My Belly is Full

For the first time in dog's age, I cooked. I mean full out cooked and my feet are really aching but I am happy. Having company often inspires me because I love to feed people, the long standing food is love mantra, care taking and all that. Oh yeah, and I'm good at it.

TGF had decided she wanted to have turkey, even though we had "the dinner" at the appointed hour and all that. Wednesday night we purchased the bird after finding a suitably small fowl. Did you know that Costc* only carries the ridiculous size of 20 pounds? A size that Cooks Illustrated, my epicurean bible, clearly believes gives you a terrible turkey. I also had the dilemma that Greg is a vegetarian so I wanted to have enough other things for him to eat. Of course I did not decide on the rest of the menu until today, really mere hours before needing to shop for it.

Since I had trouble sleeping I was awake in plenty of time to have the turkey in it's brine by 6am. Yes I said 6am because I had what turned out to be an extremely unrealistic game plan. I decided on a cornbread dressing with green apples, cream of mushroom soup, homemade gravy, and because I knew I'd be exhausted from all that, salad because in the morning Greg whined something about vegetables. The nerve, I tell you. I had planned and shopped for apple crisp (from CI of course) but bagged that idea - waaaaay too ambitious. It will happen tomorrow or Monday.

By the way, it's called dressing because it is cooked outside of the turkey versus stuffing called such for the very obvious reason. At least that's what TGF says. Works for me. She was a little dubious about the addition of green apples to the holy trinity of cornbread, onion, and celery. Turns out her doubt and my concern were wasted moments of mental fodder. The recipe comes from Cooks Illustrated. It was so frigging fabulous! I am making more of it soon. I still have enough cornbread to do another batch.

I was inspired by the last episode of Top Ch*f when the winning dish with a cream of mushroom soup. But when I read the recipe online I was horrified by the quantity of heavy cream. Of course I consulted C.I. but two sources are rarely enough for me to make a decision about a recipe or more often what bits and pieces I will pull from. I found a recipe that sounded really good online and I did not alter it. Imagine that. A real winner also.

Starting later than I had hoped dinner came in stages, with me finishing the cooking the next "course" as folks ate, and ended very late it was great. After dinner and some basic clean up courtesy of Greg and TGF because as I said my feet - OW!! And I even wore shoes. We retired to the living room and are watching Dogma, perhaps my all time favorite movie. I mean I don't have singular favorite about almost anything but this film comes damn close.

It has been so wonderful having Greg and Janet visit, and more generally having company in our home, people who are engaging and fun. I must remember to keep extending invitations to people because I do like playing hostess.