No tomatoes, please

Yeah, that’s right. This lady. Why? I dunno, because Thanksgiving is all about food and family, and I’m super excited to be here. So, we baked an official assload of pies last night. And probably drank more. It was possibly one of the best nights of my life. My brother and I learned the Soulja Boy dance, and my mom cried because she thought neither of us had rhythm, but was disproved with our awesomeness. YOUUUUUU!

So, here it goes. I’ll be updating it throughout the day, so come back!

3:00 A.M.- Apparently the turkey was put into the oven at this time, because we are baking it at 250 degrees for like, 18, hours, I guess. That seems like a health hazard a little bit…

1:06 P.M.- I finally dragged myself out of bed, upset that my mom let me sleep too much again! But she apparently wasn’t feeling too well, and had just woken up herself. We’re in the process of making some homemade cinnamon rolls, then figuring out where the hell to bake them so that we will have something to eat before dinner. I am currently helping my mom make stuffing with the cornbread we remembered to make last night in between loads of laundry (still). Check back later, I’m sure something amazing is afoot, like maybe a secret awesome family recipe aaahhh!!!!

Turkey: Sort of check, still in the oven

Stuffing: Check-ing…as we speak

Sweet Potato Souffle: Not yet

Mashed Potatoes: Not yet

Green Bean Casserole: Not yet

Cranberry Sauce: Still in the can

Assload of Pies: Check

Mimosas which will soon turn into just champagne: Totally Check

 3:00- I love my family. As I was tactfully trying to suggest to my mother a way to make the sweet potato souffle without the insipid “candied” topping, she divulged that she didn’t like it much either. We did a bit of a family survey, and, it turns out, no one likes it. Yaaay communication! So, I get my lovely, transcendent sweet potatoes without disgusting pecans and like, caramelized brown sugar that’s all hard on top and retardedly sweet. I’ve got enough of that with these cinnamon rolls which just got finished. Which are AWESOME. They’re amazingly buttery and cinnamon-y, and not too sweet. My mom got the recipe out of this Southern Living magazine she bought, and, I’m not gonna lie, I was a little leery of any recipe that came out of here. Some other gems from the same magazine: Blue Cheese Thumbprints (Ya know, those thumbprint COOKIES with JAM in the middle, which are SWEET? Yeah, with blue cheese. In the cookies. I have no words.), Beef and Butternut Squash Chili (?). The biggest problem with this magazine is, not a lot of the recipes are inherently nasty sounding, but once you look at the ingredients, there’s so much random crap that they add to make it like, quick and easy, I guess? Like, wtf, for some reason there’s dang cornmeal in EVERYTHING. The only time we use cornmeal, ever, is to make cornbread. And last time I checked, Lemon Chess Pie was not cornbread. But anywho, I am needed to de-can the cranberry sauce. By the time I return, I will have eaten, and it will be delicious!

Cinnamon Rolls, which are surprisingly delicious despite being from “Southern Living”

1 Package frozen biscuits (My mom buys the bags of the Pillsbury biscuits, and one of the types is like, buttery, and that’s the kind you need because it makes the rolls so moist and delicious.)

1/2 cup chopped pecans (Don’t toast them beforehand, because they taste kinda burnt upon second baking)

Flour, so the biscuits don’t stick to the cutting board on which you defrost them

1/4 cup butter, softened

3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar

Cinnamon (the recipe says 1 tsp, but my mom puts in way more than that. Just shake it all in there and crap until it looks good. I mean, they are cinnamon rolls.)

For the glaze:

1 cup powdered sugar

3 Tbsp milk

1.2 tsp vanilla extract

Ok, arange the biscuits on a cutting board or something in 3 rows of 4 biscuits so that they’re all touching. Let them hang out for like, 30-45 minutes until they’re thawed, but still cool. Then sprinkle the biscuits lightly with flour and pat them together until they form a square of dough. Then spread on the softened butter, and sprinkle on the brown sugar, cinnamon and pecans.

Then roll that beast up, so it’s all pinwheel-y when you look at the end. Slice it into 12 slices and place them in a lightly buttered round cake pan. Bake them at 375 degrees for 35-40 minutes until all golden brown, or basically until they smell so good that you can barely stand it. Then stir together the sugar, milk and vanilla extract so it’s all smooth and like, you know, a glaze for cinnamon rolls. Then pour that crap over while the rolls are still warm and eat it. And then be happy. Breakfast is, after all, the most important meal of the day.

 It’s time to make the green bean casserole. Later!

5:10 P.M.- So, all the food is stuffed in the fridge, and lo! It is getting dark. Maybe it will dip below 70 degrees… Thanksgiving is pretty much over, and while my first foray into LiveBlogging wasn’t extraordinarily exciting, I hope I kind of conveyed how awesome cooking and Thanksgiving is, if you didn’t already think so. Just wait til Christmas!

I’m off to dye my hair. What color? You’ll see soon…

~Rachael~

Well, I am finally home, and have a few hours to kill while I do my six loads of laundry. I’m so happy to be home, and it’s really really nice to see my brother (whom I have not seen since he went to VT in August — yeah, I just totally used whom. And correctly. Suck on that.), and, I have to say, even though we never really talked or got along too well as we were growing up, he’s turned into such a cool, art-doin cat, and I think I can safely say that I am super proud to call him my brother. He does so much cool stuff, and has turned into such an amazing, interesting person. And I’m not just saying that because I know my mom reads this.

Anywho, tomorrow! It begins! Usually Thanksgiving goes down something like this: I wake up at like, noon and then feel bad after I saunter downstairs to discover that my mom has already prepared 80% of the food AND done three loads of dishes (never forget the dishes!), just so she can make room in our tiny kitchen for more food that she has already made. Then I totally feel like crap when she’s all, “No, there’s not really anything for you to do.”

But alas! This year, it shan’t be like that. Aside from the fact that she bought actual pie dough that she’s gonna need me to roll out and mess with, I am ready to freakin do some dang cooking. I didn’t really miss the kitchen last year, mostly because I was too depressed to eat at all that semester, much less cook. Also, I kinda got a free pass on Thanksgiving because I was too busy being holed up in my room trying to recover from the nervous breakdown I had right before Thanksgiving break. Yaay

But this year, I am ready. I’m gonna be so obnoxious and trying to do everything, she’s gonna have to watch out. Also, if you’re reading this mom, we need to make cornbread tonight for the stuffing. I’m so excited about mashed potatoes, as smooth as my mom will let me mash them, chock full of sour cream and butter. I can’t wait for that delicious turkey gravy. There’s really no way to describe it effectively other than that it’s like no other gravy, and it has that amazing, magical holiday quality that makes me so happy(although, I could be one of the few that actually has other gravies throughout the year to be able to compare). Yeah, gravy is what puts me in the holiday season. And if you’re lucky, or amazing at it like my mom, it gets so wonderful and jellied when you put it in the fridge, and you can just scoop it out and put it on a sandwich, or throw it on some cold, overly starchy mashed potatoes and be amazed how everything is magically perfect again when you pull it out of the microwave.

I’m excited about the sweet potato souffle my mom makes. It’s not really souffle. It’s basically candied yams, except sweet potatoes instead of gross canned yams, and mashed up with a brown sugar butter and pecan topping instead of marshmallows. I find the perfectly cinnamon-y, buttered sweet potatoes so transcendent that I don’t even need the sweet candied topping. Or sweet potato pie, for that matter.

And pie!! I hate pie. The only pie I really like is key-lime pie, and that’s because it has graham cracker crust. Because the thing I hate most about pie is the overly flour-y crust, and there’s always too much of it. But I hate the fillings too. I hate pecan pie (sorry ma), and I don’t like sweet potato pie. I would say I hate pumpkin pie, but I’ve never even had it to know otherwise. And I’d kinda like to keep it that way. Don’t even get me started on pumpkin pie. That’s another entry.

But the coconut pie. I know it seems ridiculously inappropriate to have coconut pie on Thanksgiving, but my mom’s grandmother always made it, apparently, so that is what we do. Plus really, when the hell else does anyone ever eat pie, unless they live in a diner in Texas? The filling looks kinda like vomit before you bake it, I’m not even gonna lie. And you’re mixing it, and there’s chunks of butter and the coconut’s all gloppy, and you’re like, man, this is not going to turn out. But hey, you pull that sucker out of the oven, and it’s gorgeous, and you get this amazing sense of old-school Southern pride at having made a pie. The edges of the coconut shreds are all browned, so there are little toasty dots all over the surface, and there’s the slighest lemon scent wafting from it. It’s absolutely amazing, not to mention how awesome it tastes.

Well, that is all for now, I think my loads need to be switched out. And my brother fell asleep to “All My Children.” So even though it’s not even remotely cold enough to be the holidays, I might be in the holiday spirit, much to my chagrin, upon tasting my mom’s awesome gravy. Mmmmmm…

Get it? It’s lovely actress Busy Phillips, apparently. I love Google image search.

Anywho, I’ve been so busy that I’ve been neglecting my awesome Web site. Also, I don’t have a kitchen, so I’m not cooking or really even thinking about food much beyond the fact that I hate the dining hall. I don’t even read my normal blogs and such anymore! When I get online, I pretty much just check my e-mail and work on crap. So, there will be super awesome updates soon, I promise, as I will be going home for Thanksgiving soon and will be having fun times cooking and, um, not drinking. So, yes, awesome things coming, I swear. Yay!

Ahhh November. Even though it was stiflingly hot up until the end of October, daylight savings time has brought a sudden coldness with its depressing early darkness, and everyone has decided that they are sick. It’s amazing how achy and stuffy you feel when it gets dark at 4:30. There’s the flu going around, and colds, and a dry, hacking cough, and maybe ebola or something or other. But one thing’s for sure: When you’re sick, you want soup. I myself have been on the verge of getting sick for some time now. I have developed one of those hacking, gross chest coughs that seem to befall me every 6 months or so, and stick around for a while so I can bother my mother with my hacking hacking hacking.

I’ve also been dealing with some random stabbing pain in my throat lately, to the point where all I want is tea and some sort of other hot, salty liquid to fill my food quotient for the day. I know cooking is pretty much the last freakin thing you want to do when you’re all sick and gross-feeling, but if you’re up to it, this is so good, and it’s really fulfilling to make yourself something delicious and sustaining when you feel like hell. Almost makes you feel like a grown-up or something. Or, you can just act pitiful and guilt a hot friend into bringing you some chicken noodle soup. Or even making you some of this, if you’re particularly enterprising. So, in honor of everyone being sick, here’s a recipe I made up for bean with bacon soup. It sounds weird as hell, but it’s so good, because bacon makes everything awesome. Here it is, copied in its entirety from a previous blog I had, mostly because it’s pretty funny. Little backstory: I figured out the soup this summer when I was home from work because I almost cut the tip of my finger off while I was catering. Yeah, I almost cut my finger off, and what did I decide to do? Chop some crap. Yeah, whatever. Welcome to my world.

Since I was couch-bound today, due to my knife accident at work yesterday (tomatoes + newly sharpened knife + slippage = finger hemorrhage and three stitches yay), I decided to cook some soup. I’ve been toying for a while now with the idea of making some bean with bacon soup, since it’s my favorite kind from the Campbell’s, and I thought it would be pretty easy. And yeah, it’s pretty damn simple to make. So, after navigating the Food Lion and the scary toothless cashierlady with my awesome heavily-bandaged middle finger, I spent $4 and had the makings of some friggin awesome soup. It only has 6 ingredients, and it’s retardedly easy. The longest part of the process was chopping the carrot, but mostly because it was round and I have one less finger than normal. It’s really only enough friggin awesome soup for 1-2 people, but you can double the recipe and add more beans, or a different kind or whatever.

I started out by awkwardly chopping up three slices of bacon. I used three slices because they were little, but you can use more or less if you want. You want to make sure the bacon is pretty fatty, cuz when you cook it, it’s gonna render the fat out, and you want enough fat in there to cook the onions and carrots. So, I threw that in a small pot over some medium heat and let it cook down while I chopped a small-ish carrot (peeled, but mostly because I’m the type of person who likes that little extra Martha Stewart anal-retentive step. I mean, you don’t have to if you don’t mind dirt and little root bits in your soup. But whatever.) and half a small onion. Make sure and chop both pretty fine, especially the onion, because it cooks faster, and also gross big chunks of onion are not appetizing in soup. I think. So, I threw those in there and let them cook down slowly while I proceeded to wash, slice and eat an entire quart of strawberries. So, about 10, 15 minutes? You want to make sure that the veggies are really nice and soft. This is also where you want to add salt and pepper. I didn’t add too much salt because I thought the mixture of bacon and canned chicken stock would add up to enough season, but I ended up needing more in the end, so don’t be lame about the salt. Then I threw in a spoonful of tomato paste and stirred that around and let it kinda melt from the heat. Next I added a can of chicken stock (low sodium), a can full of water, and a can of white beans with the farty bean juice. I got Great Northern beans, even though I was looking for Navy beans, but really any white not-too-huge bean will do, like Cannellini (Bam. Wikipedia confirms my genius, yet again. All three are pretty much the same bean). Then just bring it to a simmer for about 20-25 minutes to make sure everything is nice and heated through, and the beans get a little more cooked, and bam, you got dinner. Or a nice light lunch. Impeccable with grilled cheese. Or, if you’re sick, and tired of chicken noodle soup, this’ll also cure what ails you. Awesome. 

That is all. Enjoy!

In case you were wondering what the hell that crazy picture is, it’s a Francis Bacon. Get it? Yuk yuk.

And with that, Simon is gone. Last night was such a treat, especially since I opted out of acting like an ass (it’s really too easy for me, I don’t need alcohol hurrying things along), and went to bed early, since it kinda hurts to breathe. I got to hear sirens and helicopters and people screaming outside my dorm all night. Yaaay.

But enough of that. Halloween is over. People are stumbling out of whatever holes they woke up in, putting on pants and officially freaking out about Christmas. Christmas is a long way from my mind, but the next vacation time is nigh, and I have set my sights on looking forward to it. Yay Thanksgiving. There’s something about November that just kind of screams holidays (or more appropriately, the beginning of the end of the semester). It’s definitely not the cold though, since down here, it just stopped sweltering. It better cool down soon, though, because I bought this wicked cute coat that I’m really trying to wear, and I’m tired of looking like a jackass in 60-degree weather with a dang trench coat on.

No, it’s something far more than the cold that puts me in a holiday state of mind. Come November 1st, the inaugural turkeyfest begins on the Food Network. It’s basically a month of every food personality on the channel friggin beating a dead horse about how to cook a turkey. We get it. Turkey. Oven. Thanksgiving. We don’t need to fry it, or brine it, or smoke it in a smokehouse built specially for the occasion. Also, as of late, there have been increasingly ridiculous attempts to get Rachael Ray to jam Thanksgiving preparation into half an hour. Finally, last year, they gave her a dang hour. That’s like, all day for her! And it still looked gross. There are just some things you can’t simplify without totally killing. Thanksgiving is one of those things. So, here I am, waiting with bated breath for the moment I can pack up, go home, and get totally sick of turkey until next year with my family. Ahhh November.

And with that, I leave you with a lovely post-Halloween haiku:

Pumpkin in the trash

Too much turkey on TV

Paula hates her heart

Okay, as I was trolling the Food Network’s web site for a sufficiently ridiculous turkey recipe, I found this, and I’m pretty sure it’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen:

In case you were wondering what heinous kind of food that could possibly be, it’s a pie. A goddamn apple pie. I can’t even fathom … I have no words. Just a little vomit in my mouth.

Not only does this recipe require TWENTY FOUR apples, you must stuff the apples into a bowl to sufficiently mold them into a gargantuan half-orb and then invert the whole mess onto the pie crust. Then it is covered with molten caramel and pecans. And then, I dunno, tossed into the gaping maw of a dragon? I mean, who the hell else could eat this but imaginary creatures that would normally swallow entire humans whole? So instead of making this, or really even further thinking about it, you should make a baked apple instead. Because you only eat one, and it is probably far more delicious anyway.

So, I dunno, take like, 4 apples and core them, except don’t core them all the way through. You want a hole in the apple, so you can stuff it with crap.

Now, any time I talk about apples, I’m talking Fuji apples. My family don’t do that whole red delicious bs. Fujis are in the grocery store, probably right next to your regular granny smiths, but they are super better. They’re really crisp, and amazingly sweet, and available year round. But if you can’t find those, use a Rome apple, or a Gala apple instead. There’s usually stickers on the apples, a helpful indicator of what kind it is, if you get confused.

So anywho, take the apples, and core them somehow (I would suggest a melon baller, but if you don’t know what is, you could use a knife to hack at it until there is a sufficient hole), and then throw them in a little pyrex baking dish. My mom used to stuff them with brown sugar, cinnamon, butter, and freakin red hots. I know it sounds crazy, but they were really good. They melted and melded with the brown sugar and the butter, and permeated the apple, and it was delicious. You can pretty much stuff them with whatever you want though. You could put some chopped pecans or walnuts in there, or add some raisins, or even dried cranberries would be delicious if you want a really fall-y feel. So, throw some water (or apple cider if you’re Martha Stewart) in the bottom of the pan so they don’t stick, and also because the brown sugar and butter kinda melts out and makes a yummy kinda sauce in the bottom of the pan. Bake them for about 25-30 minutes in a 350-degree oven, or until they are tender when you poke them with a knife. Serve with vanilla ice cream, enjoy, and don’t even look at that picture again.