A Peine For Your Thoughts

Thanksgiving Winners and Losers

November 30, 2009 at 4:03 pm | Posted in Recipe | Leave a Comment
Tags: baking, beets, cooking, farmer's market, Houston, Martha Stewart, pie, Thanksgiving, turnips

The holidays make everyone ache for baked goods, and I am no exception. My family has traditional recipes we make year after year, and I love them today just as much as I did the first time I tasted them. My mom’s pecan pie. My grandma’s stuffing. My dad’s giblet gravy. (If loving turkey gizzards is wrong, I don’t want to be right.)

But I’m new to this whole game. I don’t have any traditional recipes. I didn’t even care about cooking until I met Drew, and then I cared about it so much that I couldn’t stand to make the same recipe twice. And not having anything to be “known” for makes me feel like I’m not really contributing. Why does anyone invite me if I don’t have a signature dish? I don’t really like cleaning up and my dinner conversation can be a little inappropriate.

So, in an effort to finally have a delicious dish to call my very own, I’ve spent the last few years auditioning recipes. This year was no exception. I was feeling a little too big for my britches when I wrote this post, going on and on about what was in the oven, wiping my hands on my apron for just a moment to update my blog. Everything looked beautiful, so I thought it wasn’t too early to proclaim myself the next Martha Stewart and move along.

But what about how everything tasted?

Ugh. I forgot about taste.

While we’re discussing taste, let’s discuss beets.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, Drew and I set out for the Urban Harvest Farmers Market just off of Richmond Street in Houston. We figured we’d eat locally for the holidays. Eat something that was actually in season, instead of something that was magically still growing under the warm sun of Chile. We looked everywhere for strawberries, oranges, melons, pineapple–any of the things we’d normally buy at our favorite HEB.

We learned a good lesson that day. Strawberries are not in season in November. But beets are. So are turnips.

And 27.5-year-old Taryn still gags at the taste of both of them.

So, for those of you keeping track at home, we’re still at zero delicious recipes. Still at zero reasons to invite me to a potluck. Zero.

My next attempt at holiday culinary magic was baking a traditional challah. I mentioned I was using this recipe from Brown Eyed Baker, which looked absolutely beautiful on her site. I thought it would be nice to pair a traditional Jewish bread with my dad’s West Texas gizzard gravy.

I read on her blog that this bread uses no less than eight egg yolks, but I didn’t fully compute what that would mean in real life. It meant the bread was tremendously beautiful.

And also tremendously dense. OK – I’m not telling the whole truth here. This bread actually has nine egg yolks in it. Yet another plug for state-funded higher education! In order to keep my diploma, I have to tell you now that I have never mis-counted beers. Or Jell-O shots.

This bread was delicious the next day with tortilla soup, but paired with turkey, which is already a little dry to begin with, it’s a recipe for the Heimlich maneuver.

So after hours of kneading (that I did with a KitchenAid mixer, whatever), braiding, rising, egg-washing and baking, I was still at zero.

If I can’t earn my keep with vegetables or bread, at least I can bring it home with dessert, right? First I tried this English Toffee Pecan pie.

My dad’s favorite thing in the world is pecan pie. My mom makes a completely amazing pecan pie for him every single year. Except for this year. I thought a great thing like pecan pie could only get better with the addition of something as equally wonderful as toffee.

I was wrong. Two rights are sometimes too much. After this pie, which was unfortunately scraped into the trash yesterday, I would advise everyone to leave pecan pie alone. I will also be following that advice in the future.

Are you starting to wonder if my family spent Thanksgiving eating an assembly line of failed culinary experiments by yours truly?

They almost did. ALMOST. But finally, in the eleventh hour, this saved the day:

At long last, I laid something on the table that managed to be both beautiful and delicious. Martha’s Old Fashioned Apple Pie with an all-butter crust and some vanilla bean ice cream saved my life. Just when my family was about to order take-out. Just when my husband was starting to fantasize about a wife who could actually cook. Just when I thought I would have to give up and start storing winter clothes in my oven.

Thankfully, this was the last thing anyone ate. So I’m hoping it made them forget about the bread they nearly choked on. And the odd-tasting pecan pie. And the turnips.

But I don’t expect anyone will ever forget about the beets.