Thanksgiving

I made Thanksgiving for myself for the very first time ever this week, and it actually turned out well. I planned out my slow cooker turkey breast, which always comes out juicy and delicious, and spent about a week flipping through my cookbooks (or “food porn”, as I sometimes think of them) for side dishes. The original menu I planned called for mashed potatoes, balsamic glazed carrots, and blue cheese puffs, but a few days before I cut out the potatoes since it was just me eating.

I forgot to plan a dessert, but I had some Little Debbie cakes that I buy for my lunches, so the evening wasn’t a total loss.

As I said, the turkey is really easy, even though it looks kind of sketchy when you’re mixing the ingredients:



Throw the turkey breast in the slow cooker and then pour a mixture of orange juice, cranberry sauce, and onion soup mix over the top. It’s the onion soup mix that makes it smell vile, but once it cooks down the smell is gone. The recipe says to cook it for six to eight hours, but I always let it go for at least eight, because then the turkey is so done and tender it kind of shreds itself on the plate.

With the turkey set to “ignore” for the next eight hours, I turned my attention to the blue cheese puffs, which need a lot of prep time but, unlike the carrots, do not need to be served warm. It’s a basic puff pastry, and after they cool you add a filling of blue cheese, mayonnaise, and chives, but that means they need time to bake and cool, so I started early.

Mixing the flour, butter, and water over heat until it formed a ball worked out well:



So did adding the eggs and cheese:



It wasn’t until after baking that disaster struck. Just like the last time I made these, I took one pan out about three minutes too early, and the puffs deflated, leaving me with flat blue cheese rolls.



It’s hard to tell from the picture, but the pan on the right is perfect. The pan on the left, not so much. I ended up spooning the filling on top of them and mentally berating myself until I felt like dirt. It was similar to real Thanksgiving, except then someone else does the berating for me, and there’s usually more drinking.

Despite the failure of the blue cheese puffs, the carrots turned out to be the biggest annoyance, because I had to peel and slice them by hand. At first I was annoyed because I didn’t have a slicer, but really I think the problem is that I don’t have good knives. A long time ago I had one of those wooden blocks with knives in it, but now I’m down to three knives in my utensil drawer. If I get a gift card for Christmas to anywhere with a kitchen department, I guess I know what I’m buying.

Back to the carrots, though, I had to simmer them in oil and water with garlic until the liquid cooked almost all the way off and the carrots were tender, and this was surprisingly easy:



Once they cooked down a little I added the balsamic vinegar, and plated up a little of everything for my “Top Chef” camera plate shot:



Happy Thanksgiving to me!