preliminary meal pics

As promised, here are some preliminary shots of the food I've been making for this Thursday. Not pictured: the gravy I'd talked about in an earlier post.

mashed budeydoes, made floofy via ricer

I made croutons for my stuffing by cubing up some white bread, oiling the bread up with olive oil, and sprinkling on some black pepper and powdered garlic. I loaded the bread onto a tray, and in my particular oven, with its top burner, you can put both burners on and bake the bread at 350°F (roughly 175°C) for about 15 minutes, so that's what I did. As you see, I also added some panko. Also pictured: pan-fried shrooms and celery. The stuffing is still under construction at this point.

I've added raisins.

For texture's sake, and to add a bit of body, I normally toss some chestnuts into my stuffing, but the ones I got from my grocery had gone bad. When I opened their containers, there was a nasty-smelling puff of air that told me the whole story. I wondered whether I could rescue the chestnuts with a standard boil, but even after ten minutes of boiling in salted water, the chestnuts still stank. Part of me wanted to try pan-frying them, but I ultimately decided discretion was the better part of valor and just tossed the rotten chestnuts out. Some things can't be rescued, and the stuffing turned out fine, anyway.

homemade breakfast sausage, cooked and draining

The sausage (my favorite ingredient) gets dumped onto the stuffing pile.

I belatedly realized it would've been better to cube the apples up.

I didn't photograph some intermediary steps with the stuffing. In the old days, I tended to make stuffing via the pan-only method: everything got done on the stovetop. These days, though, I've acquiesced to using the arguably more popular "bread pudding" method, which means adding a savory custard for structure and baking the stuffing in the oven like a lasagna—first covered, then uncovered. The results of the baking can be seen in the following pic:

Below is the sweet-potato casserole, with raisins and home-roasted macadamia nuts. This year, unlike last year, my building's grocery didn't sell orange-fleshed goguma (Korean sweet potatoes), so I had to cheat to get the orange-ish color: I added a boiled carrot to the mix plus some molasses to darken the whole thing, and when that wasn't enough, I did the full cheat and added red and yellow food coloring to arrive at the mostly plausible color you see below (click here for comparison's sake; I think I got pretty close).

As for the marshmallow topping: I've brought the marshmallows to work. My plan is to microwave the sweet potatoes with a marshmallow topping. This will probably result in a melted mess that I will then brown up with my kitchen blowtorch, which I also brought to the office. Ideally, you bake your marshmallow-topped casserole in the oven, thus allowing the marshmallows both to brown up nicely and to retain their outer shape even though their insides will have melted and softened. We have no standard oven in the office, though, so I'll do what I have to do. Maybe the best thing to do is to microwave the sweet potato first to get it hot, then put on fresh marshmallows, then microwave until the 'mallows barely start to melt, then use the blowtorch to finish. Yeah... that's the ticket. Best way to avoid rivulets of marshmallows flowing all over the place.

That's it for the moment. Tonight, I'm doing a ton of things: (1) a redo of the gravy, (2) an apple pie (or eppel peh, as Cartman would say), (3) Chef John's corn pudding, and (4) the ambitious chicken roulade that will be standing in for turkey. More pics to come.