19 Oct 2018

Giving Thanks



 





 

 
Nothing beats thanksgiving on the farm. The countryside is so spectacular at this time of year! It was a very intimate affair, only my parents and us. That is very small considering the size of my immediate family! I was so proud of my mom for selecting an appropriately sized turkey. She usually cooks for an army... However, there was a selection of at least three desserts. She had made mini sugar pies, bite-size carrot cakes and a replica of the Starbucks Cranberry Bliss Bar. They were all big hits! Actually, make that four desserts! I forgot about the maple syrup crèmes brûlées!

I started with the desserts because those were the first things we made in the morning. Once the crèmes brûlées were out of the oven, my mom put in her homemade baguettes only for the power to go out a few minutes later... That's right, we were faced with the challenge of preparing an entire turkey dinner without any power. Here's the kicker, no power also means no water on the farm. My dad plugged in the generator so we at least had water, but that didn't help matters much for the rest. We put our creative thinking caps on and managed to find solutions. We would cook the turkey on the BBQ using the stand-up rack my mom uses for beer-butt chicken. We then divvied up the potatoes and turnip into two small saucepans and squeezed them on the BBQ as well. Once cooked, we'd mash and combine them. So far so good. We decided to leave the baguettes in the oven in the hopes that the residual heat would finish baking them. Next up were the gravy and stuffing. We couldn't use the traditional methods because we were not roasting the turnkey. We opted for the boxed stuffing and powdered gravy. It is what it is. We planned on plugging the kettle into the generator to boil the water needed for the gravy and stuffing. For the appetizer, my mom had planned on serving smokes goose canapés. The said goose (hunted by my brother a few weeks before) was a bit on the dry side so we were trying to figure out how to add moisture to it. I came up with the brilliant idea of slicing it and putting it in a Pyrex dish with a bit of water that I then sat on the top of the fireplace. It worked beautifully! About an hour or so before dinner was ready, the power came back! Luckily, we didn't have to eat via candle-light. Although, that would have been interesting.

Our Thanksgiving dinner ended up being prepared in a more rudimentary way that usual and I couldn't help myself but to think back on how our ancestors went about preparing their own Thanksgiving meals. Something tells me it was a bit more labour intensive than our current-day methods. I won't complain about the burden of cooking up a turkey dinner with all the fixing again. (My better half is the cook in the family, so I've never actually had the responsibility of cooking a turkey. I have mentioned that my cooking prowess is pretty much non-existent, right?)

T-shirt: Dynamite (similar) | Sweater: BP. (similar) | Jeans: Zara (similar) | Belt: American Eagle (similar) | Scarf: Old Navy (similar) | Earrings: Banana Republic (similar) | Booties: Carrini (similar)

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