A Thanksgiving Rescue Story: a Sweet Ending to a Tale of Abandonment...

You hear about it every holiday season--Someone thinks it's a good idea to bring a sweet little thing into a home, only to find it being neglected, shut away, just not wanted. Then, tragically, it ends up being cast away like so much garbage. You always hear it happening to those other irresponsible people out there, but this Thanksgiving, it almost happened to me.

I had too many damned desserts.

Every year I write in my little faux-leather menu log book: "Made too many desserts, two next time!" but this year, it reached epic proportions. Part of it was that I had overestimated the appetite of my guests. We had ten people at our Thanksgiving feast, but when three of them are pre-teen boys with limited appetite-attention spans, and three of them are I-will-keep-my-diet-I-will-not-succumb! types, well, you're really cooking for a handful. 

Did I mention the pistachios?

I don't blame the desserts— only, perhaps, their dimensions. A towering spiced peach pie, made with the last of the fall peaches from the Farmer's Market and a cream cheese crust; a pear-cranberry ginger crisp with toasted pepitas, straight from the recipe books of Border Grill; and Caramel crunch chocolate bars. Plus a guest brought the always-necessary pumpkin pie. Each dessert delicious; each dessert gargantuan. Add to that a healthy mug of sweet mulled apple cider before the meal, deviled eggs, the Turkey feast itself and rapidly diminishing appetites: it was the Perfect Confectionary Storm.

May I blame the deviled eggs?

Great headway was made in the pumpkin pie and Caramel Bars on Thursday. Not coincidentally, these were the only desserts the boys wanted to eat. The other two, showier desserts languished on the sideboard, cut into/spooned up, yes, and appreciated, definitely, but by evening's end they seemed to have miraculously healed themselves and were practically whole.  The truly bizarre thing, however, was that though guests ate on them over an ENTIRE WEEKEND, hardly a dent was made in either one. Let me reiterate: these were truly tasty, not some dried/bland/gummy sweets fit only for obligatory nibbles. And yet they would not move. The crisp was apparently self-replenishing; the pie was able to sustain an infinite number of slices and yet not diminish. By Sunday evening, after all the guests had left, Doug and I were staring down at two desserts barely half-way eaten. 

(Really, they were good. I swear. Doug himself, a person not known for his culinary tact, declared them to be keepers. "But you can only eat so much pie and feel good about yourself" was his explanation. Damn these eaters of moderation!)

The pie that would not die.

I would usually have gorged myself over the next few days until I had scraped up every crumb, but I knew a trip to Mexico was only weeks away, and the thought of my squeezable Thanksgiving mid-section going with me on vacation was too frightening to contemplate. Doug was of similar mind. Benj was useless. We felt like the time to share with neighbors had passed. There was no other choice: the desserts had to go. The trash can beckoned. I couldn't bear to watch. Doug, the more remorseless of the two of us—waited for me to give the word. I squeezed my eyes shut, nodded.

And that's when Providence entered the picture, in a manner worthy of the most treacly of Hallmark feature films. The doorbell rang. It was my friend Renée, someone I had not seen in, literally, years. Being, among other things, an accomplished accordionist, Renée was instrumental (no pun intended) in the writing of my novel This is How It Begins, in which a red accordion figures prominently. When I finished the manuscript (then called Liberace Under Venetian Skies) I gave her a copy to read. This weekend she happened to be out on a hike in my neighborhood with her friend Shelley, and stopped by to return the manuscript.

I wasted no time with hello's or how'd ya do's. "You want some dessert?" I blurted out. Her eyes widened but she took it in stride. "Sure!" she said. "Pie or crisp? or both?" I demanded, a little crazed. We went to the car to confer with Shelley. Turns out (handkerchiefs ready?) that Shelley had been ill on Thanksgiving, and had to leave a turkey dinner at her friend's house with only a drumstick wrapped in foil for a souvenir. On the drive home she saw a homeless person on the side of the road and gave him her only Thanksgiving leftover. Did I mention that she also has a sweet tooth? WE WERE PAYING IT FORWARD, BABY!

Shelley and Renée gladly welcomed two deserving desserts into their lives, my crisp and my pie found a new home, and my gut receded back from its semi-gelatinous state. It's a Thanksgiving Miracle, and, knowing my compulsive baking habits... it may even become a tradition.

A Vocal Harvest

Had a couple of days of voice-over work that I would love to replicate the whole year round. You know, the kind of days where you get a call in the early afternoon to send in an audition from home, then you get called by your agent at 5 telling you you've got the job and have to go in at 6 to record, then the producers call you in to their studio the next day to have you do some more. And I thought it was just a myth. More, please!

The best part was that  I was hired to be a sound-alike for none other than the uber-cool actor Ken Watanabe. Me! This validation's come at a good time— at all my Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness sessions I sit and marvel at the other actors: the amazing suppleness of their voices, their mercurial wit, their fast-and-furious banter, and I can't help, sometimes, but feel a bit... arthritic in comparison. So to nail an actor who's voice is far from mine is a great boost.

Let's see, all I need to do is Chow-Yun-Fat and Jet Li, and I'll have covered practically the entire pantheon of male Asian superstars!

Check...

Check...

Check...

And check.
Just wait 'til they hear my Katharine Hepburn!

Studying Mr. Watanabe's voice (mostly using The Last Samurai as a guide) yielded a lot of quiet pleasure. Jackie Chan (my patron saint in voice-overs) and Ken Watanabe come from the same lower register of my voice, but the differences in their speaking are quite distinct, even taking into account their different ethnicities. Mr. Chan, like the characters he plays, has a certain broadness to his speech; he's quite animated (no pun intended) and charming, but simple in his delivery—he saves his flexibility for his movement.


Mr. Watanabe, on the other hand, is first and foremost an actor, and it shows in his delivery. Listen to the colors of his voice, how he employs tone and nuance quite fluidly, and remember that this is not even in a language he was comfortable with at that time. It's quite impressive.

This gig comes on top of continuing Kung Fu Panda work (only five more episodes to record!) and a voice on the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Plus (speaking of pandas), I've got a good role in the new World of Warcraft game: Mists of Pandaria which has just come out. I still can't believe that I'm in this job that I love so very, very much, working (playing, really) with people of the highest caliber of talent, humor and kindness, making funny voices and getting paid for it.

Something to be thankful for, indeed.

Happy Turkey Day!

T-Day

First of all, Doug is not carrying around a little joey in his gut. That's just silly. You look just fine, darling.  Just fine. Now grab another piece of pumpkin pecan pie and come to bed. Don't forget the whipped cream.

The day began with military precision. Counters cleared, dishes put away, utensils at the ready. Stel and I hastened everyone away from the kitchen and made them eat breakfast out. Turkey out of the brine, and... into the oven. The race begins! Dinner rolls shaped and proofed. Mis en place arranged. And then, an eerie calm descended. With so many of the dishes already prepared and ready for final heating, all was quiet on the western front.

The troops are assembled, ready for deployment. 

A quick Scrabble game during a lull.

We had some deviled eggs to prep, some green beans to trim, but no major cooking until the turkey came out of the oven. It was odd, like we were in the trenches, waiting for the battle to begin.

"The final breath before the plunge..."

Three hours later, the thermometer reads 165. Show time. Even then, there's no major crazy running around like a turkey with its head... you know. The gravy is easy to make since the base is already done. Stel sautées the green beans. Casserole dishes get shuttled in and out of the oven. I carve the turkey. Cranberry sauce gets unmolded. The table is beautiful. We made it.

Rolls? Not so hard!

The surprise hit: NYT Mashed Potato Casserole

Desserts on the way to decimation.

And yet... my plate is piled high with fabulous food but as I raise a fork I can't help but feel it's all a little anticlimactic. A  week of work, culminating in a plate of food. Really? What meal could possibly not disappoint with such expectation? It is, after all, just food. 

Ah, I have to remind myself. It's not just about the food. It's about the process, and the intent. It's like those sand mandalas created by Buddhist monks: painstaking and temporary, except the mandala is created out of sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. I also realize I haven't eaten properly the whole day and put maybe a little too much Gran Marnier in my mulled cider. I take a bite. Oh wait, I think, I was wrong.

It is all about the food.

The meal rises and falls with the turkey, and our little Heritage Tom did not disappoint. Moist, flavorful, and lots of dark meat for me. Sides were delish. The stars? The mashed potato casserole, and, surprise surprise, the peach-berry pie, which was largely improvised. 

I'm thankful someone spiked my mulled cider.
Oh wait, that was me. 

I'm thankful to  Martha Stewart, for the turkey advice. And thankful to Dorie Greenspan for her desserts. Most of all, I'm thankful for the friends and family who have traveled far to sit at our table and share a meal and let me create obscene amounts of food for them. For Stel for being as obsessed as I am. And my own family, who know to stay out of the way and let baba cook. It's been a pleasure.

Mission accomplished. Now I just need to sleep for about three days.

PS. See what Doug thought of the food at http://www.douglaswood.net. 

Thanksgiving Eve

What, how can this be? 12 am and already done for the night, and this with going out to dinner AND watching "Top Chef"? It's a Thanksgiving miracle. Usually I'd be working on my second pie right about now, with stock simmering and miles to go before I slept. Ah, but this year I have a little Elf assisting me, my dear, dear friend Stel who has flown all the way from Chicago to mash potatoes and toast pumpkin seeds with me.

Stel displaying her highly-snackable
 roasted pumpkin seed and dried cranberry concoction. 

We've been in the kitchen all day, but it's been collegial and relatively more leisurely. Started out the day making the potatoes: I worked on sweet potatoes (to be topped with marshmallows and finished off tomorrow) and Stel assembled the mashed potato casserole from a NYT recipe. Ooooh, nothing like the sight of Yukon golds steaming from the pot. The casserole saves you from having to make the mashed potatoes at the last minute; it has all the elements of mashed potatoes but with the inclusion of a parmesan/bread crumb topping. I could have eaten it all right there, baking be damned. That's what makes Thanksgiving so alluring (and dangerous): every dish is Comfort Food personified.

"Yes, yes, it tastes good on the masher, but could you
pass that pot over here anyway?"

The other thing I wanted to devour right away was the stuffing Stel made— cornbread, apples and bacon. It's a holy triumvirate.

I have seen the Face of God, and It looks like cubes of cornbread
tossed with celery, apples and bacon.

Time for a little table tennis break.

I blind-baked the pie crust for the Two-for Pumpkin/Pecan Pie. A sad disappointment, this crust. Working with a new recipe from Ms. Greenspan, and while it rolls out well I've been finding that the crust shrinks mightily. I'm trying not to stretch the dough while putting it in the pan, but I think maybe the top of the crust is too heavy and sinks down while baking. The recipe calls for folding the extra dough under rather than rolling it. Could that be my problem? Must work on this, or I'll have mighty small pies...

Also had a bit of a snafu with my peach pie. Turns out one of the peaches I had gotten from the Farmer's Market was going bad—I was down a peach. And no peaches to be had at the local market, and no car to find one further afield. I imagined Tim Gunn coming by to tell me I needed to "make it work." Here's a recounting of the situation, done à la "Top Chef":

I ended up wussing out and using the raspberries and some blackberries we had left over from breakfast. Cross your fingers. Here's the final result:

My dough for the rolls was supposed to rise slowly in the refrigerator for two days! Instead, it grew monstrous overnight.

Yipes! Someone stop that thing!

Gently deflated it and put it in a bigger bowl. Hope it's okay for tomorrow.

What was next? Boiling eggs for the deviled egg appetizers. Started the gravy (roux & stock & butter) so we don't have to be scrambling for it tomorrow. Made the pumpkin/pecan pie, which tastes delish but whose crust burned a little. The pie gods were not with me today. I can make pies that taste good, but they always look so... rustic, to put it nicely. They is ugly. Where's the finesse? Sigh... perhaps if I make them over and over again I'll get the hang of it.

Tomorrow morning at 9:30: It's Turkey Time!

Gettin' My Turkey On

For me, there are two culinary High Holy Days: Thanksgiving and Lunar New Year's Eve. These are the pedal-to-the-metal, grueling, marathon cooking holidays that truly test your skill and endurance in the kitchen. I love the challenge. This year we'll be hosting Doug's entire family, plus a couple of friends, and I've already begun preparing, with the help of some cool high tech gizmos, starting with the cook's best friend: Monsieur iPad.

Who knew this touch tablet would be so good in the kitchen? Imagine— no clunky cookbooks taking up space on your counter, with grease-spattered and flour-dusted pages held down by bowls to keep your place. The iPad is an elegant solution, as long as you have the right apps. The ones I'm using for Thanksgiving include Pepper Plate and Baking with Dorie.

Pepper Plate is a recipe holder and menu planner; you can import recipes from a lot of cooking websites like Epicurious and Gourmet, and then you don't have to be online to use them. It can compile shopping lists for you, set a timer, scale a recipe up or down, and, most importantly, plan menus and put them on a calendar schedule. Bingo! I know what I'm prepping ever day up to Thanksgiving. With my limited memory capacity, this is very helpful. Added bonus: once you start a recipe in Pepper Plate is has a function that stops your iPad from going to sleep. Handy, though now with real cookbooks I find myself jabbing them to wake them up.

Baking with Dorie is an incredible app by Dorie Greenspan, whose cookbooks I've already raved about. Here she presents only 20 recipes (three of which I had already planned to use for Thanksgiving: the pie crust, the twofor Thanksgiving pie & the apple cake), but the format is truly inspired. Each recipe can be viewed as a simple step-by-step written recipe, a video recipe (starting with preheating the oven) or, for the practiced chef, a simple visual flow chart. It's crazy. Her videos are informative, even if you know what you're doing. It's like attending a mini master class. The most basic videos have great nuggets of information, like how to tell when your dough is mixed enough, or why baking soda is used with buttermilk. Highly recommended.

(Martha Stewart has a similar app for baking cookies; I'm not using it this go round but it deserves a mention. Hey, Martha & Dorie, if you're ready to throw some promotional bucks my way, feel free.)

With my hands full of flour and butter, how am I not greasing up my iPad? Ah, this has been solved thanks to an early birthday present from some thoughtful in-laws. Belkin makes a Chef Stand for the iPad that includes a big stylus that looks like a pestle. You jab that at your iPad and it keeps the gunk off your screen.

Okay, enough about the doo-dads. On to the food!

Started the season with turkey potsticker dumplings for my son's Thanksgiving feast (his choice). A big hit with the kids. My sister Michelle was right: if you have the right non-stick pan, fried dumplings are dream. I got a Scanpan from Sur La Table. Worked perfectly; the dumplings slid right out. Don't forget the lid!

This year I found a great blog in the New York Times about what foods to prepare when in advance of Thanksgiving Day. I'm going to try making my gravy ahead of time and add the turkey drippings while reheating instead of doing it all last minute, a time when I'm usually rushing around with the turkey trying not to slip on grease.

The blog's author, Melissa Clark, also has a good video if you're having trouble getting your cranberry sauce to gel. Cranberry sauce is incredibly easy to make! Why aren't you doing it? Made two cranberry sauces already, one that's chunky and one that looks like it shlooped out of a can, both in maybe half an hour, tops.

Today I got up early to arrive at the Farmer's Market at 7:45. Had an order there for a local Heritage Turkey but was hoping to snag a slightly bigger one. I was in luck. My turkey is beautiful, all 19.75 lbs of it. Heritage turkeys are turkeys that look like ye olde turkeys from days of yore, before they got all Pamela Anderson-ed. More leg meat, smaller breasts. It may shock some of you, but I am not a breast man. Dark meat all the way. One Thanksgiving at my in-laws it was decided to forego the whole turkey and just heat up a breast "because that's all that anyone wants anyway, without all the fuss." This breast also had NO SKIN. My bitter, salty tears could have brined a whole turkey, had there been one. Which there was not. Did I mention I'm cooking Thanksgiving dinner now?

At the market I also got all my veggies, tons of fruit, cider, flavored pistachios and flowers.

Took the neck and gizzards out of the turkey and made stock for the gravy (got to use my China cap!).

This is a China cap.

This is also a China Cap. 

Made my pie crusts and refrigerated them. Baked and dried my cornbread for the apple-bacon stuffing.

Tomorrow, we take a detour: lasagna!

How is your Thanksgiving prep doing?