Missives from the 6th Floor

I decided that having folks over for Thanksgiving dinner would both be fun and a chance to "try out" the new kitchen, so we started working on an invite list.

It was out of hand pretty much immediately - with the proposed guest list numbering in the 40's. We knew many (most?) of the named folks would have prior plans, but the risk of inviting that many people to anything is that they'll all show up, so we decided to scale it back a bit.

We ended up with 10 for dinner.

Dawnise was on hors-douvres detail, and made a garlic hummus, some spiced pecans, and a couple other things I didn't have 'cause I was busy cooking.

The main was a sweet-potato soup that Dawnise cooked up (really tasty, despite my ambivalence to sweet potato), roast Turkey with a roast pear gravy (brined the night before, and bacon-wrapped for it's last hour in the oven), stuffing, mashed potatoes, baked sweet potato with a hint of maple (another Dawnise contribution), mashed potatoes, green beans with garlic and pine nuts, roasted asparagus, and "grandma's corn" - a corn casserole that's tradition in Dawnise's family.

To top it off, rather than pie, which neither Dawnise nor I are huge fans of, Dawnise made an awesome chocolate-ginger-molasses cake with bourbon sauce.

One of our guests brought fresh baked bread and homemade cinnamon rolls, and there was plenty of wine.

We ended up with tons of turkey left - in large part thanks to Alfred's skillful carving job (and the fact that we had metric tons of other food), and we sent leftovers home with just about everyone.

The kitchen performed well - lots of counter space, even at the very end when everything was coming done and I couldn't keep up with the dishes I was creating. The range and oven were good, though the roasting pan we had was too long to fit in the oven "lengthwise" - so we baked the corn casserole in the Advantium.

Thanksgiving also ended up being a bit of an early Christmas. After the spend on the kitchen, we agreed to keep the gift giving in check this year, and decided to gift each-other each a good kitchen knife. So a couple weeks ago we went to Epicurean Edge in Kirkland and spent a very educational 45 minutes with Daniel, the owner, trying knives before finding the one we each liked.

I gave Dawnise the option of opening hers the day before Thanksgiving when she started prepping, and she gifted mine to me on my birthday. They're really nice. We also bought each-other a food processor, which we unboxed on Thanksgiving and used several times.

Friday was spent cleaning up from Thursday (and avoiding "black friday" like the "black death"), and the rest of the weekend was spent relaxing.

It was nice to spend time with friends, over good food, and take a moment to consider the lengthy list of things I have to be thankful for.