Showing posts with label Thanksgiving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thanksgiving. Show all posts

Friday, November 26, 2010

The First Blanksbliving

Nick, Laura, and myself (otherwise known as “Blick,” “Blaura,” and “Blon”) recently celebrated the newly anointed holiday of Blanksbliving. A prelude to, or perhaps warm up for, Thanksgiving, Blanksbliving is an autumnal feast that celebrates gluttony, drunkenness, bowling, ice cream, and fine cinema. Blanksbliving should be observed the Monday prior to Thanksgiving. Here’s a look at the very first Blanksbliving.

The Bowling of the Ball Towards the Pins:
Almost every holiday comes with some sort of traditional activity, usually in conjunction with binge drinking, although in the case of New Year’s Eve and St. Patrick’s Day excessive alcohol consumption is the traditional activity. The Forth of July, for example, celebrates our country’s independence by blowing up small portions of it. Christmas has gift giving and religious lip service. Halloween has become national Show-Your-Slutty-Side day. Traditional Thanksgiving has Turkey Trots and football. Blanksbliving is no exception. On Blanksbliving we honor our forefathers’ struggles against small wooden objects by bowling heavy objects at them in an attempt to knock as many over as possible. Blick, Blaura, and I paid our respects at Capri Lanes where we each earned a variety of holiday commendations. Blick for fastest bowl and highest single game score, Blaura for most improved bowling and most Skee-Ball played, I for most wins and highest overall score. We gave blanks to all those who fell to the pins in the past by felling several hundred in return.

The Appetizing of the Feasters by Pizza:
The Feast can only begin after Feasters have indulged in an appetite stimulating pizza mini-feast. The first Feast’s pizza and cheese bread appetizers were delivered by Donato’s.

The Preparation of the Feast of Feasts by the Feasters:
Having worked up an appetite on the lanes we made a few stops for extra provisions before heading home to prepare the Feast of Feasts. Butter, gravy, alcohol, and more ice cream were on the shopping list, all staples of the Feast, as well as cutlery. For like so many before us we were without knives with which to prepare our meal. With everything properly assembled it was time to begin the prep. Blick began the Baking of the Brownies while I boiled water for the Mashing of the Potatoes. I must admit that I was nervous as this would be my first Mashing of the Potatoes but I was confident that my Blankfulness would carry me through. And it did!

With the two most time consuming portions of The Feast completed we began phase two of the cooking with Blaura’s Stirring of the Stove-Top stuffing and Blick’s Frying of the Bacon.

The feast was nearly complete, all that was left was the Heating of the Gravy and the Frying of the Turkey Dogs in Bacon Grease, perhaps the shortest cook times of any of the components of The Feast, these portions are just as important and significant to the feast as any other. Let not their short investments of time belie or belittle their importance.

The Heaping of the Plates:
With all the elements of The Feast in place Blick, Blaura, and I assembled our mighty food piles on the decorative Plates of the Feast. While the base foods of The Feast are universal, their arrangements are as individual as the Feasters.

The Drinking of the Booze:
With so much food to consume during The Feast, Feasters need a refreshing and seasonally appropriate draught to quench their deep down body thirst. While beers, both root and regular, would be fine libations, the drink of the First Blanksbliving was then and will forever be the Blank Blilliams. Comprised of Wild Turkey 101 and apple cider the Blank Blilliams refreshes the palate and esophagus while enlightening the brain, liver, and Q-Zone.

Just Desserts and Other Happy Endings:
A great and glorious feast such as this must surely end with a sweet coda. To this end we amassed an unrivaled stock pile of frozen treats. The First Blanksbliving Dessert Feast consisted of: But other personal choices can certainly be opted in assuming they are indeed Blanksworthy and delightfully silly.

The Viewing of the Movies:
Once the Feasters have finished at least one helping of the feast movies are viewed to stimulate the digestive process. Cheese-ball 80’s jiggle-fests and cult sci-fi flicks are the recommended course of action, but any exceedingly entertaining fare is fine so long as it promotes heckling or the recitation of the movie’s dialogue by the Feasters and further drinking and/or eating.

We certainly enjoyed the first ever Blanksbliving, we hope you can join us next year. If you are not able to for some reason, please celebrate in your own way and share the experience with the rest of us here on the blinternet.

Blappy Blanksbliving, Bleveryone!

Thursday, November 26, 2009

TurkeyFest '09

I've been away from the blog for a little while, so I decided to come back with something truly stupendous...

Shortly after moving to Columbus five years ago, I started cooking a Thanksgiving dinner for my friends. The inaugural event happened to fall on the same day as the Ohio State vs. Michigan football game, which would ensure that only the most devoted of my friends would attend. That game almost always falls on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, which also thinned out the crowd, as many wondered why they should get their turkey fix now, when they can just have mom's turkey five days later. The solution to raise interest in the plan was to set a food theme for the party; in this case, it was "Warped" Thanksgiving: Cajun-pepper roasted turkey, green-bean-casserole-stuffed mushrooms, sweet potato fries, cranberry chutney... you get the idea. Dinner was a great success, and nobody left my house hungry.

The next year's theme was "Indian (not Indian)" Thanksgiving: Tandoori turkeys (two, as word of mouth spread from the year before), fried sweet potatoes with yogurt-coconut sauce, potato curry, cranberry chutney (again), and some other stuff with names I can't remember. This all went over quite well, and was actually my first real foray into Indian cooking. I have never used so much garam masala and turmeric in my life.

Then, for a couple of years nothing happened. I made a relatively traditional turkey dinner last year for my housemates, but didn't make a big deal out of it. I desperately needed to make a big deal out of something this year, so I hatched a plan to cook three turkeys: one deep-fried in peanut oil (a staple at my father's Thanksgiving), one smoked with apple wood (because, c'mon, smoked turkey is delicious), and one Cajun-pepper roasted like the very first bird I ever made. And so, TurkeyFest '09 was born...



Early in the morning, I set up the smoker and the deep fryer. I planned to have dinner served at 4pm, so I had to awake at the asscrack of dawn to get that smoker fired up. Luckily, she's an electric, which decreases the cooking time. 6 hours for a 13-pound bird worked perfectly.


225 degrees, the magic number for authentic barbecue. Slow cooking over a long period of time makes meat tender and moist.


Here's what the smoked bird looked like at about 5 hours in. Yum!


Giving some of the attendees a peek (and a whiff) at the roaster.


This bastard is stuffed to the gills with butter, hot peppers, onions, and garlic, and rubbed down with cayenne pepper and salt. The pan drippings from this bird are damn hot!

The oil is just about ready: 325 degrees is the ideal fryer temp when the bird hits the grease. Peanut oil is the ideal cooking oil because of its high flash point (450 degrees) and the subtle nutty flavor it imparts into the bird.

Safety first! So many idiots have seriously burned themselves, or set buildings on fire trying to deep fry a turkey. Always set up at least 10 feet from any building and make sure anything that goes in the oil is dry. Hot oil doesn't react well to cold water or ice.
There they are, my finished prizes. Roasted at the top, deep fried in the middle, smoked on the bottom. Note the cow cutting board...
Celebration on a job well done, except... aw fuck, I have to carve these beautiful bitches.

The entire time I spent carving the turkeys, I had people picking off the platters. I usually remind people that I have a knife and they should step the fuck back, but I had too much work to do.


All that was left: 3 lonely carcasses.
Happy Thanksgiving! Hope your mom's turkeys are this good... (but I doubt it.)

 
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