Excelsior!

A strange role reversal has taken place. Generally I am content eating the same meal again and again for lunch and dinner for multiple days. It is Jen that has little to no tolerance for repeating meals. She can have something for dinner then leftovers for lunch but never in the same day and never back-to-back dinners.

However, with our bounty of leftovers, Jen is somehow still going strong with wanting to have leftover Canadian Thanksgiving tonight for the fifth consecutive meal! I, on the other hand, am looking to begin branching out with something a little different.



I started by making this root vegetable bisque with the leftover roasted root vegetables. I browned up a little crushed garlic, added the shallots, rutabaga, carrot, sweet potato, butternut squash, acorn squash, and turnips. After adding some vegetable stock and a little cream I pureed the mixture. I served it up with some of Jen's delicious rolls. Unfortunately there were only two left which was wholy inadequate.



After the soup I made a large leftover plate for us to share.



After moving through all of Jen's chunky cranberry sauce we moved on to her cranberry jelly. Jen is no longer satisfied with making only one type of cranberry sauce. She asked beforehand if she should make just one type of cranberry sauce this year and I said that was probably a good idea. After a pause she said, "Yeah, I'm going to make two anyway."



To accompany the turkey dinner Jen had this Cabernet Sauvignon from Excelsior in South Africa. This was good and bad. The good was that it was a tasty Cabernet. The bad was the Jen had to deal with me occasionally interrupting dinner to yell "Excelsior!"



While periodically exclaiming the name of Jen's wine I enjoyed this Dubbel I got while at Allagash in Portland last week. This beer should be readily available as I've had their White and Tripel on multiple occasions each. For some reason I've never run into the Dubbel so I figured I'd pick some up and give it a go.

The Dubbel was pretty good. It was a little more bitter than the Tripel but still very tasty. I recommend it as a nice accompaniment to Thanksgiving leftovers.

Jen tried to combat my cries of "Excelsior!" with cries of "Allagash!" but gave up after a few tries. It's just not as much fun as yelling "Excelsior!"



Over lunch this afternoon I made a shopping list for next year's Canadian Thanksgiving. I'm hoping that next year, as opposed to this year, I actually consult these notes.



For dessert I heated up some of the leftover apple pie, mashed it up, and served it hot with some vanilla ice cream. Coincidentally this is Professor X's favorite dessert!

Excelsior!

Canadian Thanksgiving (as told through its leftovers)

I'm kind of an idiot.

Last year, during Canadian Thanksgiving, I took detailed notes about what we purchased, how much we made, and how many people attended. I thought this would be invaluable when calculating how much to purchase and make this year. It would have been, had I actually listened to my notes.

For example: in my notes it said to only make two loaf's worth of stuffing for approximately 30 people. Last year I made four loaf's worth and ended up having twice as much as we needed. This year, against my better judgment, I made three loaves and ended up with fifty percent more than needed.

On the one hand this proves that my notes from last year were spot on. Unfortunately it also proves that I'm an idiot.

This year a lot of people asked us about what the meaning of Canadian Thanksgiving is. Well, I'll try to explain by showing you the dinner we prepared as used in leftover form.



We started with a cheese plate of Jasper Hill blue, Marcona almonds, and Seaside and Darigold cheddars.



For salad I served some mixed baby greens with grape tomatoes, and cornichons. I toasted up some leftover cubed pretzel bread and made a vinaigrette with Dijon, cider vinegar, and olive oil.





Jen and I made our two variations of hot turkey sandwiches, Jen's with two slices of bread, me with my open-faced approach. Both sandwiches contained mashed potato, mashed carrot and turnip, stuffing, roasted root vegetables, turkey, and cranberry sauce.



I always feel guilty about cooking a new food to accompany the hot turkey sandwiches. However, this guilt is nothing compared to the look of disgust Jen would give me if the sandwiches were not accompanied by fries, in this case: oven fries.



Jen had some of this shiraz from Red Dust. On the back of the label the wine talks about how "the ubiquitous red dust of the Australian outback has been adopted for Australia's most popular red wine variety, Shiraz."

I'm not quite sure what that is supposed to mean.



To pari with this bonanza of Canadian Thanksgiving leftovers I figured it would be a perfect time to have a pumpkin beer. Pumpkin beers have pretty much exploded in the last 5-10 years and now every brewery under the sun is offering one version or another. They range from "tastes like regular beer" to "just tastes like pumpkin pie spice in my regular beer" to "actually quite interesting with a subtle pumpkin flavor."

I chose to have the Pumpkinhead from Shipyard Brewing Company. I had this on tap when I was in Portland this week but, since I didn't blog about it, it didn't really happen.

The bottled version of the beer was quite good, every bit as nice as the draught version. Unlike most pumpkin beers, surprisingly, the pumpkin flavor actually came through nicely with very little spice.

I couldn't shake that this label reminded me of something . . .



. . . Ghostrider! I can't wait until they make a movie about Shipyard Pumpkinhead and cast Nicholas Cage as Pumpkinhead. It's going to be totally boss.



For dessert we had a medley of desserts including whoopie pies, pumpkin pie, chocolate coconut bars, pecan pie, and apple pie.

To counteract the 80+ degree weather we decided to watch some Northern Exposure to watch some cooler temperatures as a way of ushering in the fall. Then we watched The Colour of Magic as a way of ushering in a mythical world balanced aback four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle.

And that, my friends, it the true meaning of Canadian Thanksgiving.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving, Everyone!

Prelude to Giving Canadian Thanks

I spent the last few days traipsing through Maine, visiting farms, and sampling some local treats. Strangely, I had a minimal amount of lobster in my time there. I did, however, sample the following beers:

Allagash Hugh Malone, Allagash Mattina Rossa, Allagash Black, Geary's Autumn Ale, Atlantic Brewing Porter, Sea Dog Blueberry, Maine Mead Works HoneyMaker, Shipyard Pumpkinhead, Shipyard Blue Fin Stout, Shipyard Old Thumper E.S.B., and Shipyard XXXX IPA (Pugsley's Signature Series).

I also had a Stella Artois just for a little retro fun.



Today, however, I got home and I put on my cooking shoes. Jen's always trying to get me to wear these silly shoes and I found them to really get me back into the cooking game.

Mostly all I did today was spend the day peeling, chopping, and roasting vegetables in preparation for tomorrow's Canadian Thanksgiving celebration. I took advantage of this idle time sitting on the couch to watch a double feature of Animalympics and The Matrix, two Canadian Thanksgiving themed movies.



I took a quick break to make a Maine-inspired seafood dinner based on some awesome mussels I had in Portland. I rendered a little bacon with olive oil then tossed in some crushed garlic and sliced shallots. After they'd cooked down a bit I seared a piece of cod, some sea scallops, and tossed int some littlenecks. I seasoned them with only salt and pepper but sprinkled some Old Bay over the top when it was all done.

I also baked a potato, sliced it, and tossed it into the pan. Then I grilled some slices of bread and rubbed them with a garlic clove.

I would have liked to add a little white wine and some seafood broth to this but we didn't have either ingredient handy. This dish is super easy to make (took about ten minutes from start to finish) and I would highly recommend doing this with the two missing ingredients mentioned above. It couldn't hurt to also add some fresh herbs.



To pair with this I poured an Arabier from Brouwerij De Dolle Brouwers. This was the headiest beer I've ever had and I really wasn't able to start drinking it until after dinner. It was much more hoppy than the parrot on the label would have lead me to believe.



After dinner we heard a knocking at the door. My favorite UPS driver was there holding a box. He said, "I think this is grape juice." Then he looked at the label and nodded. "Yup. Grape juice."

It turned out to be the wine we'd ordered on our expensive stop in Beaune, France this summer. As expected it was like someone had delivered a present! After all, we'd paid for this months ago and now it was like it was being delivered for free, as if we hadn't foolishly squandered hundreds of Euros on it.

I'm not quite sure why the UPS driver was so coy about the contents of the box. Is it illegal to ship wine via UPS? Is my favorite UPS driver in cahoots with the fast-talking wine salespeople in Beaune, France? Will we be able to fit 30 people in our tiny apartment for Canadian Thanksgiving?

Answers to these questions and more on the next exciting installment of Jen and Nate Buy the Farm . . . Share!

Shrimp and Red Wine

Saturday night Jen and I rushed home and made a shrimp casserole for some friends. We only had thirty minutes to do it so the heat was on!



I worked on my new patented technique for defrosting which involves sitting food in a chair under a high-powered fan. It works surprisingly well and I had the shrimp defrosted in about 10 minutes. While they defrosted I chopped garlic, onion, bell pepper, and zucchini then Jen cooked them in the pan with some tomato, salt, and pepper, all while the basmati rice cooked.

Ladies, get ready,
To have some shrimp with some boys!

We put a layer of rice in the bottom of the dish, added the shrimp to the vegetable mixture, then topped the rice with that and threw it in the oven and ran out the door.

Rachael Ray has a lot to learn from us.



We actually skipped beer tonight and poured this Cupcake Shiraz that my parents brought over a long time ago. They brought two bottle and some beer and this is the last of their generous gift. I can't remember exactly when it was but it was a while ago. Probably not in 2008 as the label states but a while ago anyway.



To continue our barely noticeable celebration of Rosh Hashanah we had this Matzoh Crunch ice cream from Chozen. Since I hadn't had the opportunity to make any actual matzoh crunch this year (one of my favorite dessert items in the entire world) we went with this ice cream version instead.

The ice cream is fantastic and I'd highly recommend it to you if you're looking for a nice way to round out a shellfish-based dinner for the Rosh Hashanah holiday.

Shrimp and red wine!
Shrimp and red wine!
Shrimp and red wine!
Take your clothes off!

Hot Pork, Cold Night

This morning we woke up at the crack of 9:00 because we had to head to Stone Barns for their annual Harvest Fest. It was good because we needed the energy to circle around the grounds multiple times looking for Jen's lost scarf to no avail.



However, we did see two guys turning roast pigs on spits. This made me hopeful that we could somehow convince our landlord to allow us to dig a pit in the front yard and do this for Canadian Thanksgiving this year.

Don't expect to see this on the blog in a week's time.



After having some Montreal style smoked meat sandwiches at Harvest Fest I decided to make something similar with the leftover Sauerbraten. I grilled some slices of rye bread with butter, slathered them with SchoolHouse Kitchen mustard, and served them with some oven fries, and pickle.

Jen was highly skeptical of this idea. This was nothing new to me. She was also proven to be wrong in her skepticism after tasting dinner. This was also nothing new.



For dessert I sliced up some of the farm Bartlett pears with some Cambozola and cracked black pepper.



This was the first truly cold night of the season so I cracked open this 't Smisje Dubbel Brouwerij Smisje that Jen got me as a gift. It is a beer brewed with honey and dates and it was fantastic.



It had one of the most stubborn heads of any beer I've ever had. I had it after dinner partially because of its flavor and partially because I poured it out twenty minutes in advance and that's how long it took the head to subside. The beer even stood atop the head after pouring a little more in the glass. It was like making a cappuccino. I wanted to make a little picture of a leaf.

However, I did not. Instead I slowly enjoyed the beer while being badgered by Jen to look up facts about the age of Aragorn around the time of the Lord of the Rings saga.

By the way, he was 88.