It was just my husband and me for Thanksgiving today- I’ve never cooked Thanksgiving dinner for just 2 people before! We decided to eat at about 3, so I wanted to make something around 11 that would tide us over and go with a glass of champagne. I found a recipe for Gruyere cheese puffs that looked great. I love Gruyere cheese. Water, butter, flour, eggs, cheese, mix it, bake it, boom.
The recipe called for "diced" cheese. What I did apparently was more like "cubed" cheese. I thought it wasn't incorporating into the batter very well, but figured it would melt down and be OK.
Um, no. They were more like little bitty cheese omelettes, because there was so much egg in the recipe. Did I mention that my husband hates the taste of eggs? He gamely tried one and fed the rest to the dog (who loved them).
At least the actual dinner turned out well. And there's nothing like champagne before noon to take the sting out of a failed dish!
Our only problem was that our turkey, even after over five hours in the oven, was still pink. We carved it up and nuked it, and it was just fine.
We can’t figure it out. The turkey was fresh, not frozen. Pepper calculated the cooking time right, as she always did. The wings were simply falling off. But the insides werem’t done.
we carved and nuked the rest before putting it away, then boiled down the remainder for soup (something we never do on Thansgiving, but we had to do something with the inadequately cooked bird).
other than the potatoes being a little runny, everything else was great.
Made a corn pudding, using the Williamsburg Cookbook, by which I swear. I’ve cooked so many recipes from it without fail, that I couldn’t believe it. Sucked the big one.
This year, my 12-lb bird was done in about 3 hours, and I still managed to slightly overcook it. Last year, the same size bird was in the oven for 5 hours and half of it was still pink. Lesson is, use a meat thermometer to check doneness. I overshot by 10 degrees this years because I didn’t even think of checking the temp until the 3 hour mark, and it was already at 175F (target: 165)
Calibrate your ovens, people. An oven thermometer costs less than five bucks at the grocery store, and will tell you exactly how far off your oven’s thermostat is. You can adjust accordingly.
Last Saturday, we had Thanksgiving dinner with my youngest sister’s family since they planned to be in Idaho with her husband’s family today. Since we were only going to have a turkey breast instead of a whole bird, I volunteered to make up some stuffing in a baking pan. It turned out a little dry so for today’s stuffing, I made sure to add more broth. Way, way more as it turned out. It came out of the oven the consistancy of custard. Runny, runny custard. :smack: Ugh! I always like to wing it when cooking but I’ve never had anything go this wrong.
TikkiDad wanted to try it anyway but there was just no way I could bring myself to serve it, so we ate Thanksgiving dinner stuffingless and the so-called stuffing is now residing in the Dumpster.
