[Sca-cooks] Report on Thanksgiving experiments...OP

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

I gather from reading cookbooks and related literature, that there 
is, indeed, a mystery to making flour or otherwise thickened gravy.

But in my family we, we do not make gravy with flour or other similar 
thickening agent. We use the pan drippings, simmered to reduce it a 
bit, and with most of the fat removed. I've never developed a taste 
for flour thickened gravy.

This year's Thanksgiving dinner - cooked by the same person who 
cooked last year's - was much better than last years, although shy on 
green vegetables - turkey, generic bred-stuffing from a bag, homemade 
cranberry sauce, some baked corn-kinda-bread casserole and carrots - 
but no salad which my daughter and i missed.

My mother had been asked to make a sweet potato casserole. I dreaded 
the mere thought of one with marshmallows on top (shudder), and since 
my mother's health is deteriorating, i offered to make it and she 
accepted my offer (shock!).

I picked up my daughter at the airport around 12:30, then she and i 
went shopping for food she could eat (she's a vegetarian). I picked 
up some orange juice to flavor the sweet potatoes, and a tangerine 
and a pomegranate to decorate the the casserole. Then we went back to 
Mom's.

Mom had baked the potatoes in the conventional oven while i was out - 
about a dozen or more of them. I had forgotten to check what 
ingredient's Mom had in the house, and there it was, the afternoon 
(we dine at 5 PM), no time to go shop more. I scraped the meat out of 
the skins and found a stick of butter in the freezer (Mom uses some 
sort of spread in a "tub"). My daughter and i mashed the potatoes 
with the butter and a little salt, and a little orange juice. I never 
see a need to sweeten them, but they needed some perking up. I 
discovered that Mom had a small bottle of balsamic vinegar and a 
bottle of raspberry vinegar in her pantry, so i splashed in some of 
each to make the flavor brighter and less flat, but it needed still 
something else. I had bought some fresh ginger very early in the day 
when i'd gone out to get coffee and milk for myself (i had arrived 
late on Wednesday night), so i grated in some fresh ginger.

Then i extracted half of the seeds from the pomegranate, and peeled 
the tangerine, separated the segments and with a small knife made a 
tiny slit in the ones with seeds and popped the seeds out. Mom wanted 
to put it in a deep bowl, but it seemed to me an awkward way to serve 
a dozen people, so i spread it in a rectangular baking dish. My 
daughter and i arranged the tangerine segments on top, then i 
sprinkled on the pomegranate seeds. It looked rather nice, orange 
sweet potatoes, yellow-orange tangerine segments, blue-red 
pomegranate seeds. It was lacking some color contrast, and if i'd 
been able to plan ahead, i'd have picked up some fresh mint for a 
complementary green.

I guess it tasted ok - there was very little left over.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita