Thanksgiving Recap: A Typical Day in the Kittchen

So...our first Thanksgiving chez nous was just about medium. I made up a stuffing recipe that turned out amazingly. Like, I still dream about it. There was a lot of butter involved.

See? Told you.

But then our turkey frying situation was kind of a mess (not a fire-y, lawsuit mess...just a poorly organized mess). I had the side dishes ready by about 5 p.m., but the turkey took longer to cook than expected, so I was reheating in cycles for about two hours. Not fun.

The Turkey Frying Brigade.

Probably the most scarring moment, though, was when I baked a perfect, amazing, delicious-looking Apple Crisp (from Fannie Farmer's Apple Crisp/Apple Candy Pie recipe). I took it out of the oven because the gooey, buttery filling had started to spill out onto the oven floor (no, I didn't put a baking sheet under it), and decided that it needed a few more minutes to really crisp up.

I have no picture to put here. Harumph.

This is where I made a mistake. I put the crisp onto a flat baking sheet (that's right, with no sides), and picked it up to put it back in the oven. Clearly, common sense was lagging, and it didn't occur to me that I could just put the crisp back in, slide the baking sheet under it, and be the producer of the best apple crisp ever.

So the crisp started to slide around, and I had two choices: try to grab it with my hand, or try to use my body to catch it as it slid towards the edge of the baking sheet. I guess I really had three choices, because I also could have just put it back down on the counter and collected myself.

But no. I chose body, and ended up with a bunch of apple glop all over me, and a shattered Pyrex dish with the remainder of the crisp on the floor. It was not fun.

I made other stuff (like a pumpkin pie, and mashed potatoes, and wild rice casserole, and gravy), which was fine. But the crisp failure really made me cranky.

The one bright side? I made cinnamon ice cream from scratch, and it was the single best ice cream I've ever tasted. I'll share more details later.