results from a day of cooking

I probably ought to attend a cooking school and really learn how to cook because, let's face it, I'm one slow motherfucker when I'm in the kitchen, especially when I have a project involving several dishes. Sunday, I managed to do everything on the agenda plus a little extra: I made a beautiful gravy for the turkey; I created a maple-mustard-brown-sugar sauce for the ham steak; I made both mashed potatoes and sweet-potato casserole (all the grocery store had was large marshmallows); I cooked up some awesome cream corn (not my recipe); and in terms of extra stuff, I made and cooked up some sage-y breakfast sausage as well as the croutons that will be part of the stuffing I'll be completing Monday night. I started cooking in the early afternoon and went all day. Below are the fruits of my labor. 

The ham glaze, which is made of maple syrup, mustard, cloves, brown sugar, and apple juice:

The turkey gravy, which contains both chicken bouillon and bacon grease as part of the roux, as well as mushrooms and bits of bacon for texture. Here it is containerized:

I stirred the gravy up to reveal some of the texture (will thin it out with milk when I serve it):

My boss gifted me with a potato ricer a while back, and this was my first-ever chance to use it. The taters came out awesome. I added salt, pepper, butter, heavy cream, cream cheese, onion powder, and garlic powder. Nothing fancy or special, but the taters taste damn good:

Riced taters:

And here's the sweet-potato casserole, with marshmallows. Too bad I couldn't get the mini marshmallows, but I worked with what I had:

Interesting note: I didn't know, until I bought this batch of Korean goguma (sweet potatoes), that Korea grew goguma with orange flesh. All I'd ever seen, before, was the gray-fleshed goguma, which tastes like sweet potato but looks cadaverous, so in times past, when I'd make a sweet-potato casserole, I'd add carrot to change the color to orange (carrot doesn't affect the taste very much). I bought carrots this time as well, thinking I'd be dealing with the usual gray-fleshed sweet potato, but the moment I started peeling off that skin, I realized my mistake. So from now on, now that I know what to look for, I'll buy this variety of goguma whenever I want to make sweet-potato casserole.

Below: only lightly browned in the oven because I was afraid of burning everything to a crisp. The cracked and crumbled bits occurred when the marshmallows puffed up and boiled over, and after everything had cooled and hardened a bit, I had to use a knife to separate the two glass baking dishes:

Lovely cream corn. It's got a milk-based Bechamel plus heavy cream. The recipe also calls for grated Parmigiano, but I opted for Comté, the French cousin of Gruyère. Behold:

And before I forget, a shot of the completed mashed potatoes:

Below is a berry sauce that's mostly cranberry, but it also includes strawberries and blueberries, which have been sitting in my freezer, looking to be used. There's brown sugar, turbinado, and muscovado sugar in the mix, as well as cinnamon and lemon juice. Behold:

The sausage for the stuffing, homemade. Very sage-y, with some maple syrup to give it that sweet, breakfast-sausage edge:

Closeup:

Croutons, early stage (cubed bread):

Oiled, buttered, herbed, and seasoned:

Final result (half of the whole batch):

So that's Stage One done. I need to make the rest of the stuffing Monday night, an apple pie Tuesday night, and the rest of everything Wednesday night and Thursday morning. More pics on the way. Stay tuned.