Thanksgiving

[eruthros]

As with all thanksgivings, I learned some important lessons:

1. Never make pumpkin pie from the recipe on the back of the can of organic pumpkin, ESPECIALLY if you're planning to replace the dairy-milk with almond-milk. graycastle and I had to make a second pumpkin pie, because the first one a) lied about the size of pan it would fill and we had to double the recipe at the last minute b) under-sugared and c) really, really, REALLY under-spiced, which I mostly fixed, but.

2. The most awesome mashed potatoes in the world are made by using some of your extra-left-over heavy cream instead of milk. (No, seriously: yukon gold potatoes, cut up, boiled with skins in salt water. Take out. Add butter and heavy cream. Mash with a fork. Nom nom nom.)

2a. I will now be keeping a small container of heavy cream in the fridge. See, I use essentially no real dairy, and don't drink it, so even the smallest container of milk will go bad before I bake with it. But heavy cream comes in really small containers, and I can bake with it, make mashed potatoes, whip it as cream, or offer it to people for ... really, really rich coffee or tea. (I usually have to do that "um, your choices are almond or soy milk" thing.)

3. Green Star Co-op doesn't carry chicken or turkey breasts, even during the holidays. Geez, Green Star -- you carry beef. Is chicken too much to ask?

4. There is only one complete Mathnet series available on youtube. This distresses me. What if I suddenly want to watch the episode with the missing baseball and the air-lifted house? I ask you.

5. Even though I think, every time, that Mollie Katzen must be joking when she tells me to grease the spring-form pan and then line the bottom with parchment paper (before putting the pan together, which makes the assembly of the pan a total pain) when making apple-pear crostada for breakfast? Every time, I do it any way. What if it's a crucial step? And I'm just too silly to recognize that?

6. I feel kinda doofy being thankful for things several days late (I'm a procrastinator! what?), but I am still really happy that I have this magical rss feed of y'all.

Comments

[panisdead.livejournal.com]

I have made those mashed potatoes, and I actually didn't like them. Yukon Gold have an unpleasantly sweet taste to them to me--is the sweetness a plus for you (I don't like sweet potatoes at ALL), or does using more heavily salted water take some of it out? I may not have salted the water.

[eruthros]

Well, I like yukon golds in lots of savory contexts, so there's that -- I usually use them with chicken stock, or lots of onions and garlic, so that the sweet is moderated. But it doesn't disappear! Here, I used fairly heavily salted water, and salted butter, and they were sweetish but not strongly so.

Also, if you get really, really fresh yukon golds, they're not as sweet. :)

[joie-de-livre.livejournal.com]

OMG, Mathnet! I haven't seen that in YEARS!

[eruthros]

It is AWESOME!

But sometimes painful, as when they spend five minutes counting out the addition in the Fibonacci series. Slowly.