tammylc

I have been to one restaurant in Michigan where I have definitely seen diners bring their own (and on multiple occasions, so it's wasn't just a fluke or mistake or something.) I don't know what the situation is there. ← They are breaking the law, and have just decided that they are unlikely to be reported. http://www.michigan.gov/cis/0,1607,7-154-1...99198--,00.html

No BYO at all in Michigan. :-( But you can ask the restaurant to recork an unfinished bottle so you can bring it home with you.

Sadly, no rest for the wicked. At least, none until Tuesday when I get on the train for a 4 night, 5 day vacation to Chicago. Boy, am I ever looking forward to that.

I'm still tired today. Ugh. Quantities were good. Only significant leftovers were some mashed potatoes. I could have probably gotten by with 20 lbs, but it's not something you want to run out of. More turkey would have been good, but I think everyone got enough. Even though the 3 smaller turkeys weighed the same as 2 larger ones, I would have ended up with more meat from 3 large. The brussels sprouts were cut in half, tossed with olive, oil, salt and pepper, and roasted.

Well, that was a totally insane day. I started shopping at 9 and finished cooking at 6:15, and worked continuously during that time, minus about 15 minutes for lunch. Cooking common meal is not supposed to take up my entire day - but I guess that's why I don't cook Thanksgiving every time I cook. It took about 4 hours to thaw the turkeys, I guess. Luckily we have big dishwashing sinks, so I just threw them in there, still in their plastic packaging. I checked on them after about three hours, and the while the outsides were mostly thawed, when I pulled out the giblets and neck, the insides were still icy. So I threw them back in, directly in the water, and another hour like that took care of it. I used Alton Brown's technique of having a trickle of running water in the sink to create convection. I had enough time for them to dry out a little bit and for me to get them prepared (chopped veggies in the cavity and pan, etc) and still got them all into the oven right on time at 3 pm. I used a Cook's Illustrated recipe that calls for relative high heat roasting and flipping the bird around - first you do the back, then each side, then finally the breast. The skin gets nice and crispy on all sides of the bird. But with three birds - two in the common house and one at home - I spent most of the 2 hour cooking time trotting around from oven to oven, dodging the multiple snow flurries that came through yesterday. I probably overcooked the birds a little, although - interestingly - the one that actually read at the "right" temperature was underdone in the legs and had to be put back in. Whatever - my standards are much higher than most of my eaters - and it was by no means inedible. Let's see... the rest of the meal was: 25 lbs mashed potatoes 10 lbs ginger glazed carrots 8 lbs brussels sprouts 6 squash cut in half and stuffed with bread stuffing for the vegetarians. I had more stuffing than I needed, so had a small amount to put on the tables for everyone too. 8 cups of gravy (my giblet stock was too watery, so the subsequent gravy was kind of watery too. Plus I didn't get good browning of the drippings. Again - I knew it wasn't my best, but others were happy) 8 cups of cranberry sauce (with orange and ginger - probably the easiest thing I made all day, it's a pressure cooker recipe that takes about 15 minutes for prep to finish.) 2 9x13 pans of nanaimo bars (3 recipes as linked above, split between two pans) I made a HUGE mess, and used nearly every pan in the kitchen. Even with me working from 11 on, and my assistant cooks coming at 4, we just didn't have any time to do any significant amount of clean as you go. I tried, and got a few rounds though the dishwasher, but it was only a dent in the mountain. I apologized heartily to the cleaners (one of whom was my husband) - but even so, they were still done within the 90 minutes they get work credit for, so while it was more work than most, I can't feel too bad about it. I've already turned in my receipts, but I had 65 people - 37 adult/ teen meat eaters, 9 adult/teen veggies, and 19 kids. I spent around $205 dollars, so with the pantry fee, the meal will come to around $4.73. It was mostly NOT organic, because I didn't have time to go to a lot of different stores, so went to one place where I knew I could get everything (including custard powder for the Nanaimo bars, thanks to their British foods section). One my way home from the grocery store, I stopped and collected up a bunch of red maple leaves, and we scattered these around on the tables for decoration. And my neighbor Jay printed off the lyrics to Oh Canada, passed them around to all the tables, and led the room in a rousing chorus. (It was impressive how many people knew the tune - we can thank the South Park movie, I guess.) So it was appropriately Canadian. As always, I'm saying "Never again," but I know I'll likely be convinced next year. Jay, who convinced me this year, has offered to take the afternoon off work next year to pitch in, and that would certainly help. As would my neighbor and assistant cook Heather's suggestion that I find a couple people willing to cook turkeys at their houses, and hand them the instructions and the ingredients. That would really help, as it would free up the ovens in the common house during the main cooking period, meaning I wouldn't have to come as early to precook squash, etc. And, of course, having the right size and quantity of not frozen turkeys would help too. Sorry no pictures - just didn't have time. I actually got a new digital camera delivered in the mail on Wednesday, and haven't had a single moment to try it yet! I was making some caramels for some friends of mine who wanted to buy some for gifts, so that's what I spent Wednesday night doing. And then Thursday night, after cooking and eating dinner, I had to play with my son, get him off to bed, and then cut and wrap up about 75 caramels before I could - finally - go to bed!

They're a Canadian dessert. Very sweet, very rich, but pretty darn tasty. here's the recipe I used, but note that there's an error in the directions - the cocoa should be cooked with the butter and sugar, not the coconut. This was my first time making them, but I was very pleased by how they turned out. They were yummy.

Slight setback on Canadian Thanksgiving preparations. When I got to my butcher this morning to pick up my turkeys, they didn't have them. He'd wrote them down for the wrong day, and had them waiting for me last Saturday, wondering why I never picked them up. Eek! They had turkeys, but they were still mostly frozen, and smaller than what I was looking for. But I didn't want to take the chance of not being able to find something somewhere else, so I grabbed three (instead of the two larger ones I was hoping for), rushed home, and put them in a big sink filled with water. Keep your fingers crossed that they'll be thawed by 3, when they need to get into the oven! But at least the guy at the bread counter at Zingerman's was able to cross-slice my bread for me, so I have much less to do with that to make it ready for stuffing. Off to go make Nanaimo bars, etc. Here's my rough plan for the day: - get up with Liam, feed him breakfast get him ready to go - drop him off at daycare - go grocery shopping. Sparrow Meats to pick up the turkeys, Zingerman's to grab a loaf of day old bread, Hillers for the rest, I think, because they are near to Michael's and I need to check out caramel wrapping options. - slice bread and put in a low oven to stale - make three batches of Nanaimo Bars for dessert and get them in the fridge to chill - make cranberry sauce - bake squash - get turkeys in the oven - start giblet broth - make stuffing, stuff squash - chopping, lots of chopping - potatoes, carrots, trimming brussels sprouts - make gravy (all except for adding the turkey drippings at the end) - cook and mash potatoes - glaze carrots - once the turkeys come out of the oven, roast brussels sprouts and cook stuffed sqash - finish gravy - carve turkeys - get food out to tables

Having been a lucky recipient of some of David's chocolates, I noted that your coating is quite thick compared to some others of my experience. Do you double dip? What kind of chocolate are you using?

Thanks, alanamoana - I think I'll try that this time - I recently did some hand coating prior to rolling truffles in cocoa powder and coconut, and was surprised at how effective it was. Do you recommend using tempered chocolate for the first coating, or will simply melted chocolate do? And how about if you're rolling in cocoa powder or something else? Tempered or no? Seems like the warmth from your hands might bring the chocolate out of temper anyway...

I definitely have the problem more with my softer ganaches, so that makes a lot of sense. I like the flavor and texture of the softer ganaches, so it's tricky to balance ease-of-working and the taste! I can understand how the extra coating for the bottom would work with something like caramels where I'm cutting them. Can you describe how best to accomplish the double dip with a rolled center? Thanks!

Another short term solution is to double dip. You'll get a thicker coating, but I've been assured that the second coating won't crack.

No solutions, but I feel your pain. I have the same problem. Cracking, and especially a problem with the bottoms sticking to my parchment paper. I was blaming it on the extra high cocoa content of the Michel Cluizel chocolate I was using, but since then I've switched to E. Guittard 72%, and I'm still having the same problem.

Wow - that hors d'oeuvres sounds amazing! I hope you don't mind if I steal it for a party...

Two weeks ago I did tortilla soup again - it's a perennial favorite around here, and it's good to have some old standbys to rely on. For this Thursday, I got talked into doing Canadian Thanksgiving again. Canadian Thanksgiving is/was actually today, but Thursday is my closest cooking night to the big day. My neighbor and friend J asked me if I was going to do it again this year, and expressed disappointment when I said no. "We don't do a common meal for American Thanksgiving," he said, "So it's nice to have that kind of feast together." Oh, alright then... I've simplified the menu to save my sanity this time, and have resolved not to allow more than the standard maximum number of people to sign up (64 - we were at 62 last I checked). The menu: Roast turkey for the carnies Stuffed squash for the veggies Mashed potatoes with turkey gravy Ginger-glazed carrots Roasted brussels sprouts Cranberry sauce Nanaimo bars for dessert (gotta get that Canadian touch in there somewhere) Now I'm off to look through this thread to see how much of everything I cooked last year. If I'm remembering right, it was something really insane, like 30 lbs of mashed potatoes. Yikes!

That sounds great, Russ. Thanks for the recommendation. Will they be open on a Sunday night?

All I have time for is one dinner, maybe two, depending on when I finish up on Monday and how close wherever I end up might be to LAX (I'm going to be flying out on the red-eye at 10 pm). Just dinner - no lunches or dim sum. I won't have the time or opportunity to drive all over the place to find the best - I'm just looking for something better than the hotel restaurant, which is what my travelling companions would no doubt default to if I weren't there. Rich, I appreciate your enthusiasm for your town and its food, but I think you'd be surprised - we have some great food here in the Midwest and Ann Arbor in particular. You don't have to dis my area to pump yours up! There's a great Salvadoran place just down the street from where I work, for example, and a world-class Hong Kong style Chinese restaurant. My other Mexican food opportunities are going to be in El Paso and Chicago, maybe Miami (although I'm leaning towards Cuban), not LA.

This has been a treasure trove of info. Thanks, all. I'm going to have a few other opportunities for good Mexican food in November, so I'm leaning towards checking out some Chinese or Indian if I decide to go ethnic. There are one or two specific Chinese recommendations above - anything else I should know about, or any specific recommendations for Indian?

Fascinating suggestion. But it looks like they're breakfast and lunch only, so probably won't work for me. Anybody else?

Those are some great suggestions, Rich, but I feel compelled to mention that I am NOT from NYC - don't know where you got that impression. My homebase is Ann Arbor, MI.

This is seeming like a good plan - I'm going to want an early dinner anyway.

Fora on 2nd Street in Naples (right before you hit Belmont Shore) is by far one of my favorite restaurants in Long Beach. Check out their website - not sure if the prices are too steep (was unclear if the cost quoted was per plate or per couple): http://www.fora-naples.com/ ← Wow - Fora sounds great! I'm a sucker for tasting menus with wine pairings, and the price is quite reasonable for that. I'll have to see who I end up going with, and how they'd feel about a splurge meal...

19 miles to my hotel, or so the Marriott website says.

That bad, huh? Well, then, I'm in luck, because I think the date is changing, so I can adjust my arrival time if necessary. What can I expect it to be like if I get in at 5:30 pm on Sunday? I've heard you have some traffic out there, but this sounds ridiculous!

I like all kinds of food. I work for a nonprofit so my expense account isn't extravagant - say a max of about $30-$40 for dinner. If I end up taking my coworkers with me, then probably something with a little more atmosphere than greasy spoon hole in the walls with amazing food. Or maybe not - I took a coworker to Sal's Fried Chicken in Rochester, NY once, and that's decidedly downmarket... I'll be coming from Michigan, so someplace where I can sit outside and soak up the warmth would be awesome. Actually, it just occured to me that since I'm taking the red-eye home, I'll actually need plans for two dinners.

Yeah, I'll probably need to be rescued. I'll be visiting Cerritos Community College. I land at LAX at 5:30, and will be heading to Norwalk from there once I pick up my rental car (I understand it's something like 18 miles, but haven't looked up details yet). I'm coming from the Eastern timezone, so that will be like 8:30 body clock, so I don't think I'm up for a long schlep anywhere. Oh, and I'll probably have a couple other people with me who are not foodies. I was hoping to find something near the hotel that would be better than the hotel restaurant. I was really excited to find out about this Thai place - bummer that it's closed for renovations! So by non-onerous drive, I guess my criteria would be no more than 20 minutes away, and straightforward directions.