Cookinig I

In one pan, I have the vegetables for the dressing - onions, celery, diced carrots (a first for me) and baby bella mushrooms with bay leaves, pepper, salt-free poulty seasoning and a quarter-cup of Imagine vegetable broth, which will be the liquid and the salt. I'm cooking them with oil and margarine for that authentic taste (my mother always used margarine for this.) In the other, I have thinly sliced onions frizzling in oil and pepper. I've already toasted the slivered almonds. These will be combined with the green beans.

As soon as jonbaker comes back from the grocery store, I'll make the dressing and put it in the oven. (I forgot eggs last night. MUST have an egg in this stuffing. Fortunately, my brother-in-law has no objections to eggs.)

Turkey is thawed. I'll put it in the oven the same way I did for Rosh HaShanah - on a bed of celery, onions and carrots as an edible rack. It goes in upside down and gets turned around halfway through - I'll do that around twelve. If necessary, I'll take out the pan of stuffing then. Then I clean off my salad greens (I got two red leaf lettues and a bunch of arugula and some parsley - I like herby salads) and dry them and put them in the salad bowl with the other salad vegetables.

Then all that will remain in terms of cooking is reheating the soup (with some water and maybe veggie broth, although I'm seriously thinking of adding soy milk - it just seems to be a very small amount of soup) and cooking the green beans.

In the time it took me to write the above, my frizzled onions were done, as were the stuffing veggies,and I realized I needed to put my monster turkey in the oven. So it's there, on its tummy, covered with poulty seasoning and cooking spray, with a fancy probe thermometer it its thigh. I'll turn it over in a couple of hours.

Cooking 1.5

Cause - not so much more has been cooked. I have the cider "mulling" in the crockpot. I just turned the turkey on its back. I have constructed a centerpiece from the stunning glass bowl my inlaws gave me for our fifteenth anniversary. She normally arranges fruits and nuts, including a pineapple, on a long, thin silver tray. I arranged fruits and nuts - NO pineapple - in a medium, round bowl. It still looks nice. The arugula is being desanded. I made a salad dressing.

I haven't started reheating the soup, though, and unti l take the turkey out of the oven, I can't put the dressing in, as there isn't enough room.

I'm going to ask my father-in-law to carve.

Delay

Irt's 4:15, everyone's here, everything's ready...

Except for the turkey, which is now about 160°F. *Sigh*

Final Report

It was *fine*. leela_cat, everyone LOVED your soup - even the five-year-old. In fact, she ate everything. Zoë, you see, loves turkey and as her Mitch is a vegetarian, she doesn't get it often. (Well, he does eat fish. He got tilapia tonight.)

The meat-free stuffing worked beautifully - I can recommend Imagine Vegetable broth. The turkey, once it was done, was delicious and moist, and I still have half it it to go.

And my sister-in-law is pregnant. She had to find the right blood pressure med - she has high blood pressure - but she has. She's about nine weeks along, she's feeling fine - much better than her first pregnancy - and. YAY! They're in their thirties, they've been married over a year and there's already a Zoë, and Jocelyn has her RN and can put school off for awhile, so it's perfect. And we get another niece or nephew to spoil. As is our job.