Because 2 days is never enough.

I spent most of Wednesday preparing some items in advance (baked pumpkin, pie crust, soup). I had plans to make the cranberry sauce, too, but I ran out of time. The challenge for me in my tiny NYC kitchen was centered around the oven. I knew the turkey would be in the miniature oven most of Thursday, which didn’t leave much time to bake anything else in there (pie and roasted brussel sprouts). Timing is difficult when space is so constrained.

Thursday was a cooking frenzy. Eating the meal took a tiny fraction of the time it took to prepare it – so anti-climatic, but worth every minute. Everything turned out swimmingly. The turkey was juicy and the the wine was flowing.

This is the final menu:

• Butternut squash & spigold apple soup (with optional dollops of home made yogurt cheese)
  I originally made this soup as pumpkin and fuji apple, but the apple was much too sweet and completely overwhelmed the pumpkin. I asked the woman at my farmer’s market for a more tart apple that would be good in a soup and she recommended the Spigold, which was great to cook with, but it does bruise easily.
• Bell & Evans natural turkey
• Cider gravy
  I ended up using corn starch dissolved in water instead of flour to thicken
  it – the flour just clumped up.
• Sage stuffing with Granny Smith apples & crumbled Niman Ranch bacon
  This is one of my Mom’s recipes. She uses a bit of chicken or veggie stock, along with some of the bacon fat (if you’re into that) to moisten the bread.
• Ginger orange cranberry sauce
  From Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone cookbook. I cooked the cranberries in apple cider instead of water to make it a bit more festive. Erik said this was his favorite dish and I might have to agree. I think will remain on the Thanksgiving menu in future years.
• Roasted brussel sprouts with fresh thyme, oregano, & pine nuts
• Dirty roasted garlic mashed potatoes
  Erik claims you call them dirty when the skins are left on.
• Pumpkin pie with amaretto whipped cream
  This was the first time I made pumpkin pie 100% from scratch. The key was to puree the baked pumpkin in a food processor. I still used the tried and true Libby’s filling recipe, which is so classic. However, I use only 1/2 of the can of evaporated milk, and I substituted 2 cups of fresh pumpkin puree instead of the canned stuff. My mom prefers her pie crusts the old-fashioned way with lard – for that truly flaky crust and unique taste. Although I appreciate the authenticity, I prefer the Martha Stewart recipe with butter.
• Hot apple cider with amaretto & a cinnamon stick
  Erik and I started calling these “slippery chimneys” after we discovered them during an apres ski session in Tahoe one winter.

I also made curry pumpkin seeds with the pumpkin for the pie. I liked them much better than the sweet/spicy recipe that is first on the list. I’m sure it’s personal preference, but I like my seeds salty and spicy – no need for sugar.

Somehow I proved that it IS possible to make Thanksgiving dinner for four people in a tiny apartment with only 3 chairs!

My friends Jody and Tony and my sister and her girlfriend, Anna came to Brooklyn to celebrate the holiday with us. I spend Wednesday evening preparing some advanced items and chopping veggies ahead of time. I boiled and peeled the chestnuts for the stuffing, yoga breathing all the time to keep myself from flying into a rage at the ridiculous task. I basically burned off the tips of my fingers and only managed to get adequate peeling for about 70% of the chestnuts (luckily, I overbought). No major mishaps, well… except for the gratin that I unwittingly cooked an extra two hours by leaving it to “cool” on top of the range where the heat from the oven rose steadily all afternoon or the meat thermometer that exploded from the heat in the over – it wasn’t a real meat thermometer. Luckily, both items came out all right regardless.

We didn’t realize how much careful planning we would need for the small oven and the big feast, but we basically had mental spreadsheets all organized and orchestrated everything pretty well. Our makeshift table even looked mildly sharp with the coordinating tablecloth (the artist formerly knows as “our curtains”) and Karl’s pie decorations were the final piece of festive charm.

The Menu:
1. Parsnip, Apple, Leek Soup
2. Roasted Heirloom Cauliflower (purple) and Brussel Sprouts
3. Butternut Squash and Spinach Au Gratin
4. Cranberry, chestnut stuffing
5. Roasted Turkey Breast
6. Cranberry-Walnut Relish
7. Garlic Mashed Potatoes
8. Apple Crisp (made by Kate and Anna)
9. Pumpkin Pie

Thanks to our lovely guests for a great holiday. I feel like a real grown-up now!

I’m not sure I could read an entire book about the psychology of food, but the Salon interview with the author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink, is a great primer on the subject. It contains a few simple tricks to help yourself eat less.

I might not be able to look at a bowl of soup the same way again.

More info>

We’re both making our first Thanksgiving feasts this year and the emails have been flying. We’ve been swapping recipes and ideas and scouring the internet and our cookbook collections and hitting up friends like Hardy for late autumn recipes to serve. We’ve all been eating pretty well, as the past couple weeks have basically been the playoffs for new dishes that might just make it to the big game.

These are the kinds of crazed Thanksgiving missives that we’ve been frantically passing back and forth:

Mindy:

Mulled wine? The juniper berries are ridiculous. I’m ignoring that ingredient.
Two other good, hot, festive drinks I like to make are:
- Apple cider, Amaretto, & cinnamon sticks
- Almond soymilk & Kailua
(I usually put 3-4 celestial seasons “almond sunset” teabags in a saucepan with soy milk to brew it, but I’m sure store bought almond soymilk would work well.)

Jess:

oh, no…I haven’t given any thought to the drinks. I’m a so behind. You already have so many. Jerk. I never thought much about this category, what have been doing all my life? I need to pick your brain re: beverages then. I might go easy and just drink regular wine, but… that seems so painfully unfestive. I don’t want to be a Thanksgiving failure on my first go-around.

Good thing we’re both obsessive types because who else would pay attention to our nonstop Thanksgiving planning/fretting? I guess that’s sort of the story of our lives.

I finished my purple scarf today. It’s hard to get too excited about a scarf, because I have made about 472 of them in the past 8 years, but at least I learned something new this time. This marked my first foray into knitting lace. This was a simple pattern I got out of the Knitting for Dummies book Melissa gave me. Rather unfortunately, this pattern is called faggot lace (I’m not making this up), but I am happy with the results. I still need to block it (I think I’ll wet block it, not steam). I used a Rowan yarn called kid classic (a mix of lambswool and kid mohair). Cozy.

And even though he told me this scarf looked, “midwestern,” which, by the tone of his voice I gleened was not meant as a compliment, Karl’s a great model, no? And midwestern to boot.

I am excited to experiment with some other lace patterns and even make up my own. I saw something at Urban Outfitters that I have a fantasy I’ll recreate. Of course, Mindy and I got caught at a book signing at a knitting store this weekend, and as the author showed off her knitted wares, I was reminded of the havoc overly ambitious knitting can wreck on one’s wardrobe.

Here’s the pattern:

R1: k5, *yarnover, p2tog, k4; repeat from *, end k5
R2: k2, p3, *yarnover, p2tog, p4; repeat from *, last five p3, k2
Repeat rows 1 and 2 until the scarf reaches the desired length.

We both know and love This American Life with Ira Glass, but my appreciation for the show has increased due to the new free podcast. I’m not sure what took the show’s producers so long to jump on the podcast wagon, but I am thrilled they have made the transition. Now I have something amazing to listen to while I knit. This is especially important since I don’t have television. (Well, I *own* a television, but it’s not hooked up to a signal. It is purely for movie watching or shows I’ve downloaded from iTunes.) I’ve always lamented the fact that you can’t read and knit at the same time. It’s terrible when your favorite pastimes are mutually exclusive because it makes it hard to decide which to do on a given night. Now I can have my cake and eat it too, by knitting and listening to TAL, which is almost like reading.

Click here to subscribe to TAL (if you have iTunes installed on your computer).

I have just discovered that Denyse Schmidt makes amazing quilts. In fact, she makes the kind of quilts I want to make. Luckily for us she teaches quilting classes at Make Workshop. Her December class is sold out, but the website says 2007 classes are coming soon.

I’m definitely in the market for a bed spread and a new hobby. Should this be our new year’s resolution?

The blanket. Yes, the blanket. It is challenging me and it shouldn’t be. It’s quite a simple blanket as far as the type of stitches – mostly purling and knitting. It is large, though – 102 cast-on stitches and countless rows. But for some reason I cannot make it work. I have started and stopped this blanket at least a half dozen times and I thought this time would be the last. Last night I discovered a hole in an earlier row, one that was too far back to unkit to. Perhaps it is a dropped stitch or perhaps not – it is difficult to tell, which is part of the dilemma. Even if I did unknit to that point, I’m not sure I know how to fix it. I tried to ignore the hole thinking that it would tighten up if I kept adding rows on top of it, or that it would get lost in the maze of stitches, but it didn’t. Now I’m obsessed with the hole. The practical side of me says to ignore it since mistakes are the endearing features of a home made item. The perfectionist side of me wants to rip out the blanket and start again because I hope to have this blanket for the rest of my life and to eventually pass it on as an heirloom. Do I want this faulty blanket to represent my handiwork to future generations in my family?

I think I’m going to unravel the whole thing tonight.

Erik and I loved riding our bikes to the Ferry Building on Saturdays for the open air market when we lived in San Francisco, but I am getting spoiled by the close proximity of the farmer’s market to my apartment in Manhattan. It is a half block away and it occurs twice a week. I literally have to walk past it to catch the subway on Thursday mornings. These are the things that I love about New York City.

My favorite fall farmer’s market items currently include:

• brussel sprouts (some farmers bring buckets of sprouts while others bring them attached to the stalk)
• cauliflower
• fresh apple cider (heat it up on the stove with cinnamon sticks)
• honey crisp apples (these have to be one of the best apple varieties around – the perfect combination of sweet and crunchy just as the name suggests)
• sweet potatoes
• kale (great on its own or in soups)

Although I haven’t seen them at the farmer’s market, the fruit vendors on the street are fully stocked with my favorite fall fruit: pomegranates. My breakfast routine now incorporates pom seeds mixed into home made yogurt. (In fact I gave a batch of freshly made yogurt with pom seeds to Anna and Isabel this weekend. I’ll have to solicit their feedback and post it here.) The fruit is only available from September to January so I’m going eat as many as I can between now and then. The California pomegranate site is chock full of information and recipes, including this vinaigrette:

Pomegranate Vinaigrette
1 cup pomegranate seeds
1/2 cup rice vinegar
1/2 cup honey
salt & pepper to taste
1 cup virgin olive oil

In a blender, add pomegranate seeds, rice vinegar, honey and seasonings. Blend well. Slowly add olive oil while continuing to blend. Adjust seasoning and strain.

The site also includes a 3-step technique for extracting the pom seeds using water, which I have never tried. I might have to experiment with the process this week. I just bought a gigantic pom from the fruit stand on the corner of West 50^th and 7^th Ave, which always has an amazing fruit selection. There is something calming and meditative about extracting the seeds by hand, though. Maybe the water technique will take the fun out of it.

This weekend, I found myself laboring to assemble the items on my to do list in an elaborate puzzle. When would I fit in the farmer’s market, make it to the pottery studio, whip up a fresh batch of yogurt, make a dent in my scarf, try out that bread recipe, look for a cookbook at the Strand, stop off at the fabric store to pick out something for some throw pillows, finish my book and so on? The tyranny of the two-day weekend took over and I actually felt a bit stressed. I did things in the wrong order, found myself at the farmer’s market while all the vendors were packing up and I left with just two measly apples, the book I wanted wasn’t at the Strand, I never found my way to the fabric store, and I felt a bit like a chicken with my head cut off. Wait, isn’t all this stuff what I do for fun?

So, Sunday, I decided to ditch the list and just do what I wanted. And you know what? I woke up early, watched the marathon, had brunch with some neighbors, and took… A NAP. And for about the first time in my life, I didn’t feel guilty about it.

My weekend was still productive (see Peanut Bread below). But I just need to remember, even though I only get two precious days, I can’t treat my leisure like a job. That’s no fun.

Peanut Bread:
Sunday afternoon, I tried out this recipe from 101cookbooks.com, taken from the new cookbook of African recipes, Soul of a New Cuisine. I am not generally a baker, but the sweet and spicy flavor combos in this recipe caught my eye. I added a whole can of coconut milk, as suggested and I substituted a little bit of cayenne pepper for the chili powder because I was too lazy to go to the store. Ultimately, there was something really interesting and unusual about the flavors, but the bread was REALLY dense and the middle remained a bit doughy, even after extra time in the oven. If I made it again, I might experiment with the oven temperature and play a bit with the spices.