Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Hope you’re having a great day – or had a great day, if you’re reading this after Turkey day. Its only 10 am and I’ve been cooking since 7:30. Let us not forget to be thankful for our dinner bounty, and to happy to share it with family.

For today’s dinner, I made as much as I could yesterday, but there’s still a lot to be done the day of. My daughter is helping a lot, thank goodness. Helpers are so nice to have around! This post, though, was one I wrote up a day or so ago – we’re having pumpkin pie today. My very favorite pie in the world. Because we have so many pumpkin pie lovers in our family, we’re having 3 pumpkin and one apple, and likely they’ll all be gone by the end of the day, or at the latest tomorrow morning.

Probably I’ve mentioned before that I’m an inveterate recipe collector. Clippings from all the magazines I subscribe to (at the moment those are: Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Food & Wine, Cooks Illustrated, Sunset and Southern Living), notes from a restaurant meal, emailed from friends, found on the internet, and now, with food blogs, I have a whole new source of recipes. If I cooked 3 meals a day, with 4-5 recipes per meal, I still wouldn’t run out of new recipes for the rest of my life, just of the ones I have in my to-try collection. I’m really trying to be more circumspect about what I clip and print out. But, it’s very hard because so many things sound so wonderful.

Because I subscribe to a lot of food blogs through google reader (if you’ve looked at the list at the bottom of my blog home page you’ll understand what I’m saying), I have a lot of reading to do. Not only do I like to support the other food bloggers out there by reading what they have to say, but you just never know what you’re going to find. After I’ve been away for a few short days, my google reader box is full. You can imagine that when I finally got around to looking yesterday, after 3 1/2 weeks, it says I had 997 blogs to read. Oh my. That’s almost overwhelming. And yet, what if I miss some fantastic recipe? So, I’m trying to read it gradually, maybe 15-20 minutes at a time. I’ve already printed out 4 recipes and I’m only down to the C’s (google gives them to me in alpha order). So, the task ahead of me is huge. Daunting. But I’ll keep slogging through it.

So, when I saw the title of this blog posting, I was hooked, since I love all-things-pumpkin. The blogger Sassy Radish, was guest hosting at the Accidental Hedonist, and wrote up a nice list of her favorite Thanksgiving menu items, among them, this dessert. Read her original posting about this recipe here. Its origin is Charles Phan of the Slanted Door in San Francisco, a hugely popular restaurant in the Ferry Building, a place I’d love to visit. You can also find the recipe on Epicurious with the title of Pumpkin Souffle/Bread Pudding.

This isn’t pumpkin pie. Naturally, with the main ingredient of bread, it’s a different texture. The challah is a soft bread, just slightly sweet. And not something I’d ever purchased before, but figuring it was an important item, I sought it out. Finally found it at Trader Joe’s, thank goodness.

Very little sugar is added, surprisingly, to the bread pudding. The pumpkin custard mixed with whipped-up egg whites provides a subtle pumpkin flavor. It’s lighter, though, than most bread puddings because of the addition of whipped egg whites. I like that part. With a big dollop of whipped cream on top, yum. If and when I make this again, I think I’ll add more spices (just because I can, and I like more of those pumpkin pie type spices anyway) and I’ll add more pumpkin. Hopefully the custard will hold with 4 egg yolks. I made a double batch, and because I don’t have enough custard cups, I made it in a 9 x 13 pan, which is what Sassy Radish did also. I baked the dish 10 minutes longer because of that. And having made this several days ago, I’ll tell you that I think this tastes better after it sits overnight – so this might make a great do-ahead dessert.
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Are these not adorable? I thought it would be fun for our daughter Dana, and our granddaughter Taylor to make these little guys for the Thanksgiving Dinner table. The project was in Martha Stewart Living (magazine) this month. You can access the template and directions on Martha’s website here. Dana will add here, that it takes a bit of time to make these little guys, what with the yarn wrapping, gluing here and there, and the cutting of the card stock took the most time, actually. But then, we are having 16 people for dinner tomorrow. They had to make a trip to Michael’s, who had everything they needed, and it took about 3-4 hours of work to complete them, done over 2 days. But I think they’re just darling, don’t you?

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At the brunch we had last weekend, I asked Susan L. to bring some kind of pre-brunch nibble. Her choice. She brought a scrumptious soup, that she served in her grandmother’s beautiful bone china teacups (see picture above). You can’t see the interior of that teacup, unfortunately, with the soup nearly to the top, but it’s just lovely, as were all the others. She had 10 different ones. No spoons needed, since we just sipped it from those cups. And she served the cutest little rolled up nibbly bites along side – a dough with a piece of apple inside. Delish also.

And the soup, called a Tomato Bisque Sip Soup, was so very tasty. It came from Sunset Magazine, she said. From the taste, I wouldn’t have known that it was such a super-quick one, merely using canned tomatoes and a few ingredients, heated up and served. 1-2-3. Done. Don’t you just love those kinds sometimes?
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Here’s another great chicken (breast) recipe. Another recipe from Phillis Carey’s cookbook, that I’ve talked about before. She’s just such a wizard with chicken. This could be a “regular” night dinner, although I think it should be elevated to “company” status. It isn’t exactly on the low cal side – it has some heavy cream in the sauce – and it isn’t exactly quick, either. Fortunately I had two helpers (Dana, my daughter, and her daughter, 10-year old Taylor). They’re all visiting us for the week (my daughter – and her two children – come to join her husband who’s been with us for a couple of months while he works on a project here, locally). So, chicken seemed like the best choice for dinner. Chicken breasts were defrosted, and I found I had everything on hand to make these. It’s nice when you do a dinner like that and you don’t have to make a trip to the grocery store.

Cajun and Creole are two different things, just in case you didn’t know. The cuisines are different, and although I’m not from the south (I’m actually a California native), we’ve visited enough times that I’ve learned not to mention to the N’awlins’ folks that they might appear similar to the unknowing. Since I couldn’t remember what the difference was, I looked it up on Wikipedia:

• According to an expression of the region, Cajuns live to eat, not eat to live. Outside Louisiana the distinctions between Cajun and Louisiana Creole cuisine have been blurred. However, Creole dishes tend to be more sophisticated continental cuisine using local produce. Cajun food is rural, more seasoned, sometimes spicy, and tends to be more hearty. Many well-known Cajun dishes were originally centered on wild game, rice and other local ingredients.

Likely the lines are a bit blurred in this recipe as well. Whatever it is, and whatever its roots, it’s just gosh-darned tasty. I’d serve this to guests anytime, although I’d make double the sauce. There just never seems to be enough sauce to go around. And I like to serve this with pasta on the side, and the sauce goes just nicely with the pasta. I happened to have served it with green beans – the Green Beans with Garlic and Olive Oil that I shared a couple of months ago on the blog. This time I had some mushrooms on hand, so I added them to the Creole sauce. They weren’t in the original recipe, so you decide whether you want to do that. The chicken breasts were pounded to an even thickness, then sort of stuffed with a cream cheese-green onion – Parmesan mixture, dipped in egg and bread crumbs (I used Panko), then baked for half an hour. Meanwhile you make the creole sauce and boil up some pasta. And whip up a bright green vegetable, perhaps a salad, and you’re done.
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At our brunch on Saturday, my friend Joan L. brought the most delicious, flavorful, lemony cake imaginable. Come to find out it’s Ina Garten’s recipe. From her cookbook, Barefoot Contessa Parties! (which I don’t have), but the internet, being the internet, I found dozens of copies of it on multiple websites. Lots of other food bloggers have done a write-up about this, but my copy came from Oprah, when she had Ina Garten on her show some while back.

It uses the zest from 6-8 lemons plus a LOT of fresh squeezed lemon juice. Not only in the cake, but in the syrup and the frosting. No wonder it’s lemony flavored. And it has the lightest texture. Most likely from the addition of buttermilk. These are made in loaf pans, then you dribble a lemony syrup all over the cakes that sinks in, and once completely cooled you drizzle it with a white icing.

No question, this is a great cake. If you’re blessed with a lemon tree, this is a must-bake for you. Our Meyer lemon tree doesn’t have ripe lemons yet. I have juice in the freezer, but not any zest. And have you seen the price of lemons, even here in Southern California? I think I paid 89 cents apiece for them. Joan, thank you for bringing this wonderful cake!
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It isn’t very often than I have the occasion to make an alcohol-based punch. We’ve been having quite warm weather here in Southern California; warmer than usual for the season, anyway, so it sounded like a good plan to serve a refreshing drink before the brunch yesterday. I should have checked the weather forecast last week when I was planning – we’ve been having fog and quite cool temperatures the last 2 days. But oh well, I didn’t think anyone would really mind.

Going to my recipe trove, I had sorted through about 10 different punches that I thought appropriate, and this one just sounded right. But, I call it Pink Sangria, instead of the real title, White Zinfandel Sangria. It’s unfortunate that white zin has acquired this reputation for only appealing to little ladies at the book club, or sipping on the porch in the southern summer afternoon. I used to really enjoy white zin – Beringer usually – but my tastes changed about 25 years or so ago, and normally I find white zin too sweet. So, to counter that tendency (to me, anyway), I used Peach Pucker Schnapps in this punch, instead of the usual (sweeter) Peach Schnapps. It definitely has a pucker, but added a really nice depth to the drink. You might taste it before you decide whether you want added sugar, if you use the Peach Pucker Schnapps.

Maybe peaches are in season somewhere in the world, but they’re darned hard to find here. I did spy some at my local grocery store, but they looked terrible, so I decided to use just the lemons and oranges. You marinate the punch for awhile, so it imparts the cinnamon and citrus flavors. Have everything all chilled, then add the club soda at the last, along with ice and you have a really special-occasion drink. The photo above shows it in its marinating stage. I added the club soda just before serving. When I make this again, I’m not going to add as much club soda – it made the punch too thin to me. But use your own discretion on that.
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Well, I’m here to tell you that not every quiche is created equal. And despite the fact that men may not admit to eating quiche, they do. And most of them like it too.

For years I used to make a quiche recipe that was good. Very good, actually, but then one day at lunch I ordered quiche at a French restaurant. After a couple of times, I determined that my recipe had to go. So a year or so ago I decided to try a different chemistry for my own home made one. More and different cheese, and whipping cream instead of half and half. Oh my. What a difference. This recipe is just really, really good. I found it on the internet somewhere, tweaked it to my own satisfaction, but I didn’t make any notes, so I don’t know where it came from. Sorry. Thick and creamy (well, yes, with whipping cream instead of milk or half and half). And although I enjoy other varieties of quiche – like broccoli or spinach, or mushroom, my favorite remains Lorraine (bacon).

We had a brunch here at our house today. In doing the menu planning, and after spending about 2-3 hours perusing all kinds of other recipes (to try something different) and building a menu from the entree, I kept going back to the quiche. I hadn’t served it to this group before, so it was “new” to them. DH loves quiche any way, shape or form. Our gourmet gathering is a group of 4-5 couples, and we’ve been meeting for about 5 years or so, on a off and on basis, for a gourmet kind of dinner. We’d never done brunch. The hostess chooses the menu, and assignments are made with each couple bringing some part of the meal, so I only made the entree and the pink sangria (I’ll tell you about that one in a day or so) we sipped on before we sat down to our meal. The other couples brought a soup, a vegie salad and a lettuce salad, a fruit side dish and dessert.

So, this quiche has all the “normal” ingredients of a quiche – cream, eggs, cheese, bacon in a piecrust. What’s different about it? Maybe not much, except a bit of white onion, white pepper, paprika, some garlic, and the types of cheese. I used Gruyere (an imported cheese from Switzerland) and Gouda and real Parmigiano-Reggiano. This one is made in a tart pan, so the piecrust is not high – it’s not a deep dish kind of quiche. I used a removable bottomed tart pan, and shhhh, I cheated and used Pillsbury’s piecrust from the refrigerator case. It was quite lovely, actually. Better than the frozen shells, and very pliable, so it was easy to fit into my two different sized pans. I just trimmed some off one and pressed it into the other one. Simple really. Then you press all the grated cheese into the shells, the bacon, onion, the Italian parsley and kind of press it all down, then you whip up the custard base and pour it on. Quite simple, really. Note: if you use a different kind of pan, or regular pie crusts and traditional pie plates, you’ll probably need more custard, so just add another egg and perhaps another 1/2 cup or more of cream. And another side note: if you use salty bacon, as some brands can be, you’ll want to reduce the amount of salt.

So if a quiche is an appropriate item for a holiday breakfast or dinner, you’ll be very happy to have tried this one. To see the tart shell recipe print out the PDF recipe. I didn’t reproduce it here (below).
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Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been planning the Thanksgiving menu the last couple of days. We’re excited that we’ll have all three of our children here, with all 5 grandchildren too, who range in age from one infant up to age 13. Plus some other extended family too. That will make a table for 16, which is two more than our table can accommodate, so we’ll probably have to set up a small table for the children nearby.

Everyone is bringing something, so that makes my job easier. I’m grateful for the help. I’ve always thought that Thanksgiving dinner is one of the most labor intensive there is, of the entire year. So much of it has to be done at the last minute – the potatoes, the gravy, the salad, etc. But I heard a suggestion the other day – potatoes hold real well in a crock pot. Just make them several hours ahead, preheat the crock pot and throw the entire batch in, cover, and it will hold for many hours. Sounds like a plan to me.

So, listen up . . . that’s the phrase I seem to use when I’m about to share something important. I’m going to give you my prized (well, no, I haven’t really won a prize for it, it’s just prized by me!) recipe for cranberry relish. My mother introduced cranberry relish to our family’s Thanksgiving table back in the late 1950’s I think. It was just the chopped cranberries (and I was often the one who had to sit and hand chop the cranberries – very tedious, I might add), and minced orange, including some of the peel, with sugar. I made it that way for years. Until one year I saw a recipe in a magazine, I think, that mentioned adding apple and ground ginger. I love ginger and what it does for baked goods and other things too. I tried it, and it’s become the regular on my Thanksgiving table ever since. Over the years I’ve tweaked the recipe a bit – reduced the sugar a tad, and added more ginger. And I think the original recipe called for 2 apples, but I preferred the single one. So that’s why I call this a Carolyn original. I have no recollection where I first saw the recipe including the apple and ginger, so I can’t given any credit for it.

This keeps for about a month, and is wonderful added to a turkey sandwich, or as a chutney type side with grilled meat. But it seems to have its strongest affinity to poultry. I can eat this straight out of the container, I like it so much. Just remember to make this a day ahead, if at all possible. It takes several hours for the flavors to blend AND for the sugar to do its magic with the fruit, drawing out the juices.
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Files: MasterCook 5+ and MasterCook 14 (click link to open in MC – 14 contains photo)

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It may be a bit hard to see here, but those cookies are thin. THIN. Really THIN. But chocolately, rich, just like eating the top off of a rich brownie. Or maybe the very top of a muffin, even.

Usually when we return from a European trip, I’m craving salads and greens, and vegetables. Not so this time because we had ample on the ship. In fact, Lucy and I raved about the quality of the designer lettuces they served at the salad bar every day. Absolutely fresh from the fields that very day. And delicious dressings, all home made. But what I did crave upon our return was chocolate. We had almost none on the trip. A couple of times we had chocolate sauce on vanilla ice cream, and we had something similar at the dinner at Gundel. And one night they offered a chocolate terrine. I was sad to decline that but I knew the caffeine would keep me awake that night. But otherwise, chocolate didn’t figure much in the shipboard menus.

So, since the cookie barrel is empty around here, I decided to make something chocolate. I was leafing through the December issue of Bon Appetit (how come I’m getting the December issue in the first or 2nd week of November, I ask you?), and spotted these chocolate thins.

These are made in a bowl, so quite easy. It couldn’t have taken more than 15 minutes to complete the preparation, and another 20 minutes max to bake them all. Pretty cinchy. And, they are really delicious. But I do warn: they’re very fragile. I’ll have to figure out how to package these carefully so they don’t break – they tend to break in half very easily. But they’re very tasty.

Added note 3 days later: these cookies are so, SO thin, they’re not easy to serve. You pick them up and they break apart, I’m sad to say. So, make them a bit thicker when you pat out the dough, and make sure they are getting browned around the edges. These are soft cookies – there’s nothing crispy about them. But the chocolately taste is wonderful.

You whip these up in a bowl – no mixer needed. I used good Scharffen Berger unsweetened chocolate in these.

There they are on the Silpat before baking. It’s a bit tricky spraying the plastic wrap, laying it over the little blobs of dough, then very gently patting the cookies out thin. I wonder if I made them a tad too thin? Maybe next time I’ll try them a bit thicker just to see. Once you remove the plastic wrap, you add the nuts. I used walnuts because that’s what I had on hand.
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One day on the river cruise, the pastry chef, Klaus Ungruh, gave a lecture about apple strudel. The draw, of course, was that we’d all get a slice when it was all said and done. About 60 of us gathered around a table to watch. Frank, the tour director and the chef had a very cute repartee going. As Frank listed the ingredients, the chef pulled them out of a shelf below the table. Into the very large and deep Hobart mixing bowl he placed a plastic bag of flour (sealed up), a full bottle (not pouring, just the bottle) of oil, a round box of salt and he poured in some water and literally threw in an egg – splat… We all laughed. He pretended to mix and knead it inside the bowl, then, as if by magic he reached down into the bottom of the bowl and voila, he pulled out a round disk of dough. Even more laughs. He whisked the rolling pin over the dough about 10 times, turned it over and rolled another 10 times, and the dough was done.

Then he used another bowl and to it were added: apples, raisins, cookie crumbs, cinnamon, rum, hazelnuts, sugar and lemon peel. In about 5 seconds he mounded the filling on the dough, and rolled it up. Done. Off it went to the kitchen, and they brought in an already baked one for us to sample. Delish. Whether I’d really make this or not, I don’t know. I did make strudel once upon a time (when I was very young, with a woman who was a live-in cook for a neighbor), but I thought it an awful lot of work. This version seemed infinitely easier. It was served with a vanilla sauce, warm.

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