Thanksgiving Dinner Run-Down

Sadly, I failed to take any photos of our dinner before we dug in.  Needless to say, it was delicious 🙂 and I hope yours was also, however you may have celebrated.

We had a good day of relaxing, cooking and eating 🙂 and we’ve finally consumed most of the leftovers.  Our menu included some of the following:

Sourdough baking in the oven.

Another loaf of Sourdough, though this time I adjusted the flour to water ratio (using about 2 1/3 c flour and 1/2 c water, if I remember right (I’ll have to see if I still have my notes) – and the flour was a blend of Unbleached Bread Flour, Unbleached AP flour and White Whole Wheat flour)  Even though the dough was less slack, it was still not quite the right balance.  While the bread was still delicious, it was still more ciabatta shaped than batard shaped (the dough actually split during its final rise) – and the crumb was still full of holes, but smallish holes, not large irregular shaped ones.

The Bird, ‘cocked and ready to go

For the main course we had a dry-brined spatchcocked roast chicken.  I used this recipe/method as a guideline, and roasted the bird on a roasting pan with the drip tray over the stuffing.  It was absolutely delicious with lots of crispy golden skin and the stuffing was nicely flavored with chicken drippings.  In case you are wondering, yes, that is butter you see trapped under the skin – it makes it extra delicious 😉  If you decide to spatchcock a bird, be sure to keep that backbone to help add flavor to the gravy!

Our sides included mashed potatoes, green beans and maple glazed roasted sweet potatoes.  The easiest way I’ve found to roast sweet potatoes is using this method – for the maple glaze, I just drizzled over some maple syrup towards the very end of the roasting and as soon as I pulled them out of the oven, I dotted the slices with butter.  If you opt to maple glaze your sweet potatoes, keep an eye on them – you don’t want the maple syrup cooking off and burning!

If you happen to purchase prepared foods from Costco’s deli, I found that the aluminum trays that they use to pack a lot of their prepared food in work quite well for cooking sides in the oven.  I was able to fit three of these trays side-by-side onto the bottom rack of my oven while squeezing in a fourth pan next to the roasting pan on the top rack while the chicken was roasting 🙂  It was really nice to be able to time dinner so that it all came out of the oven all at the same time!