaning, but, as with the dry cleaners, it speeds things up considerably to have the receipt when you pick up the turkey.) We have our menu planned, I have a basic shopping list. None of this is particularly newsworthy; I am just repeating it because on Saturday's market run I spent nearly fifty bucks, and all I have to show for Thanksgiving dinner is two bags of cranberries and a pint of cream for the pumpkin pie.
Lest you wonder just what kind of cream and cranberries would cost me fifty bucks, I assure you that I did actually buy other things, and good and useful things at that. They are just not specifically Thanksgiving things. You might think that this would not be the best weekend to make a great honking batch of paradise jelly, but from the moment I arrived at the market and smelled quinces in the cool dry air, I knew that jelly would be inevitable. Every time I buy quinces, I think of the many uses to which they could be put: slipped into an apple pie; featured in a pie of their own; halved, poached with a vanilla bean and a little sugar, pureed and turned into sorbet, or ice cream, or left halved and tipped into a wide-mouth mason jar and then covered with grappa. Then I take them home, let them sit in the trifle bowl for a day or two until the kitchen smells of quince and little else, turn them onto the cutting board, scrub the fuzz off their skins, cut them into chunks, tip them into the preserving kettle, cover them with water and boil them until the skins pull away from the flesh and they give under the gentlest pressure of the ladle. I must have made this jelly at least a dozen times, and every single time I get such a charge from cooking the quinces, and seeing how beautifully the juice sets, a set so thick that the juice doesn't pour so much as fall from the ladle. But it's not an overdone, jujube-like set. It's so soft that it makes the mind wander.
