Thanksgiving, why I'm enamoured of butternut squash and why higher education is failing
First off, all the recipes that I didn't get a chance to try out on my Uncle and his family, turned out just about perfectly for Thanksgiving with our friends.
I was sweating bullets because I hadn't tested them before making them. But, they were some of the best recipes I've made for this particular holiday. Especially the Butternut Squash Apple soup (to be served with optional blue cheese cream and/or toasted pepitas). The cheese cream wasn't necessary - neither were the pepitas - but they were a pleasant addition.
Had I not added the "better than boullion" chicken base to the soup, however, it might have really needed the cheese and seeds but, as it was, it needed nothing more.
I'd cut the butter called for in half (2 sticks seemed a little excessive even if it was for a 1 1/2 gallon quantity). This soup is like velvet in texture, it's extremely satisfying, received compliment after compliment and seemed to be one of the biggest highlights of dinner. I LOVE it! And plan to make it a staple in our household.
Let me know if your interested and I'll send you my version of the recipe. The only change I would have made to the other dishes is not adding bacon grease to the butter that graced the green beans (by the way, Blue Lake Green Beans rock). I probably would have stuck with bacon grease *infused* butter. No matter - it turned out great :-)
The thyme roasted sweet potatoes (with a little bit of a bite supplied by red pepper flakes) was a welcome change from the intensly sweet versions usually offered up at this time of year.
The mashed potatoes were a huge hit but how can you go wrong with sour cream and cream cheese whipped russets topped with a dusting of paprika and Turkey Gravy?
I feasted on sides and only indulged in about 2 ounces of white meat turkey. I had the mistaken impression this would save me from the distended stomach syndrome. I was wrong (and I only had one reasonably filled plate!)
Entertainment for the evening was discussion of quantum physics, the nature of philosophy and where it intersects with science, laughing uproariously at some essay papers turned in by one of the guest's college level astronomy class (the worst of the lot he'd read).
He's an adjunct professor at a Cal State campus and the quality of the papers was beyond humorous. As a matter of fact, if we thought about it for too long, it became depressing.
It wasn't just a matter of English as a second language students. If you know what to look for in sentence structure you can pick those out of the group fairly easily and understand why the paper may seem to be "off". These were "how the h*ll did this person pass the entrance exams?!" papers.
The 11 year old daughter of one of the guests could write better. But, the icing on the cake was one particular paper. The first paragraph was the same sentence - poorly re-worded in each instance - over and over again. The "how can I use up space and/or word requirements" school of writing.
The second paragraph was practically prose. Had I been given enough time, I might have found just exactly the paper it was lifted from through a thorough Google search. The kicker was this: in the second paragraph, there was a notation of reference 151...no matter that there were barely 150 *words* prior to that paragraph, much less references....but there it was. (151) The paragraph also noted (Figure 1) at the end. Of course, there was no Figure provided. Crimeny sakes! If you're going to plagiarise at least be intelligent about it!.
There was also movie viewing. Since the family had never seen Wall-E on the big screen, I bought it the minute it came out. Lil Miss B is in love with the film as am I.
There's this very odd sychronicity thing that hit me while watching it. Peter Gabriel has been the "mood music" for so many of the wonderful transitions in my life - to hear him again on the soundtrack of a film that touched me so deeply on so many levels made me smile. Mayhap I have a kindred spirit. That said, I don't plan to engage in the Hollywood past time of "stalker"dom.