Thanksgiving Leftovers and Postmortem

So the day was lovely, went well, remembered to serve all the food for once, having taken the precaution of putting all the items on a previously emptied shelf in the fridge, weather was nice enough for a walk between courses.

And here are most of the leftovers, not many this year, today's lunch.  

Shared with Handsome Son, who left me some pumpkin pie and cheese and crackers and took home a meal's worth of turkey and cranberry jelly but passed on the vegetables.  The turkey leg roulade was not an unqualified success.  For one thing it took much longer to cook than the recipe claimed, and the meat itself, while it tasted good, was not sliceable into the neat rounds they promised.  More of a good tasting shambles, to be exact.

Son suggested that perhaps the pix with the online recipe were not of a leg rouladed, but of a turkey breast,which I now think is correct.  Even they couldn't make this one look neat.  He also wondered if they'd actually tested this recipe at all, or just used clip art and a series of guesses as to how it would work.  We indulged in all this bitter dialog while whipping into it, I ought to admit.

However, the stuffing was good, and all that extra the recipe made  will go into some bird for Christmas, maybe cornish game hens, we'll see.  I still like the principle, just doubt whether the turkey leg is a good subject.

The cranberry jelly was out of a can, this being HS favorite, and I got a can of what claimed to be cranberry sauce, but which turned out to be another jelly. Hm.  Cranberry and raspberry.  Which in fact was pretty good, even if there was a big lie on the label. To me a cranberry sauce has whole fruit, and it pours from the can, as if you'd made it yourself, which I didn't this year.

The applesauce was excellent, great apples went into it, and it really paid off.  And the delicata squash and various other farm veggies played their part just fine.   In fact a lot of the veggies were finished on the day.  Handsome Son attended to the baking of the pie in between watching Poirot, causing him to miss essential plot points and be unable to fill me in on them, since I had fallen off into a little doze on the sofa..

All in all, a very nice day, and thank you all for the notes and emails and comments and texts on the day.  Also my friends who left a bag of Indian goodies to add in, hanging from the doorknob before they left for the weekend. Included was a little gold box of chocolates with a jingle bell attached, which has now become the first item on the ficus tree, which acts the part of a seasonal conifer.

Plenty to be thankful for, I'd say.  My birthday comes in a couple of weeks, and  Handsome Son is inviting me to his place to cook me lunch, his choice of menu.  Usually he comes here, but I thought it would save his carting about all the ingredients and tools (he doesn't trust my kitchen tools).  So that will be great.  This will be a double digit birthday, both numbers the same, and I wonder if there's a name for that?  any blogistas who happen to know, please say.  No, I'm not 99.  Yet.

No mention of Christmas is allowed until my bday is past.  Not that I have an exaggerated sense of my importance, at least that's my story, it's just that, well, the season doesn't begin till then.  Even if there's a jingle bell already in place.