Thanksgiving luncheon: the final elements

All prepped, I think.

Tonight, I cooked up my peas and carrots; I pan-fried some remarkable* ham steaks, seared up some thick slices of turkey breast, bought some ice cream for the pie and cobbler, and tried a bit of turkey with my gravy to see whether I needed to tweak anything in the gravy. Verdict: the gravy doesn't need any more bouillon: I simply have to be conservative when adding milk to thin the sauce out. Otherwise, the gravy does what it's supposed to: it elevates the bland turkey-breast meat by adding creaminess plus the texture of bacon bits and mushrooms. All in all, I'm pleased with how tonight's prep went, especially compared with last year's prep, which was a bit creatively bankrupt. Some pics from tonight follow.

Peas and carrots, heavily buttered, with salt and pepper:

These ham steaks, below, started off steak-like, but they were shot through with fat, so I ended up cutting the meat along the "seams" of fat to produce unevenly sized chunks of ham (I had originally wanted to cut the steaks into even quarters, but I quickly realized this was unrealistic given how the fat was distributed throughout the meat). 

The ham now sits soaking in my tasty glaze:

I seared up the turkey breast in a mix of butter, olive oil, salt, and pepper. The meat was already fully cooked, so this was only about instigating a little Maillard reaction to add a bit of flavor; overcooking already-cooked meat can dry it out, so I ended up doing 90 seconds on one side of each "turkey steak," and 45 seconds on the other side—enough for a kind-of sear:

With that, I think we're ready for tomorrow. I've hung a final checklist on my front door to make sure I don't forget anything on my way out. Expect photos from the feast itself!

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*I bought the ham steaks at the local John Cook Deli Meats outlet. They were thinner than the Costco ham steaks I used to worship, and that was, initially, disappointing. These ham steaks were also quite expensive at W15,000 per large, steak-like slice, so that hurt, too. What I belatedly noticed, though, was how French the cut of ham was for each steak: in the States, we generally like our ham to be juicy but to have a minimum of fat. American ham also tends to be roughly the same pinkish hue all the way through; just look at a spiral-cut, honey-glazed ham to see what I mean. These John Cook ham steaks, which were even labeled French-style as jambon (French for ham), were definitely French cuts of pig; they brought back European memories as I looked at them. With this cut (and I wish I'd taken a picture before I pan-fried the bastards), the meat had some pink in it, but in moving outward toward the fat cap (another difference between this cut and many prepped American hams is the presence of a significant fat cap with the French cut), the meat became ghostly white to the point where it was hard to tell where the meat ended and the fat began. And the French cut, being so fatty, fried up like bacon—at which point it started to look more like an American ham. No matter: the smell was delicious, and my glaze made the whole thing even better. I think the troops will enjoy the ham, maybe more than they'll enjoy the turkey.