I hope you enjoy your trip and your dinner Lars. If someone gave me 20 hours and I didn't have everything I already needed from the grocery store, plus have to plan and cook, I would probably tell them I would take a rain check. I'm glad you and your brother can get it together that quickly

Beverly

What would I do for a Thanksgiving pot luck with 20 hours notice, well Lars, I would most likely do much less than you are doing! My gosh, you are doing the best of the best - stuffing and gravy is all I ever really want, and while I normally wouldn't go crazy for chocolate ice cream, homemade with almonds and amaretto sounds fantastic.

So I guess my answer would be "I would call Lars" :)

Happy Thanksgiving, Lars and Kevin!

(And BTW - to say they will probably appreciate the gravy is a gross understatement.)

Wow, Lars - you are the man! Great thoughts for the pot luck; maybe I'll ask you to plan my next one. :)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Lars, I think you've got it all covered..and that ice cream sounds DEVINE!

Whatever you do about the food, I would sure as heck take the freeway. The 405 on Thanksgiving? Smooth sailing. I'm taking it, anyway. I need to go near the Santa Monica airport. The 405 the day before Thanksgiving? You couldn't pay me to go near it. Cahuenga and La Brea will be a biatch just because of all the lights.

One thing I do not miss about Cali is the traffic!

Lars, I think three dishes is a generous sharing. That ice cream sounds wonderful.

What would I make with that kind of notice? Hmmm...maybe a starter soup, dressing, or this gingerbread layer cake with pistachios I used to make every year. (It's probably too warm where you are for that cake though. Ice cream seems like a better choice!)

With 20 hours notice I could make just about anything from hors d'oeuvres to dessert except the turkey (unless it was already defrosted). I have a well stocked pantry and freezer though, so it makes it easy to whip up last minute "anything".

Have fun and enjoy your friends, it sounds like a fun party.

Alexa

I want to hear the recap! I agree with dlundin, the freeways will be empty.

Well, the party was a lot of fun, and although the freeways were empty, Kevin wanted to take La Brea, which was also almost empty. We only had traffic near Hollywood & Highland. Kevin got confused on Cahuenga because he didn't realize that we were supposed to be on E. Cahuenga, but I finally convinced him. He's only been to the John Anson Ford Theater once (I've been quite a few times), and he's never been to the Hollywood Bowl OR Universal, and so he's not as familiar with the streets and neighborhood as I am. It took us 20 minutes on city streets, and so that wasn't bad.

Paul is kind of between gigs right now, but he was able to buy his condo last year. His last job was video editing for a new reality dating show, which will premier on Bravo the first week of December. Here's his imdb profile, which oddly does not mention that he did the video editing for Blind Date, even though I have seen his name on the credits at the end of some of the early episodes. That's where he met my friend Secha and subsequently how I met him.

Also in attendance, doing most of the cooking, was a friend of his named Sean, who books talent for several talk show - I don't remember which ones, but he was interesting to talk with. There was also a friend of Paul's from Boston and his wife (from Seattle), who were pleasant but live in Orange County and were a bit dull. They thought Venice was full of crazy people and didn't like. Also, Vince Ly was there, whom I met when we were making Attention Span,

As for the food - Paul admits to not knowing how to cook anything (He has a copy of the book How To Boil Water, but he was in charge of starting the turkey before everyone else arrived. For some reason, the turkey was cooked with a rum glaze that contained nutmeg, and I found the nutmeg to give the turkey a very off flavor, and so I only ate a small portion of the thigh, which, however, was very moist. The breast was dry. Paul loved the mushroom gravy that I made, and the entire quart that I took got consumed, even though there was also some plain gravy that someone else made. Vincent brought a ham and a cake, and Paul gave me some of the ham to take home and Kevin took some of the turkey, which I was not interested in eating. Most of my stuffing was left over because there was another stuffing that was on the table (Mine was left on the pass-through and therefore not easily accessible) made using a boxed stuffing mix. I didn't eat any of that, but I did have mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. Paul made the mistake of buying Ralphs' brand instead of Ocean Spray, and the other Paul was not letting him live that down, telling him that Cape Cod economy depended on everyone buying O.S.! My friend Paul lived in Boston before moving to L.A., although he lived in Poland until he was ten (speaking only Polish and German) and then in Austria with his grandmother for two years after that.

Paul was cracking jokes constantly during the party, and he has a very dry, quick wit. His accent is more like The Bronx than Boston, and so he comes off like a NY personality. At one point he found an abandoned half consumed bottle of beer and demanded to know whose it was. Then he exclaimed, "This is alcohol abuse! Don't you know that there are sober children in India?"

Toward the end of the party we started talking about the next party, and I told Paul that I would like to host it, since we live about half way between the two Pauls. Paul's birthday is exactly one week before mine, and so we decided to have a joint birthday party - or two parties one week apart. There's no telling what his schedule will be like by then, however, since his work is very sporadic. I hope it will work out because he's great at parties!

BTW, I didn't make the ice cream because I forgot that the recipe calls for milk, which is something I never have on hand (except after guest leave and leave it in my fridge), and so I just took some strawberry ice cream that I had made a month or so ago. It was still good, but no one at the party was interested in ice cream, since we had cake and pecan pie. If it has been chocolate ice cream, however, it would have been good on the cake (which was chocolate), but then I guess strawberry would have been good on the cake as well, although I didn't think of it at the time.

Oh, I had the idea of making Caesar Salad, but I had forgotten to ask Kevin to buy the lettuce. I should have made the salad dressing and croûtons anyway because Paul had bought the Romaine lettuce and forgot to get the dressing. I wish he had told me because there was not a single green vegetable at the meal! In fact, it was rather sparse, but still enough food and lots left over.

Kevin and I were very happy that we didn't have to go to a restaurant, and I was especially happy to renew contact with Paul and hope we will see more of each other in the near future.

Lars

Sounds like a wonderful day Lars...and that Beer joke is pretty funny...I can just hear the accent ringing..

Love the beer joke too, I'm stealing it! Also 'live in Orange County and were a bit dull' - a bit redundant, eh? LOL

Sounds like a fun evening, uncoordinated foodwise but good company. I'm sorry your ice cream didn't go over, it sure was a hot day.

Great recap Lars, thanks for the fun read! Much more interesting than my early dinner with just the 5 of us. J and the older boy had to leave for a hockey tournament, while I'm stuck at home taking the middle kid to his games.

We're so dull, we could be from Irvine!

AM

That sounds like the perfect Thanksgiving, Lars! I love facebook:)

I agree with all who said you chose a lot of work.
Happy that you dropped one of those foods from you to-make list. Whew!
Thanksgiving is an especially important holiday to share with friends and dining in a restaurant is usually disappointing. Happy you were mostly wth people that you enjoy.

BTW, I would have made 2 cranberry sauces and apple pie.