Thanks to all who helped with the menu. Some things went as planned. Others not so much. Food was eaten. It's the first time I've taken chairs away from the dining table so people could spread out. If we're only three or four, we just sit at one end of the table. Today there were six, so I put two chairs in the living room. For a normal dining room celebration, all the chairs go in the living room to have more seating and the folding chairs go in the dining room to seat more people. But it was great fun having a "full" table with just us few, and great conversation and lots of laughs.

For those who were so kind and supportive in the planning thread--a few days ago, one of those who ignored my message about voting for what they wanted to eat, apologized for all of them. No excuses. I hadn't said anything. Just a straight out acknowledgement and apology, which I greatly appreciated.

Final menu:

Bourekes (filled filo pastries) cheese ones and pumpkin others.

Turkey croquettes

Cranberry jezebel

Pumpkin gravy

Tri-tip sous vide

Stuffing (casserole)

Green beans aumondine

Roasted baby turnips with leaves

Green salad with red wine herb vinaigrette

Mom's Apple Pie

Toll House Cookies made by The Expert

For Mr. Picky, fried chicken bits and baked potatoes

The ingredients for the bourekes were hard to source and not quite right. They were better after having been frozen. Whereas the chicken bits weren't at their best from the freezer (more on that later).

Part of the point was to fry things for Chanukah, which is something of a joke. The miracle is that one day's consecrated oil lasted in the Eternal Light for eight days. So we fry things in oil. ;) So I made turkey croquettes to be part Thanksgiving and part Chanukah. I liked Amylou's suggestion of a béchamel base. Most of the recipes I've seen are basically fried meatballs. Silly me, I made the béchamel according to the traditional recipe (minus the nutmeg). The turkey had been cooked sous vide and frozen. It was very moist unlike a lot of Thanksgiving leftovers. I should have made a thicker sauce. It was delicious--with a whole (sliced) giant red spring onion, garden sage, thyme and tarragon and some et cetera. Unfortunately, where I expected the sauce to turn to glue in the fridge, as such things do, it either stayed liquid, or the turkey shed liquid into it or something. So I thought, eggs and flour for glue, right? But I was coating them in eggs and breadcrumbs, so just kind of folded some inside and squeezed hard. The first batch fried up well enough, but the next one was a mess (I finally figured out that there was something up with the heating element when the zucchini latkes were a 100% fail), so I stopped. The tester also seemed a bit tough and overcooked. The remainder will become part of a pie or casserole. It really is good. :) Anyway, after heating in the oven on a rack with the dread chicken bits, the croquettes improved! I must have a magic oven. :) Everybody liked them. And the pumpkin gravy and cranberry jezebel-ish were excellent on them. Not tough and just right tasting. Magic!

Cranberry jezebel-ish, I say, because I used Lindac's version of the recipe--always great--but yet again, the grocery delivery gave me horseradish sauce, not prepared horseradish. This one, however, doesn't have weird stuff in it and I tried it on a sandwich. It's good. But not for the cranberry sauce. And since I discovered the error while making said sauce, I was wracking my brain. If it tasted good as is I would have just served it as cranberry sauce, but it was too sweet without the kick. My eye, roving the fridge, hoping to find some leftover horseradish until I remembered I'd left it at my mother's house, lit upon a jar of TJ's harissa. It's about the consistency of prepared horseradish, and has an excellent kick, so I put it little in, and added a little more--about a teaspoon in all, maybe half a tablespoon--and it tasted an awful lot like real cranberry jezebel. Amazing! I realized how much the Dijon adds to the flavor, leaving the horseradish/harissa to do the kicking. :) Everybody loved it.

The pumpkin gravy went over well, too, but somehow the stuffing didn't get passed, so there was a lot left. The stuffing was a combo of homemade whole wheat sourdough and matzah, Mother's style, with red onion, celery, colorful peppers and mushrooms, but shitakes rather than creminis because that's what I had. Also garden sage and herbs de province (dry), and some vermouth because I was too tired to look for the new bottle of sherry.

I was trying to make the tri-tip to suit other people, so I followed a recipe from Anova, the circulator maker. There were no issues with the circulator, and it was a pot, a small vessel, so easy to keep even. And with my Anova pot cover that keeps the moisture in. I seared it in my big cast iron and got a beautiful crust. It was way underdone. Not quite mooing. Not quite. So we put some slices in the still hot oven, and they actually came out well, and I finished cooking the remaining part in the oven for seconds. It was fine. The sous vide was really for getting it out of my way rather than an obsession with edge to edge or anything.

I should have cooked the beans longer. I like them barely more than blanched, but someone who has known one from a foetus will tell one what he thinks. :) They were all gone.

They liked the turnips a lot. I was going to do mixed roasted veg but accidentally bought twice as many bunches of baby turnips as I'd meant to, and they were small so lots to the bunch. Just roasted with oil and S&P, so the leaves could get crunchy. They softened in the bowl, however. I should have used a platter. They did very well by them.

I was exhausted when I made the salad. I'd done fine until the sun went down, then suddenly felt tired. I couldn't deal with getting down the salad spinner and had nowhere to lay out the veggie drying mats. I had a head of green leaf and a huge bunch of curly green kale. Still do. I had some triple washed spring mix and baby spinach mix and just dumped some in the bowl (reputable source), and hearing Lars in my ear denigrating many salads, added breakfast radish slices, English cucumber, heirloom mini-tomatoes cut in half, shredded ementhaller cheese, maybe something else. I was going to add avocado, ginger beets, scallion and a few other things, but I ran out of bowl, and it was pretty as it was. the dressing was just EVOO (started with Spanish but it was too wimpy so switched to Italian), red wine vinegar, a dribble of old vine zin, herbs de province, garlic pepper, and salt, but then on a whim I added some Coleman's mustard powder. It was an excellent addition!

Mom's Apple Pie uses slices which are prepared overnight with sugar and spices, rather than a jammy filling. I used a spiced white-whole-wheat crust, and a 10" deep dish. Because it's not a sinkingly wet pie, I tried an open crust again, without prebaking the top. One of the minions found my missing Fall leaves cookie cutters in a decorative cookie jar! What a great place to keep them! Wish I'd remembered I'd done that. So I did the leaves and rolled the dough thicker to help the top not sink. It worked! The spices turned the crust a very pretty dark brown. It tastes really good but there wasn't the amount of liquid as usual (made worse, probably, by the more than just vents openings) which usually goes solid in the pie. It's still really good. ;)

Anyway, I tell you all about what went wrong because I think that's more interesting than what goes right, but I promise you, in the end there was a lot of really good food and really happy, stuffed people. Mission accomplished.

Apologies for the lack of food pictures. I can't take pictures while cooking. I need my hands for other things. :)

Well, except PIE, fresh out of the oven (fully on a trivet even though it looks like it's half in the sink):