Recipes
Cookbooks are so optimistic. They lay out instructions in glorious isolation from the reality of cooking an entire meal at once.
Wednesday I made soup stock, so that I’d have enough to keep the dressing from drying out. Thursday I made the soft rolls and cheesecake. One block of my afternoon went something like this:
- Roll out, cut, and roll up half the roll dough (I make what are supposed to be crescent rolls but never turn out that way)
- Suddenly remember to turn the oven on to warm
- Finish rolling out, cutting, and rolling up the rolls
- Put rolls in oven to rise
- Dig graham crackers out of pantry. Remove one of the three plastic-wrapped packets. Whack several times with rolling pin to break up crackers; commence reducing them to crumbs with same rolling pin
- Continue rolling graham crackers into crumbs
- And more rolling
- And more rolling
- Pull rolls out of oven; turn heat up to roll-baking temperature (biting lip because oven thermostat is not reliable)
- Set microwave timer
- Continue whacking graham crackers until timer beeps
- Whisk rolls out of oven; swear because the bottoms smell burnt
- Dump rolls off hot baking sheets as quickly as possible; sigh in relief that bottoms are not burnt
- Continue whacking graham crackers
And that was just keeping two plates in the air. Late this afternoon I was working on five at once.
For some reason, no matter how I do or don’t plan things, my Thanksgiving dinners always time themselves perfectly. I have never burned anything (well, except the rolls one year, but that was my mistake as the bread is always make-ahead), and nothing has ever come to the table underdone.
This year was a good year. The squash, despite what turned out to be a just plain wrong recipe, turned out excellent, and nothing really failed.
Someone asked, so here is what turned out to be my version of the squash recipe:
6 small butternut or acorn squashes (or use some of both)
1 small red onion, finely chopped
2–3 medium-sized ripe tomatoes, chopped
Fresh basil, 8–12 leaves
6 tablespoons pesto, or to taste (store-bought is fine)
3–4 oz. feta cheese, crumbled
Olive oil, for brushing
- If using butternut squash, cut off the necks (just below, actually, so that you have access to the central squash cavity). Save necks for soup. (Hey, what’s Thanksgiving without leftovers?) If using acorn squash, cut off a “hat” at the top, much as with a jack-o-lantern.
- Scoop out squash guts and discard. Consider roasting the seeds, though.
- Cover the diced onion with boiling water for two minutes; drain and pat dry. (A steamer basket works very well for this.) Distribute onion among squashes.
- Distribute tomato among squashes.
- Distribute basil among squashes.
- Add approximately 1 tablespoon of pesto to each squash.
- Fill remainder of squashes with feta
- Brush feta and the top of the squash with olive oil.
- Bake at 400° for 20 minutes or until squash-flesh can be pierced with fork.
Turned out really remarkably well. The recipe specified “small” squashes (how big is a sugar pumpkin, anyway?), so I got small squashes. The other amounts in the recipe turned out to be massively excessive, though—three red onions instead of one, huge amounts of tomato, “two small feta cheeses” whatever that means. So I wung it (“wung it” being the past tense of “wing it”), and it was good.