Thanksgiving Review and Reveal

Photo from Serious Eats

So Thanksgiving at my place was a hit. All the food turned out as planned, amazingly, and I even had time to sit down to eat and chat because I did so much in advance. The pumpkin pie was announced "the best I've ever had" by my dad.

Also, remember the secret dish I alluded to in my last post? That was turducken. Turducken! I know. It was amazing. I used a recipe from Serious Eats that makes a smaller turducken. Usually turducken is a a deboned turkey, stuffed with a deboned chicken, stuffed with a deboned duck. That is a lot of work and apparently takes a whole day to make. Serious Eats made one using duck breast, chicken thighs, and turkey cutlets. Much easier. I doubled the recipe to make enough for everybody to have a little, and I used the same stuffing we had for the meal rather than what the recipe called for. To do that pulse dry, uncooked stuffing mixture in a food processor (or Magic Bullet) until fine, add stock or water a little at a time to make a cohesive, but not soggy, mixture.

The one tip I have from all the recipes is that the pumpkin chocolate tart recipe makes A LOT of filling. After I baked the tart shell it looked like it wasn't going to hold all the filling. I also realized the recipe called for a 14 oz can of pumpkin, not a 22 oz like I had, so I doubled the rest of the filling ingredients. I pulled a Tenderflake crust out of the freezer to make a straight up pumpkin pie (Tyler got his wish in the end). There was still filling left, so I filled another pie shell. In all I ended up making 5 (!!!) pies, 3 of them pumpkin. Two days later there is only half a pie left.