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This is the turkey I roasted for Thanksgiving. This year I celebrated T-Day with a bunch of my Cleveland-based friends who live in New York. I hosted at my apartment. Here is my good friend and roommate Zachariah carving the turkey. He looks like he’s doing a great job!
The turkey I made this year was an herb-mustard roasted turkey with a sourdough pretzel stuffing. I brined the turkey overnight in salt and sugar water, and made an herb mustard butter to rub down the turkey and baste with. The herb mustard butter contained 1.5 stixxx of butter, 2 huge tablespoons of dijon mustard, a giant handful of fresh finely chopped flat-leaf parsely, green onions, and thyme, and salt, pepper and honey. This is the stuff that is sludged all over the turkey in the photo above. Below are some photos of its preparation:
The stuffing is made like normal stuffing, except instead of croutons, I used sourdough dough pretzel “nibblerz”. Plus, no additional salt is needed to season the stuffing because pretzel’s have built-in salt. It’s good!!
The real beauty of a “friends’” Thanksgiving is that it’s like a high-end pot luck dinner. It’s not really a ton of work for the host because everyone brings something. As a result, there’s always way too much food, there’s always a ton of carb-heavy dishes, and oh yeah, sooooooooo much alcohol (8 cases of beer, 1 bottle of whiskey, one giant bottle of vodka, one little bottle of scotch, 2 bottles of champagne, 2 bottles of white wine, 4 bottles of red wine, and a big stock pot of hot 151 apple cider, HOLY SHIT WTF).
For dinner, we had FOUR varieties of stuffing (pretzel stuffing, bacon stuffing, cornbread stuffing, vegetarian stuffing with pine nuts), 3 pies (pecan, pumpkin, blueberry), pumpkin risotto, mashed spiced sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, meat and veggie gravy, roasted root vegetable medley, 2 fresh cranberry sauces (jalapeno and orange), and I don’t remember anything else.
Before dinner, we had wonderful snacks as well. Shawn Lovejoy brought over a wonderful cheese plate with very fine cheeses, Jed brought over a shrimp cocktail as well as some beet goat cheese croissant wheels.
Thanksgiving was fun!
Now about this HOT DOG. I was actually reminded of this hot dog upon uploading these thanksgiving photos onto my computer, because these hot dog photos were still on my digital camera’s memory card. This was actually one of the best hot dogs I’ve ever eaten. It was in Los Angeles right outside of The Smell at like 3 am. There were these beautiful Latino ladies grilling hot dogs on an aluminum foil covered shopping cart.
Let me tell you about these hot dogs. First of all the hot dog itself was twice the size of a normal hot dog. It was topped with perfectly grilled onions, bacon, mayonnaise and poblano peppers. Some dude came up to me before I bought my hot dog and said to me, “This is the BEST hot dog you will ever eat. I am not related to these women, and I am telling you this! This is the BEST hot dog you will ever eat!!” He was right! Everything about it was awesome.
Afterwards, Molly twirled baton. The End!!!!
