Turkey Tales: Part One

So Thanksgiving has come and gone, the house is empty and all is quiet. To properly recount the holiday weekend, I will have to go day by day.

Wednesday: I got home from work feeling rather frantic and did some manic cleaning for a couple of hours. First order of food business was brining the turkey. I put it in a cooler, it was 20 pounds after all, with coarse salt, brown sugar, ice water, lemon and bay leaves. Then I got started on my sweet potato kahlua cheesecake. I kept seeing recipes for pumpkin-bourbon cheesecake but since I was making pumpkin pie, I thought I'd swap that for sweet potato. I'm not a huge bourbon fan, nor do I have any in the house. So this cheesecake was born. It was delicious and definitely my favorite dessert of the weekend. I got the inspiration from the smittenkitchen website and she got it from Gourmet magazine.

Crust:
Half a box of vanilla wafers
1/4 c. packed light brown sugar
1/4 c. granulated sugar
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Filling:
1 can of sweet potatoes, drained
3 large eggs
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 T. Kahlua
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1 T cornstarch
1 1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 t. ground ginger
1/2 t. salt
3 (8-oz) packages cream cheese, at room temperature

Topping:
2 c. sour cream
2 T. granulated sugar
1 T. Kahlua
1 T. vanilla

Dominick arrived and I quickly enlisted his assistance as my sous chef. He started making tembleque, which is a coconut pudding; light, not too sweet and an old favorite of ours. While I hollowed out onions, which served as containers for the stuffing, Dominick put together the filling for the pumpkin pie, nothing out of the ordinary except that we added cardamom.


Let me talk a bit about these onions. I was expecting 10 people or so for dinner and scooping all those layers of onions while trying to preserve the outside and simultaneously weeping, was no piece of cake. But I stuffed the onions and they were so dainty and cute that I forgot all about it.



Another guest arrived, the wine was opened yet still I had pie crusts to roll out. Of course, halfway through the process, I realized I was short on flour. I'm not going to elaborate but needless to say, the crust really didn't go the way I was hoping. I cobbled together bits of dough and pressed them into the pie plates, making Dominick and Jessica promise not to tell anyone about the debacle.

At this point, my cheescake was out of the oven, the turkey was brining, the stuffing was ready to go in the oven and two pies were underway. I had some more wine and went to bed. I'll have to tell you all about Thursday in the next post, this is exhausting!