Crafty Kim

Dark Days Challenge: A (mostly) local Thanksgiving

We had a quiet and fairly peaceful Thanksgiving. My sister Kathy drove down from Wisconsin. She only stayed for Thursday and then headed home on Friday, after a busy day of cooking, hanging out, and playing Gloom and Ticket to Ride. I failed to get any photos of our Thanksgiving dinner!

Our (mostly local) Thanksgiving menu:

Turkey
Sweet potato gratin
Mashed potatoes
Bread stuffing with apples
Green jello salad
Olives and pickles
Cranberry sauce
Pumpkin pie

Our turkey came from a local food co-op that does a vegetable CSA and a meat CSA - Avalon Acres. This is our second year with a turkey from them and both years we've had moist, flavorful, and incredibly tasty turkey. We used the same cooking approach as last year: we roasted the turkey breast-side down until the last hour. This protects the breast from the heat and keeps the breast meat moist. Then we flipped the turkey breast-side up (infinitely less scary to do than it sounds!) for the last hour of cooking. Delicious!

Tim made his "only allowed on Thanksgiving because it's so unhealthy" specialty - sweet potato gratin. Layers of thinly sliced sweet potatoes, cream, brown sugar, dried cranberries, and pecans.

We even managed to put a more local spin on the green jello salad, by using local cream and pecans. We talked about skipping the jello salad this Thanksgiving (to go totally local), but it's Tim's grandmother's recipe and he loves it dearly. Wouldn't feel like Thanksgiving without it. My non-local "must haves" for Thanksgiving were black olives and whole berry cranberry sauce.

Thanksgiving local ingredient breakdown:

• Sweet potatoes (gratin), potatoes (mashed potatoes), onions (stuffing), pumpkin (pie) - Bugtussle CSA
• Bread for the stuffing - Twin Forks Farm
• Pecans (jello salad) - Nashville Farmers Market
• Cream (jello salad, gratin) - Hatcher Family Dairy
• Milk (mashed potatoes) - Rock Springs Dairy

Thanksgiving non-local ingredient breakdown: Celery (stuffing), Pineapple (jello salad), Green jello (jello salad), Sage & thyme (turkey and stuffing), Sour cream & cream cheese (mashed potatoes), olives, cranberry sauce, pickles

I was actually really surprised and happy to see how much of our Thanksgiving dinner could be sourced locally. The highlight? Making Dorie Greenspan's Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie using fresh pumpkins from our CSA. We roasted the pumpkins in the oven and then pureed them. The pie needed extra cooking time because of extra moisture in the pumpkin, but it was so delicious that it was worth the extra work.

Happy anniversary, Tim!

A bit of retro goodness for Tim on our 7th anniversary!

Happy anniversary, schmoopie!

How to get into the newspaper in Wisconsin (yes, it does involve cheese)

While I was traveling, my Dad celebrated his 77th birthday. He likes us to make a big celebration out of it and I think once you get over 70 and/or have 9 kids, you should more or less get your way on your birthday, so we always throw him a pretty good party. I was sad to miss it this year, probably the first time in the last 10 years that I haven't been there (of course, I was probably petting a koala right then so things balance out). This year's party was a tailgating party at the Milwaukee Brewer's game.

Tailgating is a bit of a religion in Wisconsin, whether at Brewer's games or at Packer's games. Much is made of how at Miller Park (the Milwaukee baseball stadium) you can tailgate, which you totally cannot do at many loser baseball stadiums (ie Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs) around the country. Some of my best Wisconsin memories involve tailgating with my sister Kathy at Brewer's games when I was a kid. The only true hard and fast rule of tailgating in Wisconsin is that bad weather (too cold, too much rain, too much freezing rain, too much snow, hail the size of baseballs) doesn't stop the tailgate party.

Apparently, it poured during the entire party for my Dad, but there were tents so no problem :)

The whole story of the birthday party (well, and a bunch of stuff about other tailgaters) was in the Milwaukee Journal Food Section yesterday. The part about my family is mid-way down this article. I love the quotes from my sister Karen (in the yellow jacket in the picture) and that recipe for Cowboy Caviar at the end of the article is super yummy, from personal experience. I particularly loved the picture in the article of the giant spread of cheeses that they had. And that, my friends, is what a genuine Unertl party looks like.

6 years

For my shmoopie on our 6th wedding anniversary....

I'm not even going to go into "last year at this time, we were in southwestern France..." because seriously, our anniversary last year was even better than my birthday :)

I met Tim ten years ago, when we both worked at Abbott in Dallas. Our friend (and co-worker) Jen worked relentlessly to set us up. In fact, Tim thought that I put her up to asking him out to the movies but I was actually just as surprised as he was by the whole thing. She invited him to go to the movies with the two of us and then said "Oh, wait - I forgot, I'm going out of town this weekend! I guess the two of you will have to go alone! Ha ha ha!" We went to see The Saint with Val Kilmer and then took advantage of a "buy one dinner, get one free" coupon that I got in the mail for Traildust Steakhouse. And from there, we really had no place to go but up, right?

Happy anniversary, schmoopie!

ps And yes, the whole shmoopie thing, that's from Seinfeld.