We spent a week on Long Island for Thanksgiving. Tom joined us for most of it, and I spent a lot of time shuttling to and from the city for work and play.

Before Tom joined us Ben and I went for a cool walk on the grounds of an old estate that backs up to his family’s house. It was a gorgeous late afternoon.

Late sun through ornamental grass in the yard:

Wonderful weathered red shutter on a collapsed potting shed abandoned in the woods:

The last gasp of sunset:

We cooked most of the sides for Thanksgiving: Super-creamy (and amazing) mashed potatoes (wheeee, 6 pounds of potatoes, 3 cups of cream, 3 sticks of butter!), stuffing/dressing, cranberry sauce and gravy. It was my first attempt at any of those things and I was delighted that everything turned out well. The gravy freaked me out because the turkey turned out to have dropped 2 cups or fat with virtually no juice. Since nothing separated I assumed it was all juice, no fat, used butter to make my roux, then found myself with a separating greasy mess of gravy. I eventually drained off most of the fat and gave it a final good whisking before giving up, and Poof, it pulled together, very velvety and glossy if a bit (a lot) thick.

Ben’s brother John’s second or third helping:

On our final night on the Island, Tom made one of his standby specialties, chicken with cashews. Delicious as always!

Well, I’m weeks and weeks behind, and we’ve had quite a few dinner parties and a couple good regular dinners. Among the things I’ve eaten:

10/25: A surprise lunch with Tom, who brought over an extra robiola cheese from his Cheese Class. Also a loaf of ciabatta, so we had the cheese and bread with honey for lunch while discussing the article about him in the Dartmouth newspaper.

10/29: Craving cassoulet but obviously lacking the time or resources to pull even a facsimile together, I cooked navy beans and then combined them with garlic sautéed in olive oil and a can of muir glen diced tomatoes, then added a couple sausages (I browned them a bit first). When the sausages were almost cooked I pulled them out and sliced them, then added them back in a few minutes before serving the stew. It worked out well and was a nice warm meal on a damp Sunday. I still need to get the cheater’s cassoulet recipe from a guy I work with at Tuck, who served it at a big french-themed party a month or so ago.

10/31: On Halloween we carved our first jack o’lantern, who Ben named Steve. Ben did the initial hollowing and I took over for the carving. (The hair was Ben’s suggestion.) We weren’t going to be home that night, so we left out candy for the trick or treaters, of whom there were very few on our quiet little street.

Sadly Steve, after being moved outside next to the steps a week or so later, seems to have attracted a large number of very small slugs. Yikes.

Ok, it’s been a while but there have been two days with good cooking-outcomes, as well as one total mess.

The mess first–I thought quesadillas would be a fast, good dinner one night, so I laid in tortillas, refried beans, sour cream and salsa, and figured I’d use up a bag of grated jack cheese in the fridge. Sadly the bag was nearly empty, and Ben said he thought he’d eat 3 quesadillas (they weren’t big); I figured I’d eat two. We had cheese for two in the bag, so we pulled everything out of the cheese drawer and sliced it up. One had provolone and scraps from some weird thing that had come in a food basket (not gouda, but covered in red wax, yellowish inside). One was two slices of cheddar plus scraps from food basket loaf of cheddar. Another was all the weird wax-cheese. I fried two and gave them to Ben, and then fried two more for myself, at which point Ben was totally full and I realized I could only eat one. So we had one uncooked (one of the shredded cheese good ones) and one extra cooked one, and we’d used up all our sandwich cheese for nothing. I really need to work on knowing how much we can eat and what exactly we have in the fridge.

On to successes:

Thursday night I cooked wild mushrooms, polenta, and grilled pork chops. I followed Bittman’s grilling instructions and rubbed the chops with lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper.

And then Ben grilled them perfectly on our great little weber baby-q, a b-day present from my parents.

I sliced up all the mushrooms, then sautéed some garlic in olive oil before cooking the mushrooms.

The polenta was only ok—I had a box of instant from a cake I’d made, so I used that. Easy, but the texture wasn’t great and it was too salty.

Everything came together nicely though. I piled the polenta high (it was stiff), laid the chop over it, spritzed that with lemon juice, and then put the mushrooms on top.

I fried the leftover polenta for lunch Friday, and sautéed a zucchini to fill out the leftover mushrooms.

Sunday my brother Tom came over for some home-style baking. We had bulla on the mind—they are a Swedish roll sort of like challah but with cardamom and a sweeter dough. We had trouble getting the dough to rise, and then overcompensated by not punching it down hard enough or rolling the strips of dough out enough before shaping the bulla. As a result the rolls’ texture is a bit off and they puffed up more than usual in the over, losing the distinctive knot shape they should have had. They taste good though! Next time I’ll up the cardamom so the flavor is stronger.

For dinner I made a Dutch Baby, or german oven pancake, which is something we had for Sunday Night Supper growing up. It’s an egg batter that puffs up in the oven, and we always eat it with maple syrup. Well, I’m not sure if it’s my oven or what, but it puffed like CRAZY around the edges, and stayed totally flat in the middle (which is typical, but this was more pronounced than usual). I think one edge must have been 8 inches tall when I first pulled it out of the over. Whee!

Tom demonstrates the massive height of our dutch baby:

Tom, by the way, is looking like a skinny lumberjack these days, especially in his new 10″ LL Bean boots: