so. much. food

So, we made about 3x as much food as we needed for the 6 of us eating dinner.

And when I say 'we', I mean, mostly, 'me': I worked on prep from 9pm -> 1am and cooked from 9am -> 3:30pm.

We ended up with something like 6 quarts of mashed potatoes due to a screwup of mine.

All in all, it was a lot of good frickin food -- Jess buying groceries and picking the recipes worked quite well -- but I've chopped more in the past 24 hours than I have in the past 3 years combined. 8 onions, 10 apples, 2 bags of potatoes, rosemary, thyme, chives, oregano, parsley... and not once did I slice my finger!

This is the first time I've ever had 4 pots on the stove, two pans in the oven, and two thing already done and waiting to be served. (Potatoes, Green beans + shallots, cranberry + orange relish, two pans of stuffing, cornbread and turkey, respectively.) I felt like a cooking machine.

Menu:

• Turkey, rubbed with herb (parsley, rosemary, sage & thyme) butter and roasted.
• Apple and sage bread stuffing with chestnuts.
• Cranberry-orange relish.
• Garlic mashed potatoes with chives and parmesan cheese.
• Green beans with shallots and almonds.
• Cornbread. (from a TJ's box)

I made everything there except for the actual cooking of the herb butter, which Jess did while I was making the cornbread. (I did all the turkey rubbing as well... mmm, rubbing down naked turkey skin with slippery substances...)

Turkey cooked about 1.5 hours quicker than we expected, but ended up *really* tasty -- thank goodness for thermometers, since it did *not* look browned at all when we pulled it out, but the thermometer told the real story of it being at ~160. (I think the thing got slightly warmer than it should have been, but cooking in a roasting pan kept in the moisture and made it really tasty.)

This is the first time I've ever cooked a big meal like this, and I'm pretty pleased with how everything came out.