I’ve been doing a lot of cooking lately. There are many reasons: watching tv on a tiny 24″ lcd doesn’t quite give me that HD thrill; the pocket book it tight, so we don’t go out much; i need to get my fill of tasty food; cooking is like engineering lite–prepping food is akin to building libraries, devising the execution plan such that everything comes out hot at the same time is kinda like software engineering, and in the end you get yourself a nice little product. Sometimes i almost enjoy the execution more than the end food product (not that the food is bad, but i just like executing).

Anyway, I got ambitious this year and decided to cook thanksgiving dinner for carmen’s mom. The menu was as follows:

• Empanadas
• Butternut Squash Soup
• Roast Turkey
• Stuffing
• Cranberry Sauce

Many an astute reader will notice the menu is similar to our first annoual pre-thanksgiving warm-up dinner. That is not a coincidence. I opted to swap out the tart cranberry sauce for a more traditional one and one of carmen’s mom’s friends brought the mashed potatoes. I think this meal actually turned out better than the first. the turkey was a bit juicier, the stuffing had better taste–although not entirely better consistency, and the cranberry sauce was a major leap forward.

After eating two turkeys in as many weeks, i think i’m officially done with the bird for a while. time to move on to some red-meat.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 2:16 pm and is filed under cooking, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.