Thursday, November 27, 2008

Butter Thanksgiving report

It all went very well, except for the part where I wanted to put my husband and sisters-in-law through a paddle-wheel for being so NOISY and generally CHATTY and BUBBLY when I was TRYING to make GRAVY in a BRAND-NEW roasting pan that has a NON-STICK LINING and therefore requires SPECIAL IMPLEMENTS that I couldn't FIND.

(I'd like to pause here for a minute and for a moment of thankfulness. Thank you, dooce, for inventing "dooce caps," which allow us to say very straightforward things EXTREMELY EMPHATICALLY in a way which we hope is HUMOROUS.)

So anyway, here was the menu ... in all it's almost-completely-from-scratch glory:

Turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, and two sticks of butter
Mashed potatoes with butter and light cream, i.e., the real way, not that heretical way Joke keeps going on about
Green beans tossed in melted butter and freshly grated parmesan cheese
Pureed Sweet Potatoes with buttery Pecan Praline topping
Pumpkin Ravioli with Sage Butter
Wild Rice Salad with Pecans and no butter
The World's Most Fattening tossed salad with blue cheese, pine nuts, croutons, olive oil and mayonnaise but no butter

Pecan pie with pecans and brown sugar and guess what?
Chocolate chocolate chip Bundt cake
Whipped cream, which if we'd kept whipping, would have turned into butter
Cranberry-Oatmeal cookies and three sticks of butter right there

a whole box of those Mozart Kugeln
Coffee with cream, and not, you'll be amazed to hear, butter

I had one small plateful of food and a taste of the pie and cake. Then I sat around and felt stuffed and uncomfortable. For hours. WAS IT THE BUTTER?

I only feel better now that I've spent two hours on my feet doing dishes. This doesn't sound like a lot of fun, but I enjoyed it. I got to listen to my latest audiobook while I hand-washed and put away my grandmother's china, and I think the resulting standing forced the food away from my gall bladder, which judging from the amount of butter in tonight's dinner, must have been ready to explode. So I was actually glad to do it.

To the glow I always feel after I've achieved another new high point in housewifery, I can now add the realization that I haven't burped in HOURS.

We had fun. To the crowd of Buxoms there was added my son's cello teacher. My son's cello teacher is obviously quite capable of talking about classical music, and therefore kept my father-in-law out of trouble. Also we had my friend "Vodka," who has a daughter the same age as ours, and the two of them managed to kept my daughter out of trouble. She was excited and giggly, and she wanted to lip-synch to Madonna songs, but no tears were shed.

I thought we were going to have more people, so I rented a 72-inch round table and six gold ballroom chairs from one of those party rental places. We didn't end up using the table, but the pretty gold ballroom chairs rock. I didn't take pictures, because I was too busy looking for the PLASTIC whisk for the GRAVY so I wouldn't SCRATCH THE NEW PAN WITH MY DOOCE-CAPS but they looked amazingly festive. I think I might buy some. Maybe if I have lovely ballroom chairs, I'll cook dinner for people more often than Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I mean, I'm a good cook. Just ask the people who were sitting around tonight burping.

Oh, and my son's cello teacher wanted to play the piano and accompanied me while I sang a Faure song, so the evening had very Parisian-salon overtones.

In addition to the burping, I mean.

In conclusion, I have only this to say: BUTTER.

7 comments:

  1. Will you please adopt me, so that I can be invited next year?!

    FA

    p.s. I love butter as much as you do.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I brought your salad to Mr. D's family's Thanksgiving yesterday and it was VERY well-received. Your meal sounds divine. Like you, I don't mind handwashing dishes--the hot steam clears my head and the standing feels good after all that gluttony and sitting around.

    ReplyDelete
  3. For next year, a plastic wisk

    http://www.amazon.com/Oxo-Grips-Nylon-Balloon-Whisk/dp/B00004OCNU/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1227916347&sr=8-1

    ReplyDelete
  4. YFA: Sure! Come! But BYO butter.

    GGiW: Yay! Glad they liked it.

    Sara: That's what I couldn't FIND while my sisters-in-law were exclaiming over the cuteness of my son's pet turtle. And if I could have found it, I would probably have flung it at them.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Burping and butter, for what more could one reasonably ask?

    That said, I love the ravioli. Not terribly sure it's Thanksgiving-ish, but I don't care.

    -J.

    P.S. I GAVE you a silicone-coated whisk, after you had a similar episode trying to make scrambled eggs.

    ReplyDelete
  6. P.P.S. It may be at your other place, though.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Pumpkin ravioli not Thanksgiving-ish? It has pumpkin in it. Pumpkin that I cut up and cooked myself. What could be more "Come ye faithful people come; sing the song of harvest home / God our maker doth provide / for our wants to be supplied" than that?

    But if you insist, next year, I'll give pumpkin raviolis away for Halloween. Sheesh.

    p.s. The whisk is at the condo. Along with other really useful stuff like the Official Preppy Ice Bucket and 90 percent of my champagne glasses.

    ReplyDelete

Gentle Readers:

For the time being, I have turned off comment moderation. Please don't spam; it's not nice.

xxx, Poppy.