National Gluttony Day

So the beloved C and I were going to have people (actual family) over for national gluttony day. Because I'm just having issues or I'm contrary, I decided that we would not have a "groaning board" for the holidays, that we would have a reasonable feast. That I would not make gazillions of dishes. That I would be freed from the tyranny of hor d'ouevre. Just say no to excess, to greed, to gluttony, to Americans using all of the resources!

So we decided to have a first course of butternut squash soup, a turkey breast, cornbread dressing, green beans. A friend who grows her veggies was bringing the salad. Desert a little apple pie. A lot of food, actually, but missing a few dishes from the traditional thanksgiving holiday overload. No biscuits, no potatoes, no mashed veggies.

Of course, we didn't have enough soup bowls for eight, so we bought little 1 cup bowls for the soup - actual chinese rice bowls. Little. But that was okay, since you just needed a little bit of soup, there was more food coming. It would just be a little taste. And so that weekend I made butternut squash soup and while I doubled the recipe, we ate it that Sunday for dinner and saved the rest. C spent the Sunday sorting through linens and ironing them, just like women were doing all over the nation. A little pre-cooking, a little ironing before the festivities.

I had been intending to make a free-form apple pie with puff pastry, and to use the left over pastry to make little cheese sticks. An hor d'ouevre! But don't tell anyone. Of course I couldn't find any puff pastry. Well I could find stuff masquerading as puff pastry. But, having made puff pastry, I know that puff pastry is made of flour and butter. Not transfat loaded salt flour with ingredients that no one can pronounce. So a little change in plan, I made pie dough pastry, and gave up the idea of little cheese sticks.

I had gone to Whole Paycheck and ordered a free range organic turkey breast, on bone, 8 to 10 pounds. I was scheduled to pick it up between 9:00 and 9:30 on Wed. Notice that if there was a problem I wasn't going to be giving myself a whole lot of time to fix the problem. To salt or brine a turkey I needed a couple days lead time. Obviously I didn't have time to defrost anything by then either. C came back and said, turkey breasts don't come in 8 to 10 pound increments, 6 pounds is the biggest that they come. So now I have a turkey that is less than one pound per person before cooking, when it shrinks. But that's okay, because there was going to be enough food. And people could fill up on dressing.

C asked how much ice cream I had bought for the ala mode aspect of the pie. 2 pints I said. I don't think that's enough she said as we were blocks from Whole Paycheck on Wed. But we didn't want to go back. Just a little drop of ice cream on the pie, we don't want to over do it.

So on Thursday I start making the dinner. I roll out the pastry dough into a tart pan and pour in the caramelized apples and realize that the apples don't fill the tart shell as abundantly as I had imagined. There are bare patches. A pie with negative space.

I start to make the dressing. I had made a loaf of cornbread on Sunday and another one on Tuesday. One of the loaves had mold on it. So I had half the amount of stuffing that I had planned.

And teeny, tiny soup bowls.

And a negative space pie.

And two to four pounds less turkey than planned.

And no hor d'ouevre.

We're the only people who spent hundreds of dollars on a Thanksgiving meal with not enough food.