My MIL’s pumpkin pie recipe, doubled, fills 2 deep-dish crusts or 3 regular crusts. I prefer the deep dish, and I place both on a cookie sheet, just in case they overflow. Last time, they were great. We’ll see how it goes next time.
We’ll not go into how many times I’ve spilled stuff going into or coming out of a hot oven.
Up, caffeinated, and sheveled. I suppose the “worst” Thanksgiving was when I was first on my own, and 1st payday was the day before TDay.. I ended up having La Choy Chicken Chow Mein for dinner.
:dubious:
Beagles eat rocks and Naugahyde.
: borrows peals, clutches them :
We had a beagle when I was a little kid. His name was Hush Puppy, because my mom vetoed Daddy’s suggestion of “Shut up, you (fill in the four letter words.)” Hush Puppy ate the screen fabric off the door. Twice. Not “chewed it out of the spline.” Ate it.
Anything that a beagle refuses to eat is truly inedible, nu?
“Allesknowsdasistgerstupider.”
I hate people who list more than one answer to a question, but Mama Plant ties herself.
Discovering that I baked acorn squash with butter and brown sugar, she prepared it with margarine and artificial sweetener.
Her Mother made oyster dressing that I liked when I was a kid. Believing that a lot is better than a little, she put approximately three pounds of oysters in the dressing. We had to take it home, and the cat would not eat it.
Flytrap, your post reminded me of a cake fiasco my sister created eons ago. This was back when the recipe for putting pudding in a box cake mix showed up in a magazine. My mom tried it, we all loved it, and it’s been my go-to ever since.
My sister (jr-high age at the time) wanted to make a cake, so she followed that recipe… AND the recipe on the box. So there were 6 or 7 eggs, a cup of milk, a cup of water, a cup of oil… :eek:
No cake that night.
I spent about 20 years pretending to be madly enthusiastic about receiving “my favorite candy” for Christmas every year from my grandmother. She asked. I told her Almond Roca. She heard “Ferraro Roche.”
Twas okay.
Still better than the aunt who thinks that my food allergy is just something I’ve imagined, because “no one is really allergic to peppercorns.” Old people are weird.
Define “old” (she says as she rounds up the retirees in the MMP…) :mad:
I wasn’t there, but the way I heard it was…
The men went out hunting and brought home a wild turkey for Thanksgiving Dinner.
The bird was in the oven and something didn’t smell right.
It got to smelling so bad that people had to leave the house.
Turns out, whoever had shot the bird had shot it through the bowel, spreading the contents throughout the meat.
You’d think somebody would have noticed when cleaning the bird?
New plates got here, all safe and none broken.
Everything is in the dishwasher, clothes are in the dryer.
Puppy food got delivered too. Probably the last bag I’ll buy as it is recommended that you put shar pei puppies on adult food between 4 and 5 months. It’ll be a good thing, as Ripple steals the puppy food and he is getting a bit pudgy.
I still have lots to do.
Love all the cooking stories everybody told and it makes me rather happy I never learned to cook much beyond the basics…probably would have burned my house down several times over by now…
Managed to find two bathroom brushes with long (extendable) handles at Target, will try them out later today. Also looked at more furniture, it’s amazing how prices vary from place to place. Nice outside but I’m probably a homebody for the rest of the day.
No truly horrible Thanksgiving meals for me - of the fall / winter holidays it’s still my favorite.
As a child I remember really enjoying Maryland Beaten Biscuits much to my elder’s amusement.
Taking most of this week and all of next week off and truly looking forward to it.
For the first time in 16 years I overslept and missed the beginning of my shift. Truly my own fault as I had made the schedule (admittedly a month ago) and forgot I scheduled myself to cover a morning shift (4a - 12p_) instead of my usual 10a - 6p shift.
Oops.
Woke up to 10 missed calls on my cell phone, though it’s nice that the only thing I heard was concern for my health not catching shit for missing it. That and it was a really quite morning so we really didn’t miss anything other than a 2 alarm fire in Annapolis (fortunately no injuries).
Did I mention I’m ready for some time off?
I woke up today with a massive headache. The weather is changing (rain, finally!) and I apparently double as a barometer. I wanted to get somethings picked up outside before the rain, but I’m not sure that will happen.
**Johnny **- that brined turkey from TJs sounds like the way to go. I’ll try to get one of those.
**Mooomm **- your ham casserole sounds yummy. Can you share the recipe?
From the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook of 1981 - my copy is falling apart and this is one recipe that’ll stay open:
2 C cubed, fully cooked ham
2# potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced (I don’t always peel them)
1/4 C chopped onion (I prefer to slice a large onion 'cause I like onions)
1/3 C all-purpose flour
2 C milk
3 T fine breadcrumbs (I don’t use these)
1 T melted butter or margarine
2T finely snipped parsley (I don’t bother with this either)
Sometimes I’ll add a cup of frozen peas.
Grease a baking dish. Layer half the ham, potatoes, onions, (& peas) then the rest of the ham, potatoes, onions (& peas) - I actually use 1/3 of the potatoes per layer so I end with potatoes on top.)
Another change I make - I put the flour and milk in a shaker with some salt and pepper, shake it up really well, then pour it over the layered stuff. Bake, covered, at 350° for 60-75 minutes, till the potatoes are “nearly tender” according to the recipe.
At that point, if you want to, you combine the crumbs with the butter, sprinkle them over the casserole, sprinkle the parsely, then bake another 15 minutes.
Since I don’t bother with the crumbs, I just bake till the potatoes are done. I may top it with cheese.
And now, I’m off to the kitchen to build this.
The last one is easy; groundhog. My Great-Aunt Bardi could make groundhog that tasted like something that you would pay $100 a plate for in some fancy joint downtown. I can’t make it taste like anything other than old dirt and moss. It’s edible ------ just terribly so. I follow her recipe, I’ve tried other recipes - nothing comes out right. Except the grease — you could lube a fleet of beer trucks with the grease.
I haven’t had a really bad Thanksgiving; ever. Some really great and mostly real good but even the worse was a pretty good day. I’ve always been lucky in avoiding the complete-disasters-in-the-making by finding ways not to be there.
Now if we remove the turkey from Thanksgiving; the church we were at last night is where I won the infamous Birdzilla ----- 46 pounds dressed of farm raised turkey. We kept it frozen until into the summer when the history events began and with some friends partly pre-cooked it in a real oven before going over the campfire with it – for 12 straight hours. It was a demonstration and the meal for several Units. And while it wasn’t bad some parts were MUCH better than others. How our ancestors dealt with wild game of a size found back then I don’t know. But by the time it was all said and done ------ I really wanted a cheeseburger. 
No but mine (hand to God) used to sweep the dirt floor in the shed. God love her, the older I get the more I miss Rosa. I wish I could be more her style of strange.
And cook! That woman could take things damn near garbage (I don’t doubt a time or two it was garbage) and produce feasts! Growing up poor had its advantages and she mastered each and every one.
Not Thanksgiving, but as a dumb twenty-year-old, I decided to make a pumpkin pie from scratch. How dumb, you ask? Dumb enough that I wasn’t sure what part of the pumpkin went into the pie. I thought maybe the flesh was part of the rind so ended up removing the seeds from the guts and using that. The pie contained mildly pumpkin-flavored custard with weird orange strings running through it. :smack:
I tried roasting a pumpkin once - damned thing NEVER got tender, and I tossed it. Never again.
Meanwhile, my casserole is in the oven. We’ll eat in an hour or so. I’s hongreeeee!!
Roxy is home and sleeping. Apparently her other grandmother won’t put her down to nap in a quiet room, so she never naps over there. Poor kid is whipped!
There are sweet pumpkins made for roasting (which is most of them), and those that are Halloween decorations. It’s like the difference between sweet corn and silage.
My sister in law tried to argue last week that “I know poor rural south, and my granny used a brush broom to sweep the yard!” I shut up (for once.)
Granny Sue (my SIL’s mother) came to Mama’s for Sunday lunch yesterday. She spotted the straw broom in the corner. “Oh, that’s what we used to sweep the house with, and we made gallberry brooms to sweep the yard!” SIL had enough Grace to hush.
Bless her, my sister in law has Lazarus Long Syndrome. She’s the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. She has never been mistaken.
We good. She’s my brother’s third wife. I’ve learned how interact.
(my raising was pretty solid middle class through about 1977, when my father was diagnosed with a cancer that was rare then, and 95% survivable now. How cool is that?!)
Bless her, my SIL likes to imagine that she’s the only survivor of a generation who picked tobacco and sugar cane. My brother is a patient man.
My father liked smoked turkey, so it fell on Mom to do all the work associated with smoking a turkey, including getting up at an ungodly hour to put the turkey in the smoker. She smoked the turkey (and a couple of other things, IIRC), through my high school years.
One year, she had a dream that she woke up in the middle of the night with a fire burning outside. The next morning she woke up and went to check on the smoker… which had caught on fire in the middle of the night, and the turkey was lost. Not a dream, and she never smoked a turkey again.
My biggest mistake - many years my family has done Spanish Spare-ribs and Rice (family recipe) for turkey day or Christmas, with turkey & fixings on the other day. After my divorce, I started being the bringer of the spanish rice, but it had been a while since I had made it.
First or second year, I was short a small amount on the rice. But I had brown rice as well, so I topped off the measuring cup with that. Bad idea. The brown rice never cooked, and I stirred it so much, the white rice turned into effectively a risotto. Next year I cooked it at Mom’s so she could show me where I was going wrong, and I’ve gotten it right ever since.