My Funny Little Frog: Thanksgiving

This was the first thanksgiving where I cooked. In the past, I was never really interested in cooking and the thought of getting up at 6am to prepare everything was not something I wanted to do on my day off. However, ever since we bought the house, I have really enjoyed making food and challenging myself to create new and interesting dishes. Cooking a giant turkey from scratch seemed like it would be the next appropriate milestone in my quest to become a good (maybe great?) cook. Perhaps I should have achieved this important milestone prior to inviting my family and friends over for a holiday dinner, as it was quite possible that my little experiment could fail and we would all be eating shrimp cocktails and hummus with pita bread for dinner instead of yummy turkey. Instead of the proposed disastrous scenario, everything turned out lovely.

It seems there are just as many ways too cook turkey as there are to skin kittens. I didn't do a lot of research on turkey cooking, but I did notice a few contrasting schools of thought, such as the brined vs. not brined crowd, the stuffed vs. not stuffed, basted vs. no basting, and of course breast up vs. breast down.

Ultimately, I decided to go with tradition and ignore all the blogs, cookbooks and commentary. I called my mom and asked her what she does. She told I didn't need to buy a brined turkey, so I got a regular, fresh one. She has always stuffed her turkeys, so I did the same and made a chestnut and sage stuffing which I placed into the turkey's chest and neck. I roasted chestnuts in the oven, which was surprisingly easy to do. The turkey's skin was basted in a mixture of olive oil, sage, poultry seasoning, salt, pepper and smoked paprika. For side dishes, I made mashed potatoes from scratch and a traditional green bean casserole, something we had never eaten in my family before. I basted the turkey every half hour and cooked it for about 5.5 hours. Everything turned out amazing.

For dessert, I didn't want to make the traditional pumpkin pie, as my family isn't too crazy about it. So this year, I decided to keep pumpkin in the dish, but make a cheesecake instead of pie. I made a yummy crust out of ginger snap cookies.

And combined pumpkin puree with the cheesecake batter. I baked the cheesecake in a water bath, a cooking method I have never used before. It was strange to do, but it worked quite well.