kareina

I haven't cooked a turkey dinner since the year clovis_t and I lived in Canada, which was 2003. It used to be my favourite meal of the year to cook, and I did two a year (Thanksgiving and Christmas) for most of my life. Well, ok, when I was little mom did all the work, but from about the time I was 10 I gradually took over more and more of the responsibility for cooking that meal, and was doing it completely on my own from 18. But in early 2003 I quit eating meat, when I figured out what was causing me issues with my digestive tract, and then while in Australia our oven was too small for my big turkey roasting pan & lid anyway, even if I felt for doing the full feast for others to eat, and in Italy my oven was a toaster oven, so I really wasn't tempted.

However, since moving to Sweden and joining lord_kjar's family for Christmas the past couple of years I have been missing my family's holiday meal. Here in Sweden the table is full of ham, a variety of things made from fish, eggs with caviar, and some pickled stuff. Non of which I eat. Their only traditional holiday foods I eat are the fruit salad, the green salad, the knackebrod, and the plain boiled potatoes. And, of course, I eat desert: the risalmata(short grained rice cooked in more milk than you think it will absorb, cooled and blended with whipped cream (2 parts rice to 1 part cream), served with thawed berries.

As much as I love the desert, and as pleasant as both the green and fruit salads are, being faced with a table wherein I am willing/able to eat less than 1/4 of the the offerings had me longing for my childhood recipes. Therefore this year we hit on a plan: we'd stay home on Christmas Eve, join some of his family at his parent's house on Christmas Day, and the family would come here on the 26th for an American Style Turkey Dinner.

Therefore I got busy. Back in November we bought the largest turkey we could find in the grocery store--5.4 Kg, which is only 12 lbs. This makes it, by far, the smallest turkey I have ever roasted--we used to always buy the 20 lb variety--it took years between being permitted to help stuff the bird when I was a kid and finally being able to lift the stuffed bird in its pan into the oven all by myself!

On Saturday we baked pepparkakor and made a pepparkakor fortified village with guard towers. (Note: many people translate pepparkakor as "gingerbread", and, indeed they are related sorts of junk food, but the recipe isn't really the same--the version we did used 300g butter, 5 dl sugar, 1 dl light syrup, 15 dl flour, 2 dl water, t Tbs baking soda, 2 Tbs cinnamon, 2 Tbs cardamon, 1 Tbs cloves, 1 Tbs ginger, and a little fresh grated nutmeg, which wasn't in the original recipe, but it so belongs there). This was necessary because linda_linsefors considers these cookies an essential part of her family's holiday traditions--they always baked the cookies and used some of the dough to make and decorate a house, and then she would eat the cookies for breakfast crushed in her fil (which is not quite the same as yoghurt, since it contains a different culture, but is close enough to substitute for it in recipes.)

Last Sunday I baked a big batch of bread and set 1.5 loaves aside in a cloth bag (hanging from a curtain rod--I have never seen any insects or mice or other small creatures checking out my kitchen for snacks, but I see no point in tempting any that may crawl through on a recon trip) to dry a little.

Monday I focused on Uni work, and we did some grocery shopping.

Tuesday (Christmas Eve) was pie baking day. We did an apple pie and a pumpkin pie (lord_kjar had never tried one before, but wanted to, since it is the stereotypical American pie to have with Turkey Dinner), and generally made the house a bit cleaner and more organized than it had been. In addition lord_kjar cooked up some rice porridge for breakfast (yum!), and then in the late afternoon we mixed the cooled left over porridge with whipped cream to make risalamalta (quadruple yum!)

Wednesday we went down to Pitea for the family gathering there--leaving here around 11:00, so as to be there a bit before noon, since food was to be served at 13:00. Since they do their traditional Christmas food on Christmas Eve, this meal didn't feature the ham and endless rounds of fish, but instead consisted of some roast beef, from a young animal a farmer friend of theirs had provided, boiled potatoes (of course--this is Sweden), a cheese pie, a salad of greens, apple, and walnuts, and only a couple of things I don't eat, and, much to my delight, they had risalamalta for desert, too. Luckily for me, there was a gap of an hour or so between serving the meal and serving of desert (which also had a fruit salad with whipped cream on the side, and ice cream. While I did take some of the fruit salad, I wasn't tempted by the ice cream. Why would any one want to eat that overly sweet store bought stuff when it is possible to eat risalmata, and have all of the wonderful creamy flavour, without any sugar?

We left their place around 18:00 on Wednesday, which got us home at 19:00, at which point we went back out to the store to pick up fresh veg and some fruit for today's dinner. Then I started baking. First I mixed up our traditional refrigerator roll dough and got it into the fridge to chill and rise over night. Then I used up some of the left over pumpkin that wasn't needed for the pie (ok, butternut squash--that is the variety that is available in stores here) and some of the water in which the pumpkin had been cooked to make a batch of bread dough to be baked that evening.

While we were waiting for the dough to rise I read aloud to the others another couple of chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. We are up to chapter 90-something now, and still loving it. Just last week one of our friends at the SCA feast had gone onto a small rant about Fantasy books in general, and magic and expressed in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books in particular, and every time he said anything on the topic I countered with "you need to read this fan fic--it addresses that complaint". By the end of the evening he convinced me that he is the exact target audience of HP and the MOR, because the author seems to be writing with the exact reason of having made those same complaints himself over the years.

The pumpkin bread finally came out of the oven quite late, so I didn't get to start my yoga for the evening until 22:45. As a result I didn't get to bed till just after midnight, which gave me a bit of a nap before I got up at 05:30 so I could get up and bake the rolls from the refrigerator roll dough before putting the turkey in the oven. I managed to do that baking and get the bird into the oven, stuffed, by 06:30, at which point I went back to bed for another short nap. (as an aside--this year's stuffing was really good. Instead of using breakfast sausage combined with bread like Mom always did, I took a package of ground moose meat, mixed it with an egg, some oats, everything in the spice cupboard (more or less), and some chopped onion and crushed garlic. I then fried that up in butter, leaving the meat blend in decent sized chunks. This was the first year I thought to cook the stuffing meat the night before and then leave it ready to go in in the fridge over night, and it worked so well I wonder why I never thought of it before).

I got back up at 08:30, and then spent the rest of the day steady busy, but never rushed: put the "giblets" (only the liver and neck where in the bag here) into water to simmer for most of the day, peel and chop potatoes and set in water to wait till later to boil. chop fruit for fruit salad (three types of pears, some apples, one of those Japanese pear-apples, orange, and kiwi), assemble the green salad (one bag mixed greens, two small bags spinach, one yellow capsicum, carrot, cucumber, tomato, and avocado), separate the neck meat from the bones, use the immersion blender to chop that meat and the liver and mix it into the water in which it has been cooking. Strain the meat solids out of the liquid and set them aside in case anyone thinks it is food later (lord_kjar might--he is an omnivore) and add herbs and spices to the liquid to wait for the drippings from the turkey pan to become gravy, boil the potatoes, chop the broccoli and get it ready to be steamed at the last minute. Pull the turkey out of the oven (I had, of course, basted it many times over the course of the day), and pull the stuffing out, pour the liquid from the pan into the gravy pot and begin cooking gravy (delegate carving of the bird and the whipping of the cream at this point), and put the heat on under the broccoli.

By the time I was done mixing up the gravy the broccoli was cooked, the turkey carved, and we got everything onto the table and served a bit after 13:00. Then I proceeded to eat too much. I didn't take much of any one thing, but 100% of the main meal is stuff I love, and much of it I hadn't eaten in years. Note that I took only a very tiny token piece of the turkey, since I have no idea if it is typical food industry fare and thus likely to cause me issues with my digestion later, but I did take seconds of stuffing, because I love it (and I don't fear that the moose was subjected to too many hormones and bad living conditions growing up (or whatever else it is about store-bought meat that my body doesn't' care for), since it didn't have much dealing with humans before that hunter found it), and didn't hesitate to use the gravy, because I make an amazingly delicious gravy. I confess that while I baked pies, I didn't eat either of them--I am not a big fan of desert pies--cooked fruit doesn't do it for me, and I don't care for sweets. So instead I had fruit salad with whipped cream and almonds and called it desert.

My tummy was still full when the guests went home around 16:30 (that could have to do with my tasting a bit of this and a bit of that in the way of the (plentiful!) left overs as I packed it all into smaller containers to go into the fridge--yes, I wrote that down into my food log, too, and it brought the total for the day rather higher than typical (3.82 bowls of food for today, while my all time average since starting this food log back in 2005 is 2.99 bowls of food), so while the others went to lay down for a nap straight away, I decided to go get some computer time and type this up, since I don't care to sleep with a fully tummy. It is now 18:45, so I may wind up doing my yoga fairly soon and then going to bed early for the night, rather than bothering with a nap. Tomorrow, after we eat some of the left overs, we will decide what to freeze and what to leave out to eat between now and when we leave for Lund on the 1st of January. Hopefully, I will also return to my paper in progress--it would be nice to finish one complete draft before the end of the year, and the last few days I have been too busy to even think of it.

All and all I am quite satisfied with the the results today--the timing was perfect, the food all a yummy as I remembered it, and I got compliments from the others too (though I must confess, the fact that *I* really liked everything I ate is actually more important to me--I know that I tend to be way fussier than anyone else, so if I like the food others are usually reasonably happy with it, but the reverse is not often true).