We bought Rufus a new coat at the craft fair last weekend. The one he wore home from the kennel is nice, but more of a spring/fall coat which wouldn’t be warm enough for the snowy winter we’re expecting. Because we’re indulgent (having no kids to spend money on), this new coat is an extra-special model, complete with a snood.

With snood in place, Ru reminded me of someone, but it took a few minutes before I realized he’s descended from royalty:

After all of that stressing out over the turkey, I’m overjoyed to report that the excess dry brining didn’t hurt one bit; that was one delicious bird. It had a very concentrated turkey flavor because the cells weren’t flooded with water, so now I have a go-to method for all of the Thanksgivings in my future. Also, I’m looking forward to being the very last food blogger on earth to try the Zuni method with chicken.

I was so busy cooking and serving yesterday that I forgot to take pictures while everyone was here, but I did remember to capture the first of our (probably many) leftover meals this morning: mashed potato pancakes. Since I used cream cheese in the potatoes, they held together well after sitting in the fridge overnight, so I added an egg and some milk to thin them out a bit and dropped the thick batter by the tablespoon into a hot pan sizzling with butter. With all of that richness, the only thing the pancakes needed was a drizzle of warmed lingonberry jam to put them over the top.

Gil’s family left right after dinner, but our friend Mark and his dog Larry stayed the night, so I had another opportunity to rectify my photo laziness by capturing the Many Moods of Larry this morning.

cute doggie pics after the jump

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brined & roasted turkey breast with roasted onions, garlicky savoy cabbage, and caramelized apples

Any of you who’ve seen me on Facebook this week know I’ve been ever-so-slightly stressing over cooking Thanksgiving dinner for seven. It isn’t the number of people or even cooking a full meal for them, it’s the turkey that’s getting to me. Can someone please explain the allure of turkey? I’ve never been a fan, and always managed to avoid more than the token piece whenever it was served. It isn’t even that it’s usually dry, because I’m more of a dark meat fan. It’s just so … dull, more like a meat substitute than real meat.

Given my indifference to the bird, it should come as no surprise that I have no experience cooking it. So, observing (for the first time in my life) the rule that you never serve anything to guests you haven’t made at least once before, I did a dry run a couple of weeks ago using Alton Brown’s brine recipe. It garnered rave reviews online, but I thought the turkey was still meh, though moistly meh, granted. So hey, that’s something.

But last week the heavens parted when I read the LA Times article on the Zuni Café method of roasting a turkey and decided to give that a try, as it promises flavorful turkey with delicious crispy skin. The problem is, I had to start it Sunday because I didn’t want to deal with it before work at 5am Monday, so it’ll brine a little bit longer than the 3 days + 8 hours recommended in the recipe. Claudia warned me against it, but I’m an irrepresible risk-taker. Hell, I’m a maverick. (I just had to find a way to get that in there, sorry.) And I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the extra day of salting doesn’t ruin the bird, but we’ll have plenty of sides to munch on if it isn’t great.

So my menu, traditional though it may be, is:

turkey
roasted sweet potato and butternut squash soup
wild rice salad
mashed potatoes and gravy
roasted asparagus with parmesan
corn pudding
cranberry chutney (I can’t find this recipe online, but it came from the November 2008 issue of Martha Stewart Living)
apple crisp

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! May your birds be juicy and your desserts plentiful.

Gil spent the better part of the week in Atlanta for a conference, so he and Ru are awfully happy to be reunited.

Cute, but I think I’ve just taken the poster shot for NAMDLA.

Breakfast is a subject I take seriously. Most mornings I start the day with some sort of heart-healthy cereal because let’s face it, I’m not getting any younger. But on weekends, that sensible thing flies right out the window, especially when I’m waking up to a frosty morning.

And nothing says weekend breakfast like eggs — they’re so delicious and versatile. Saturday morning, the last of our farmers’ market eggs provided the base for a refrigerator frittata — we had leeks, potatoes and a big bag of spinach hanging around, so into the pan they went along with some pecorino romano and good, fruity olive oil. Just the thing to get us going.

Our Sunday ritual continued with taking Rufus to the 9am (!) greyhound hike at Wawayanda State Park, so I decided to make another big breakfast to keep the chill out of my bones on the long trek. One of my favorite things about eggs is that you can poach one and add it to just about any leftover, and presto –  instant brunch! So that’s how I polished off the last of my leftover aloo gobi experiment from a few nights earlier. So good, and it really kept me going on the long hike. I’m not saying this breakfast was the reason I felt energetic all day, but it certainly didn’t hurt.

Grocery shopping with Gil is always an interesting experience. I enjoy lingering in gourmet or international groceries, but at the local Stop & Shop my goal is to get what I need and leave before despair over the state of the produce grips my soul. Gil sees it as an occasion to document the bizarre items that I swear don’t exist on the shelves until he calls them into being.

Because the pictures are starting to pile up, he’s started a regular Tuesday series called Lost in the Supermarket. Stop by every week to see his latest perplexing find!

This week he presents the doubleplusunkosher edition:

Looks like I’ve been tagged. Since I performed so abysmally last time this happened (by taking at least three months to respond to only one question), I made an effort to be more up-to-date here.

Seven Random/Weird Facts About Myself

1. Gonna start out with a bang, here: I have dextrocardia with situs inversus. Another way to put it is all of my internal organs are flipped left-to-right. Yet another way is to say I’m ass-backwards, as many of you have long suspected.

2. The only celebrity I’ve ever been excited to see on the street was Gilbert Gottfried. Seriously. I nearly hugged him, but didn’t want to freak him out.

3. There’s “IM Amy” and “In-person Amy” and never the twain shall meet.

4. I hate parties. As soon as the invitation comes, I get anxious about actually having to talk to people and count the days till it’s over. And then the party comes and I’m fine — sometimes. Social butterfly, not so much.

5. I was an accompanist at several churches growing up, and served as Minister of Music at a Unity church before moving to NY.

6. I’m related to Ron Guidry, but only through marriage, so I still have an excuse for my complete lack of athletic ability.

7. The State of my Hair … is BAD.

My Seven Favorite Blogs
Most of these blogs have too much going on for me to tag, but I’m supposed to pick my favorites, not only the accessible ones. So here they are.

1. I couldn’t have made it through the last year without Andrew Sullivan.

2. I may not be Afrobella’s target audience, but I love her writing, her wit, and her generosity of spirit.

3. Every post at Matt Bites is an inspiration. If someday I can be half the blogger, cook, and photographer he is, I’ll be a very happy woman.

4. Cuz she’s Fly!

5. Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction helps me to structure my thinking, especially about web design.

6. From movies to films and current events, The House Next Door’s got you covered.

7. Even if you don’t agree with their politics (though I tend to), the heds alone are worth a visit to Reason Hit & Run.

I’m not going to tag anyone, but if you’d like to play along on your blog, link back to this post so everyone can check out your responses!

We finally gave in to temptation this weekend and made those chocolate chip cookies. Oh, don’t play coy with me — you know the ones. They’ve been everywhere since the NY Times article ran in July, but we’ve somehow managed to avoid making them until now. This, as it turns out, was a very wise decision, for these cookies are not kind to the waistline.

The ne plus ultra of chocolate chip cookies, they live up to the hype and then some, though I’m not sure if resting the dough mattered quite as much as the sheer size of these delicious monsters. I mean, they weighed in at nearly a quarter pound apiece. When you have that much goodness going on, you get the best of all possible worlds in one cookie — crispy edges and soft, pillowy centers shot through with large hunks of chocolate.

But the addition of sea salt (coarse grind) elevated the whole recipe to something otherwordly. I even added extra to later batches because I wanted a bit of salty crunch with every single bite.

I hate to run, but I really need to sample another cookie, just for quality control purposes. I wouldn’t want my co-workers to experience anything less than the best, after all.

Recipe here.

The daily commute into the city may be rough, but Ringwood really is a beautiful place to live. Gil and I took Rufus for a walk around the lake this morning, and I brought my camera along to show you some of the gorgeous views.

more photos after the jump
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