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Saturday, November 24, 2007

BIRDZILLA

Or, What We Ate for Thanksgiving Dinner.

Birdzilla
Birdzilla, our honkin’ big-ass Thanksgiving turkey.

Twenty pounds, Esteemed Readers. Twenty pounds.

This year, we tried a new recipe: Crisp apple-scented roast turkey with cider-Calvados gravy, from the latest issue of Saveur magazine. Leave it to me to experiment on a crowd of sixteen friends and relatives. Fearless (or stupid), dat’s me.

But it all turned out for the good. Despite the dark-brown, crisp, caramelized skin, the meat underneath - both white and dark - was remarkably tender. That was, incidentally, SWMBO’s one complaint about the bird: that it wasn’t dried out sufficiently for her taste. The Missus, you see, prefers white meat that has been cooked to the consistency of hard-coat stucco.

[One of the little things that makes our marriage work: She eats the white meat, I eat the dark.]

For anointing the Yummy Turkey-Flesh, we had a potful of delicious cider-Calvados gravy:

Cider-Calvados Gravy
Yummy, yummy gravy.

To accommodate the whole roomful of happy diners - sixteen in all - we swapped the furniture in the dining room with that of the sunroom...

Thanksgiving at Chez Elisson
The Thanksgiving table.

Even the little ones had a good time.

Madison and William
Madison and William scarf up some T-day dinner.

For dessert? Shelly brought a loaf of excellent zucchini bread, JoAnn baked apple and pumpkin pies, and I had this little gem, a cranberry, almond, and cinnamon tart, adapted from a Martha Fucking Stewart recipe by cutting the baking time and temperature dramatically:

Cranberry, Almond, and Cinnamon Tart
Adapted from a recipe by Martha Fucking Stewart.

That tart, or any of those pies, was good enough to make you want to gouge out your eyeballs in sheer ecstasy, especially when served with a dollop of fresh vanilla-scented whipped cream.

Crap. Just writing about this has made me hungry. Guess it’s time to haul out some of the leftovers...

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