A Warm Thanksgiving Day Dinner in Florida

I can't say I was looking forward to rutabaga for Thanksgiving Dinner this year, but it was included in the most colorful side dish at my daughter Rebecca's house this year, roasted along with other root vegetables and garnished with goat cheese.

Rebecca and the Rutabaga

In spite of my reservations about the rutabaga, we enjoyed a complete Thanksgiving dinner. Included were many of the more traditional sides as well, Erica insisting on making the famous green bean casserole, with the extra onions she loves.

Green bean casserole

Roasted root vegetables with goat cheese

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The complete feast

If we had had to bake the pie and prepare stuffing we would have started the day before. Instead Rebecca added apple cider to a brining mix and placed the bagged bird in a laundry basket in the garage refrigerator overnight. The next day it was allowed to dry out to promote browning.The fresh turkey was ordered from her favorite meat market, Petty's (www.pettysmeats.com), where we also  purchased  prepared stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and pinot noir. Petty's had their sommelier available and he was wonderfully helpful. The word sommelier has some options for accent placement which I haven't yet mastered but I love to try to sound sophisticated by saying the word. It was fun shopping in a market that actually has a world-traveled wine steward with notebooks full of notes on tastings (notes on notes??) he had participated in.

Petty's sommelier advised us on a good Pinot Noir...

Rebecca was embarrassed when I said I liked the bottle, but I just meant that I had glanced at the back label and liked what I read! The sad irony of it all is that Rebecca was suffering from a sudden-onset gastric issue and we decided to not open the slightly pricey wine for our dinner, since she was avoiding alcohol until her stomach felt better. I bought an interesting aperitif/dessert wine which some of us sampled:

Pumpkin pie decorated by Erica,  pecans for garnish and a dessert wine

The sommelier had offered two dessert/aperitif wines to taste and I thought I liked one quite a bit and decided to buy a bottle. Skip the next paragraph if you couldn't care less about French wine or its origins. For a long time I boycotted French wine, while Chirac was the president. It meant nothing, since at the time we had three children in private school, and I could afford  no wine, even wine before its time.

Yes, the aperitif/dessert wine was French--Domaine de Joy, Floc de Gascogne--yeah, whatever! With just a little research, I learned it was a menage a trois, if you will, of equal parts of three white grapes (Colombard, Gros Manseng and Ugni Blanc), spiked or married with brandy, resulting in a vin de liqueur, which is a sweet, "fortified" aperitif. The Floc de Gascogne is spiked with Armagnac. Armagnac is a brandy made in the Armagnac region of France, like Cognac (which comes from a region a little north) and added just prior to fermentation. Because of the higher alcohol content, yeast fermentation is halted and the wine stays sweet. Now isn't that cool? Did you know that?  For an exposition on the Armagnac brandy see the following article:
http://nymag.com/restaurants/articles/wine/sommelier/armagnac.htm

The three grapes that are blended in this bottle of wine are from the same region and even could be some of the same grapes that are specifically designated for use in making this particular brandy. That fact was the most surprising to me, but then, I didn't even know brandy could be made from white grapes! I know that the cheap brandy we bought to mix with raisins (for the men) and apricots (for the women) for traditional Dutch drinks for Christmas two years ago resulted in some pretty awful stuff and I couldn't pronounce the Dutch names either.

So often  the name and taste (or pronunciation) of a wine consumed is completely forgotten. I enjoyed learning about the process of creating this blend of French grapes and brandy, so I document it here so that I will remember!

Back to the turkey dinner. The most labor-intensive and dirty dish-producing menu item was the Butternut Squash and Corn Bread Stuffing Muffins from the Thanksgiving issue of  Food and Wine magazine. The girls baked and crumbled corn bread, sauteed onions, celery and bacon and roasted and pureed the squash. The mini-muffins were wonderful for pre-dinner snacking (only the slightly burned ones). They were golden with butternut, rich and flavorful.

Stuffing Muffins

The hot sliced turkey breast with just a hint of the apple cider brine, along with the aromatics inside the bird, which included a couple of apples, was delicious. The next day it was not the same--it never is.

I added some fresh herbs from Rebecca's Garden!

Once again, it was a delight to celebrate a holiday with Rebecca and Gustavo--a triple celebration really, all crammed into three days. Friday we selected and decorated a fresh tree, pulled out the Christmas decor and piped in some Christmas music. Saturday was Rebeca's birthday celebration/special day, which included the new Muppet Movie, a P.F. Chang lunch and a lomo al trapo dinner, all sponsored by her father, and topped off with a homemade carrot cake by Erica.

Fraser Fir - 2011

Speaking of crammed, the floor was being redone in three rooms and it took a little longer than anticipated to finish. We finally rescued the dining room table, piled high with boxes and things in the living room, late Wednesday night. I had dusted and vacuumed and mopped the newly-floored rooms while our hostess laid down with her ailing tummy. It seems that when there is a mom around there are always some cleaning tasks! We enjoyed such mild weather in Maitland that we could have eaten our turkey on the patio, but it was easier and cozier to dine in the dining room.

The new bamboo floor in guest bedroom

 It was cool enough one evening, however, to fire up the new (outside) chimenera which Gustavo had ordered as a surprise for Rebecca's birthday. And it was not too warm to fire up the wood in the fireplace for the Third Annual Lomo al Trapo.  (See last years lomo photos here.)

Lomo al Trapo - 2011