Thanksgiving

Happy belated Thanksgiving, everyone.  I am thankful for my health and my family's health, happiness, and prosperity; I am thankful for my co-blogger.

I have been pretty busy this break, with a Thanksgiving dinner, wedding, and a day trip to New Jersey all in the past three days, so here's my belated Thanksgiving blog post.

meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow....

Every Thanksgiving, my family spends our evening at my cousins' house in Brooklyn.  Their house is actually a one-floor apartment - tight on space and high on kitschy/eclectic decoration, but always as cozy as I remember it as a kid.  They have also accumulated a menagerie of pets - a fierce pug named Poncho, and four extremely pet-able cats named  Blue, Highway, Maverick, and Remy.

Thanksgiving dinner consists of at least 20 people, crowded around a dinner table artificially extended by other desks and surfaces.  This is our usual setting for giving thanks and feasting on this holiday, and I love it.  See, my household, if we had to do a Thanksgiving dinner, would stick with chicken and Chinese food because that's all my parents know how to cook.  At my cousins', they're more progressive, so we get the turkey, side dishes, dessert: the works.  I'm very grateful for them for hosting us every year.

antipasti

This year, we had an Italian-themed round of appetizers, with antipasti (olives, cheese, salami, prosciutto, pepperoni), bruschetta (thinly sliced, super crunchy garlic bread and a chopped tomato-onion topping), and potato knishes (okay, maybe that's not very Italian, but they were very good - a thin skin around fluffy smashed potatoes).

As the appetizers were cleared away for the main courses, enormous heaping plates of food starting appearing on the table.  I imagine the tables sag a lot under the weight of a dozen or more dishes.  There was: ham, potato croquettes, pasta shells, eggplant parmesan, chicken parmesan, rice balls, stuffed mushrooms, mashed potatoes, apple sauce, cranberry sauce, apple stuffing, sausage stuffing, sweet potatoes, deep-fried broccoli (?), and turkey, of course!

layer-upon-layer Thanksgiving dinner

I love shrooms!!!!1!!1!!!

Everything is delicious and if I had no self control, I would eat my weight in everything, but this year I tried to exercise some restraint so I wouldn't end up having to go home unable to wear my pants.  My one favorite and most notable thing, however, is the stuffed mushroom dish.  I wait all year for my aunt's stuffed mushrooms.  Oh gosh.  So good.  The mushrooms are button mushrooms slightly bigger than a quarter in diameter, and topped with stuffing.  The stuffing on the mushrooms is somehow a little more tangy than the stuffing dish, and it's almost indescribable why it is so good.  All I know is that I always scoop up all the leftovers into Tupperware to take home after dinner.

cream.  puffs.

Typically, we all bring dessert items, potluck-style.  My family usually gets some sweets from West End Bakery on 18th Avenue, a tiny old Italian bakery that has great...everything.  For desserts, we had Italian cookies, pumpkin cheesecake, sesame cookies, homemade cream puffs, fruit, and coffee.  I always enjoy the homemade pumpkin cheesecake because it is the perfect combination of pumpkin pie in a creamier context.  The cream puffs were fresh and light and addictive...I may or may not have eaten three.  In a row.

I am so thankful for Thanksgiving and all the delicious food it entails!