Thanksgiving Breakfast

In our little seaside town on Thanksgiving morning, it is customary to dress your pet up in some ridiculus outfit and promenade down to the downtown area and show off your pet and greeet friends, neighbors and family. Oh and drink Bloody Mary's and Mimosas as well. Actually, the drinking part has kind of gotten bigger the last few years. I'm not against that part of it, it just makes it a little more difficult to manuever my bike around everyone else.

I don't dress up my dog because I think it is just undignified for any dog over 35 or so pounds to have to get dressed up as  a sunflower or Elvis. Besides, the poor thing was a pound puppy rescue and came with the unfortunate name of Bingo, so I'm not going to make him suffer anymore than that.  I ususally shorten his name to Bing. He's so grateful to be here, he'd do it for me, but I wouldn't ask. Lap dogs, by all means, they are already yappy little dogs, so I don't care if you make them do something undignified, they already are in my book.

I also have learned from experience that taking a 15 pound turkey out of the oven after drinking ain't that easy, or pretty. I've never dropped a turkey, but I came close once, and that scared the bejeebers enough out of me to skip the drinks until later in the afternoon.

It has become our family tradition to make a small breakfast, get the turkey in the oven, and then ride our bikes down to the town center for about an hour and then head back to the house for the real work to begin. The following Smoked Salmon Tart is a perfect little start to the day, goes really well with a Bloody Mary or a Mimosa. Something different on the palate before all the coma inducing food.

I'm posting this now so you'll be ready for Thanksgiving morning, but I'll have to post pictures on Friday after I have some.

For people that like smoked salmon, you will get many oohs and aahs over this, and it doesn’t even take much effort. For those who don’t, you’ll get turned up noses. I’ve learned there is no converting someone that doesn’t like smoked salmon. It is elegant for parties or brunch or even tea, if anyone ever has a tea party.

Smoked Salmon Tart

Pepperidge Farms Puff Pastry Two Pack. Unwrap one and thaw for about 30 minutes. Bake flat on a cookie sheet, lined with parchment paper. The parchment paper is really important. The puff pastry already has a lot of butter in it, so if you try to shortcut that and coat the baking sheet with more fat, it comes out terrible. The parchment paper allows you to slide it right off onto a cool counter top or directly onto the serving dish. Press on it to get some of the air out before it cools.  I know that defeats the Puff part, but it’s gotta be done. Let it cool about 30 minutes before topping.

Parchment paper is a wonderful invention. If you haven’t used it before, start. You will love it when baking anything, but especially cookies. You can slide the whole batch off in one swoop and they will be perfectly browned on the bottom. Those little wienies wrapped in crescent rolls? Slides right off onto the plate. Clean up is a snap too, just throw it away and your baking sheet is clean. It is also good for underlying aluminium foil used to cover something being baked. You may have noticed that the foil will disinegrate where it touches food. The parchment paper prevents that and sticking as well. Important when you want a niced browned turkey without the skin pulled off onto the foil covering it. Note: waxed paper will not substitute.

Meanwhile, bring an 8oz package of Boursin Garlic and Herb Goat Cheese to room temperature. I set it out the night before just before I hop into bed. Perfect in the morning.  When you unwrap the foil, there is going to be some liquid released, so don’t do it over the pastry base, do it over the sink. It needs to be really soft and spreadable, so remove it from the foil and hit in the microwave for 10 seconds or so if it isn’t because you forgot to take it out the night before.

You can use plain goat cheese or whipped cream cheese if you hate goat cheese. Why you wouldn’t like goat cheese, I don’t know, but some people don’t.

Spread the goat cheese over the cooled puff pastry base. Unfortunately, even using a light hand you will flatten that puff even more now. You will also get crumbs in the goat cheese. It’s going to be okay. Take the cheese all the way to the edges.

Next is a layer of smoked salmon. And TA DA, can’t even see the crumbs.  Try to get a really good product. There are plenty of inferior ones and I know they are less expensive, but you get what you pay for. Cover all the way to the edges. It’s okay to cut pieces to make them fit.

Top with a finely seeded and chopped tomato, finely chopped purple onion or shallot and a scattering of capers. If you have some fresh dill, a little bit of that is good too, but you have herbs in the goat cheese, so go easy. Unless of course, you had plain goat cheese, go right ahead with the dill, and some chives too if you have them. A few sprinkles of parsley if you don’t have chives won’t hurt either and give it some more color.

Cut into small squares to serve, diamonds if you want to be fancy. A pizza wheel works the best for this, a knife drags the toppings around. It is best served within about an hour. You can refrigerate it, but the longer it is in the fridge, the more the pastry suffers. Try to bring it to room temperature at least an hour before serving.

Butchering a hog

My father-in-law is a pain the ass.  He is in his 70's now and retired. And a major pain in the ass.  He's got the regular old man pain in the ass stuff going on. He's fat and diabetic. Seriously, he is fat. Stands 5' 5" tall by 5x5 wide.  Rides one of those skooters around, eats what ever the hell he pleases, says what he wants, unkind things.  My kids refuse to be around him except holiday dinners. But he takes it up a level because he has been an asshole all his life. So now he's an old asshole. I have to admit, I certainly didn't think he'd last this long. But of course because he's an asshole he has. My sweet mother in law passed away years ago. He left her for another woman when my husband was 9 years old. Scarred him for life and I'm the one that picked up all the pieces from THAT trauma. He was married and divorced several more times, to increasingly bizarre women that I had to put up with at family events and shield my children from. After the last divorce, to a 7x married born-again christian lady that said they were going to spend our inheritence,  I put my foot down and absolutely forbid him from marrying again. I told him just to get on his skooter and go screw around like he used too. I guess he's over that now. Thank goodness.

So he called me last week. First he called my cell phone, but I was on my work phone. So he called my work phone. I was still on the phone, an important call, so I didn't put the person on hold, I let it go to voice mail. In about 30 seconds someone from the front comes back and starts waving at me to get my attention. I put the person on hold, and they tell me "your father in law is on the phone, he says it's important." By the time I end my call and go to pick up his call, he's hung up.  When I dial him back, it's busy. The person from up front hustles into my office and says, "He's on 2 again." Deep breath, pick up the phone. "Thank you for calling, this is Sunny, can I help you?" Which pisses him off to no end. He tells me he's ordered a ham for Thanksgiving. Which is two weeks away. I promise I wasn't running out to do the holiday dinner shopping that very minute, so he had to blow up every phone to get to me before I did. I thank him and hang up.

As much as I'd like to be a bitch back to him, I seldom can. My southern manners and respect for family just runs too deep. My husband can't really be too hard him either, and he has way more reasons to than me. I always say that he is the good man he is because of his mother. She loved that man til the day she died, even though he broke her heart. Thank goodness for the anonymity of the internet, I can tell the world what an asshole he is.

On Sunday afternoon, my husband went over to visit with him and watch the first half of the local team's football game. On his way out, his dad tells him to take the ham in the fridge to me. So husband brings it home and hands it over to me.  I'm in charge of the ham now. It's huge. It's a WHOLE ham. I have never in my life bought a WHOLE ham. It must be 20 lbs. Because 7 people need an average of 3 lbs of meat apiece for Thanksgiving dinner.  It's in a plastic garbage bag that's leaking, so I take it out to get a good look at it. He's opened it. He ate some of it. It's a week and a half to Thanksgiving. Cured meat or no, it's not going to last until then. What the hell am I going to do with this thing? I don't even buy these kinds of hams, because of the nitrates. According to the label:

Ingredients:

Pork, water, salt, sugar, sodium phosphate, flavorings, monosodium glutamate, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite and sodium citrate. Glazed with sugar and real honey.

Glad they used real honey. Our health is safe now.

So, I figure the only thing I can do is cut it all off the bone, bag it up and freeze it until Thanksgiving.
I sharpen up a good knife and start in on it. Get out a bigger cutting board. Some big bowls to put the sliced ham in. The cussing gets pretty loud because this is some major work here. About the time 18 year old son gets home, I'm hacking at the bone with a cleaver and am surrounded by mounds of ham, flecks of it are in my hair. He asks what I'm doing. I told him I was butchering a hog. He said he was cool with that. Five gallon size zip-loc bags of meat plus two of soup bones and I'm finally done. After cleaning everything up, I have to empty the freezer to re-arrange everything and finally get it all to fit.

I guess the rest of the life of this blog will be recipes for left over ham.

I'm making turkey for Thanksgiving.