Thanksgiving dinner

     I hope everybody had a pleasant Thanksgiving day. We did. the weather was gorgeous. I strolled through the neighborhood before I threw our birds on the fire, and enjoyed Mariachi music blaring from the house of one Mexican neighbor (but far enough away we couldn’t hear it from inside our house, thank goodness) and talked with another neighbor about what was under all those covers on dishes he was unloading from his car. Besides the usual Thanksgiving stuff, he had lefse, Norwegian-American potato pancakes.

     Cooking as usual with lowest possible fat and sugar for Jerry’s sake, and strictly non-gluten per doctor’s orders for me, we still came out with a tasty feast, although it was a bit odd. We started with hors de oeuvres made of sesame crackers with a dab of low-fat cream cheese and a dab of canned crab meat. I had tasted the crackers with cheese and salsa at Costco on food-demo day, and they were delicious. These were absolutely despicable—I could not swallow the crab meat. Jerry gobbled them up, and still has most of the can of crab meat to make an omelet for whatever. Or to feed to stray cats, in my opinion. 

     We “splaycocked” a pair of Cornish game hens (cut them along the backbone and flattened them out like a butterfly), browned them in a skillet, then dumped in mirepoix (chopped onions, celery and carrots) and some white wine, covered and cooked them on the stovetop.

      I cooked one large sweet potato in the nuke, split it lengthwise, and served Jerry his half plain and mine sprinkled with brown sugar and marshmallow. I’m not alone in my liking for that sweet stuff—recently I saw a TV program with Jacques Pepin and Julia Child preparing Thanksgiving foods. When he made some disparaging remark about sweet potatoes with marshmallow, Julia sounded almost sheepish about it, but said she liked them that way. 

     We finished  off the menu with garlic mashed potatoes with the unthickened gravy from the game-hen pan, and dressing made of corn bread, Andouille sausage, onions and an array of peppers, red and yellow bells, one Serrano, and a Poblano. I made the cornbread from scratch in an iron skillet in the oven, and ever the engineer, Jerry pointed out that I could have saved lots of time and energy cooking the cornbread in his waffle iron. To me, Andouille tastes like hot dogs, so I’m calling it our hot dog dressing. 

      We had whole-berry cranberry sauce out of a can, and it was fine, although I'll miss not having leftovers.

     And we chased the chickens with pumpkin pie made with a non-gluten tart crust that was pressed into the pan instead of rolled out plus the cooked-down pulp of our Halloween Jack-O-Lantern. For whatever reason, perhaps the soy milk I used, perhaps the egg-beaters without yolk, the pie didn’t stay orange, it turnout out greenish. However, it tasted great! 

     So what did I forget? It’s not our traditional meal unless I forget to put something on the table, and this time it was anything fresh and green. Jerry was pleased with that. He didn’t want to eat any “Green S ___!” 

     When we bought the game hens, the store clerk looked at the hens, looked at Jerry, looked shocked, and said "They're not big enough for you!"  They were. I ate all of mine, plus seconds on the potatoes. He still has half a chicken left over.