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People are offering home delivery on precooked turkey dinners for our Thanksgiving. Have ordered a turducken dinner at heart stopping prices and keep thinking I ought to cancel it, but the other dinners look very so-so, besides charging for all extras (gravy, cranberry jelly, stuffing if you can have it). Also no guarantee that their turkey isn't a turkey roll. If I'm gonna roll, it'll be something high class like a turducken.

Also annual stock portfolio consultation last Wednesday assures me I have actually made money this year. This cannot last, so I will indulge while I may. Heart stopping turducken comes to two meals out at a moderate restaurant with wine and tip, after all.

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I had to look up turducken, it sounds really interesting! In normal times I order a bone-in green ham for an annual New Year's Eve dinner, and braise it myself in dry cider and a bit of apple juice. Leftovers are frozen in the cooking liquid (which will also make a nice aspic), and used up in sandwiches. I will do that again SOME DAY.

Turducken can be very nice or absolutely appalling. I've had it maybe three times all told. It's a bit over the top but I like the medieval English excess of it.

I imagine one can buy a green ham at the butchers here but all I see in the supermarket are cooked or cured ones. A ham you cook yourself must be truly succulent, especially with the marinade. But it's a lot of meat for one person, so not something I'm ever likely to taste myself.

It does freeze very well, if you have the space, especially if you freeze it in the cooking liquid. I remember one year when my usual size was unavailable and I had to ket a 5kg one I was happily eating it in a ham sandwich once a week for months.

Yikes. 5kg of ham is a mighty big ham. But I suppose is why our fecund peasant ancestors kept pigs.

Yes, it was a bit of a shock when I picked it up at the supermarket! I had to go to a restaurant supply shop to find a pot big enough to fit! And even a dinner for 20 people didn't make much of a dent, since it wasn't the only dish...I think I finished the leftovers in June.

20 people and leftover ham. OK. There must have been a lot of other dishes, because here a 5 kg Christmas turkey is barely enough for twelve, and that's with copious hors d'oeuvres and side dishes.

Oh yes. Ham couldn't be the main dish because I always had Muslim guests, so it had its own separate table. My standard New Year's menu in those days was:

Cider-braised ham
Lamb, chestnut and saffron stew (Iranian recipe)
Shredded chicken with orange juice (ditto)
Prawn and mixed vegetable curry (Sri Lankan)
Mixed vegetable salad
Rice with herbs
New potatoes
Sliced baguette

Home-made brandy fruitcake
Summer pudding (with frozen mixed summer fruit) or fruit jelly (one year I did a mimosa jelly with champagne and orange juice)

Lemongrass and ginger tea
Champagne

My housekeeper and I did most of it in advance, so it was easier to do than it may sound. I usually had leftovers of everything, not just the ham. Except the chicken, which always went home with one particular couple, who adored it...

Edited 2020-09-29 03:21 (UTC)

I'm in awe of you and your housekeeper. But that's still a lot of food even for twenty people. Buffet, I assume?

Had to google summer pudding. It sounds gorgeous. But you're in the tropics, sort of, yes? Don't you get fruit year round?

Yes, it's buffet style, very informal.

Except for pineapple, which is pretty good roasted, and cooking bananas, tropical fruit is much nicer fresh. Summer pudding is a specific UK dish, and requires specific fruit - raspberries, redcurrants, blackberries, strawberries, which are all extremely expensive fresh (except when the Korean strawberries are in - highly recommended, 90% as good as the Japanese ones, which are the best in the world, and half the price). Much easier to go to the catering supply shops or the supermarket and buy "mixed summer fruit" frozen by the kilo. It makes great jelly too. I did that one year, a big glass bowl full of defrosted mixed summer fruit, half a bottle of champagne, some apple juice for sweetness, and a load of gelatine. Delicious after a heavy meal.

The only thing tricky about summer pudding is turning it out intact. I cheat and make it in a glass bowl, so you get the beauty of the colour, without having to upturn the pudding basin.

There is a nice variant called autumn pudding, which uses apples and blackberries, and I had a super non-traditional one in a restaurant once with peaches and blueberries and pistachio nuts.

Ohh that sounds divine. Especially the gelatin variation, which obviates the need for bread or brioche base. Still too heavy on the sugar for me now, but someday... And yes, here too you can get frozen berries year round, though still a bit tasteless compared to the real thing.

So I google autumn pudding and find almost all the webpages have suddenly adopted the British definition of pudding, giving me any number of desserts that have nothing to do with fruit. BBC comes through, but oh dear oh dear. They want pears and plums as well, fruit which in Canada is really hard to get properly ripe and can't be bought frozen.

Pears and plums make good crumble too. And actually if you're going to cook plums, it's better that they're still pretty hard. I tried doing a crumble with ripe plums once, and they dissolved into liquid. I had crumble pastry in plum sauce.

Turducken sounds rather tasty. Enjoy it, say I.

At its best, it's heavenly. I shall hope that price ensures quality as well as free range fowl.

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