How to cook a healthy Thanksgiving Day feast :-)

I guess my dad and I had a pretty nice Thanksgiving.

I’ve been cooking and cleaning for two days, so I’m pooped! One of the challenges I had this year was adapting recipes for my new sugar-free regimen. Dad’s not supposed to have sugar and now I’m not eating it, either, so no cheating (which dad does, if we enable him). But dad’s tastes in food are very humble: he likes comfort food, mashed potatoes and gravy and so on, and he doesn’t like anything unusual. He loves my cooking as long as I don’t get too imaginative.

My first experiment was making cranberry sauce. I had just learned how to make my own jellied cranberry sauce last year, but it takes tons of sugar. I tried making a batch using about half the amount of honey as the recipe called for sugar, and cooking the cranberries in apple cider instead of water. The result is very tart, which is okay, but didn’t gel fully, which is odd because cranberries have tons of pectin. Next time I’ll try cooking it longer. But I had sugar-free cranberry sauce.

Dad only likes stuffing cooked outside the bird, in a casserole, and I don’t eat stuffing, so I don’t even stuff the turkey. I put some cut up carrots, celery and onion inside the cavity and roast the bird au naturel. I made a two-thirds-reduced stock from the giblets, mostly for the gravy. Usually I cook the neck, too, but this turkey didn’t have a neck–maybe because it was too small. It was only 11 pounds. The stock was cooking down and steaming up the windows all afternoon yesterday. I used some of it for the stuffing.

I made baked butternut squash with roasted garlic and carmelized onions. This is a dish I cook and eat all winter, but it seemed appropriate for Thanksgiving. I steamed fresh carrots to make peas and carrots. Dad likes candied sweet potatoes, so I made spiced-honey-orange sweet potatoes. This was something of an improvisation. I steamed the sweet potatoes, reduced the cooking liquid, and planned to make the sauce with honey, a bit of molasses, butter, and spices. But I was having an orange for supper and I got the inspiration to squeeze part of the orange into the sweet potato sauce. It was delicious.

Finally, I made stuffed mushrooms. These are not part of our Thanksgiving tradition, but I had mushrooms left over from the home made pizza and got inspired. The stuffing, which was a complete improvisation, was made from red and green sweet peppers, the stems of the mushrooms and onion, sauteed in olive oil,, a bit of my own whole wheat bread, some of the giblet stock and a little shredded cheddar cheese. Wow, were those good! I’m the only one who ate them, though. They’re gone. *g*

I cooked or prepped almost everything yesterday, so today I only needed to cook and mash the potatoes, roast the turkey, make the gravy, and get everything else into and out of the microwave or oven in the right order. I’ve got it all down to a science. Of course, it’s a lot easier when you’re only cooking for two!

I didn’t make any dessert. I actually ate very moderately, because I didn’t have any gravy, stuffing or mashed potato. I ate both the drumsticks (dad likes white meat), cranberry sauce, squash, sweet potato, peas and carrots and mushrooms. I wasn’t over-full at all.

Dad is a lifelong James Bond fan and really wanted to see Quantum of Solace, so we went to see that after dinner. We got in for free because I had some passes I’d gotten from a Hershey’s chocolate promotion earlier this year. It was okay–I like Daniel Craig, and I love Judi Dench as M, not only because she’s great, but because it’s such a trip to see an older actress in such a juicy role (especially in the notoriously sexist Bond franchise). But the violence kind of gets me down in these movies. I also had trouble following the complicated plot because the director and editor clearly need to lay off the methamphetimine. A lot of the movie looks like it was shot by a steadicam operator while he was being chased by a pack of Rottweilers.

As though making dinner and cleaning wasn’t enough to keep me busy, today was the New Moon, so I did a New Moon ritual when I got up this morning. This was an especially significant New Moon because the Sun and Moon were conjunct both Mercury and Mars, and Uranus turned direct today, as well. Uranus has been retrograde since June, so things should start shaking loose now.