Thanksgiving Roundup

I officially have the entire weekend off. No SAT lessons or driving to San Diego to film for Stonefield. Just me and a keyboard all weekend. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited by the prospect. I've walked Mel (which was lame because the Rangers were out handing out tickets for dogs off leash so Mel didn't get to do any of the running around she desperately needed after being cooped up in the house yesterday on account of the rain), made my pot of coffee and I'm chomping at the bit.

So to begin...a bit of Thanksgiving roundup. This year was a Moser Thanksgiving year - it'll be a Kramer Christmas - so I headed down to SD Tuesday night bearing far more recipes than were really necessary. It's all Alison's fault. I had emailed her a list of dishes that we could make, expecting her to cull it down to a reasonable number for 10 people, but instead she responded with something along the lines of: that all sounds great! Seriously people, I need saving from myself, otherwise when it comes to the Holidays I will cook until I drop. It's like a sickness. But a rather delicious one.

Brussels Sprouts, Onions, Peas and Sweet Potatoes....Heaven? I think so

THANKSGIVING WITH THE MOSERS

Appetizers
Goat Cheese Crostini w/Grapefruit and Black Pepper Marmalade
Crudite with Mom's dill dip

Main Course
Turkey Breast (prepared by the CBTS Mosers - a funny story in an of itself, but one I won't get into)
Cashew Nut Loaf (a Moser vegetarian classic)
Pumpkin Stuffed with Vegetable Stew

Sides and Sauces
Hazelnut, Sage and Mushroom Stuffing
Plain Jane Mashed Potatoes
Bourbon-Walnut Sweet Potato Mash
Gratinéed Mustard Creamed Onions
Brussels Sprouts Hash w/Caramelized Shallots
Green Peas
Rice Pilaf
Cranberry Sauce with Port and Tangerines
Roasted Vegetable Wine Sauce
Portobello Mushroom Gravy

Salad
Butter Lettuce and Arugula with Gorgonzola, Pears and Candied Pecans

Dessert
Roasted Sweet Potato Cheesecake with Maple Cream
Apple Pie

For the record - that's 18 dishes for 10 people. Overkill? Perhaps. But look at how happy those people are:

Ready...Set...EAT

Thanks to Alison and her quick thinking with the camera, I actually have pictures of the event. I'm going to post some of my favorite recipes in separate posts today and tomorrow. They're all worth hanging on to for future Holiday events.

Silverlake Wine

Have I mentioned before how awesome this shop is? It's by far the best wine-buying experience you'll have. Everyone in there knows a ton about wine and as soon as you walk in they actually offer to help you find something without being the least bit snobby. My kind of shop.

So yesterday Alison and I headed over for their Sunday wine and paired appetizer tasting. They had a fellow who's a cheese expert bring in a selection of raw cheeses to pair with four different wines. The most interesting part, in my mind, was his assertion that when pairing wine and cheese you don't actually want balance. Strong acidic wines call for strong salty cheeses. And fruity wines call for fruity cheese.

After two hours of tasting and chatting, we left the store with six bottles of wine for our Thanksgiving feast! If you're ever over here on the eastside and need a bottle of wine - HEAD to SILVERLAKE WINE on Glendale. Trust me, you'll thank me.

Mercury Just Went Retro

Retrograde of course, which is infinitely worse than anything that bespeaks bell bottoms.

Case in point: Thursday night. I come home from working in an office all day (already not the top of my list of things I enjoy) and decide to make a delicious-sounding recipe of curried squash stew on Quinoa. I even had my camera all ready to take pictures. So I spend the hour chopping and dicing and I make the stew...and it's honest to God the most disgusting thing I've ever tasted. I have no idea what went wrong with the recipe, but let me tell you it went bad in a major way.

So Fine. I can deal. Gonna drown my sorrows with some TV on the Internet and eat a fried egg sandwich. And I could not, for the life of me, fry an egg. I realized, as I was scraping the second batch of destroyed eggs into the trash can, that I'd recently used the pan to attempt some ill-fates hash browns and had clearly destroyed the perfect seasoning I'd developed in the pan.

Eventually I was able to cobble together a pathetic-looking egg sandwich, and sit down to the internet. Desperate to numb my brain, I clicked on the internet icon, only to discover the internet running at about 1/8 it's usual speed and completely unable to play any kind of video.

So Mercury has gone Retro on us. I'm expecting to butt my head against similar annoyances until the end of January, when it gets back to normal.

Joining the Club

Hey friends. There's this new fun recipe website - from what I can tell it's like the myspace for foodies and in an effort to kick start their site, they're giving away $6000 for a kitchen makeover. You know you want in on that. Click HERE to join!

Happy Birthday Greg Lasagna

Today we celebrated my younger brother Greg's 22nd birthday. There's no better way to spend your birthday than doing construction work so he and I helped my dad out in the back of their house (more on this to follow).

For his birthday dinner Greg requested a lasagna, foolishly thinking of the kind you buy frozen at the market. There was no way either Mom or I were going to serve Greg frozen lasagna, but making a lasagna from scratch, while delicious, can take all day. Fortunately, Mom has become a Rachel Ray fan and recently watched an episode of 30 minute meals where she made a lasagna from ravioli, veggies, cheese and bashemel sauce. Or at least she saw the second half of the episode. I believe this is the actual recipe, though I don't know for sure since I didn't watch the show. At any rate it's something close to what Mom saw.

The point to all of this is that you much start with an unbelievable huge kitchen. Like this one:

That's not actually true. I just lust after my parents' kitchen as it has about 15xs the counter space that mine does.


In fact, what you need to start with is some veggies.

And I wasn't paying too close attention but I believe Mom sauteed green and red bell pepper, onion and eggplant with olive oil and garlic.


She also made a bechamel sauce using 3Tbsp flour, 3Tbsp butter and 3 cups milk. While all this was happening she cooked 1 package of ravioli to use as the pasta.

Then came the assembly. Bechamel, pasta and veggies first,

covered with cheese, Bechamel and some straight-from-the-jar Classico Sauce.
Repeat until all the ingrediants are used up. Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes. Eat veggies and drink wine while the lasagna cools and sets.

Happy Birthday Greg!

The Greens Cookbook

Lately I've become obsessed with the Greens Cookbook. It's funny because it's probably the one cookbook I knew best growing up, mainly because of the veggie lasagna mom would make every Thanksgiving for the vegetarians. When I got my copy it went up on the cook book shelf, to be used periodically as a reference for simple things like a berry crisp or spinach and goat cheese pie.

Normally I wouldn't be that into a cookbook that doesn't have pictures. Half the joy of cooking from a book is pouring over the glossy photos of food that you will never be able to match up to. And I was never that interested in most of the recipes so I mostly ignored the book. After making dinner the other night from it though I had a return to Greens moment. I started pouring over the book and suddenly all of the recipes looked and sounded amazing. Now I can't stop flipping thru looking for new fun things to try.

I'm PAing on a commercial for the next couple of days, so I most likely won't be cooking, or posting for that matter, but I have a feeling that on Wednesday, and for sure Friday, I'll have a few newly tested recipes to share.

I am reminded of a woman I heard interviewed about a book she had just written. Right after she gave birth she left her career to be a stay at home mom and almost lost her mind from boredom (fortunately I don't have that problem). Her savior: Julia Childs and her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She decided to make one French recipe from the book a day for a year. Her memoir is about this year of the disasters and successes of doing just that.

I was thinking that I wouldn't mind trying out a similar thing with the Greens cookbook. Bryan? Interested? You do like the spinach and goat cheese pie!