The We-Will-Make-You-Jealous Thanksgiving blog...Part 1:Thanksgiving Thursday, cooked in 2 locations.

So about the title...No, I'm not just a randomly vengeful person who likes making other jealous by taking random food photos and making lengthy descriptions...it's just that my aunts and cousins were having a reunion on the other side of the country, when they could've come to Chicago instead. In any case, they had their Filipino-food Thanksgiving back in Seattle, and we had our delicious one here, and we took a lot of pictures partly to make them a tiny bit jealous (or to make them wish--even just a little bit--that they could've just come here instead).

8.45 in the morning...woke up, even though I slept at around 2:45 in the morning planning Friday foodventuring (more on that later), making a sample batch of scones, and talking about the inside secrets of the restaurant industry.

9ish...started cooking--making cornbread

9.30ish...photoshoot with cooking utensils and aprons with Mindy (selected pictures from a long series of pictures and a video--note my awesome koala slippers).

10ish...cornbread out of the oven! I forgot where I got this recipe from online (it was pretty standard as a cornbread recipe, but it just had a lot of butter). I didn't like it as much as other cornbread I've had, because this cornbread was more on the dry and mealy side rather than on the sweet and bready side--which I guess is a preference thing on my part.

Sometime between 10 to 12.30...dried green apples for Apple-Cheddar Scones, and made them (but didn't bake them yet) too.

12.30...snacktime with Filipino food! We got turkey from Uni-mart (a Filipino store which is not related to the one in the Philippines), so my uncle got some other stuff, like Lechon Kawali, chopped up and fried pork--which was both fattening and delicious, especially since I had not had breakfast.

Turon! Yum. Delicious banana and jackfruit wrapped in eggrolls and fried with caramelized brown sugar syrup on top. Had this two days later, but it was still good. :)

1ish...Jason's Gingersnap Pumpkin Pies in the oven. The one in the bowl was our sample pie, and it was a delicious snack.

Butternut Squash Soup preparation--shredding the squash.

Baumkuchen (German tree cake)-making time!

(many kitchen appliances--mixer, food processor...sink were running at the same time while this was going on)

4ish...people (Mallory, Sebastian, Mark) head over to the satellite kitchen (Mark's recently renovated kitchen) to bake the baumkuchen, which needs an oven of its own (read the Wikipedia page, it will tell you why--hint: lots of layers). While this is ongoing, the oven in the main kitchen gets more action (cooking and reheating everything), garlic mashed potatoes get made, the table gets set, people go and shower/change...

...and we ate, at about 5:45.

Butternut Squash soup: My cousin Mallory's specialty dish (or at least one of them), which is basically butternut squash and green apples blended together with chicken stock and other things. She served these with a sausage garnish and some Sriracha+sour cream on top. It was delicious. I always like how the sour cream+Sriracha adds a bit of a kick to the otherwise-basic squash soup.

Apple and Cheddar scones: I thought these turned out pretty well, even though I had to change the recipe a bit since I made a mistake with the dough. I added a lot more sugar to these scones though, because the sample batch, which I tried the previous day, was too tart and sharp for my taste. They were good warm, and also with cranberry sauce.

Figs with Prosciutto+Asparagus with Chorizo (done before I woke up, which is why I have no pictures of these in progress): Yum. I've always loved figs, and was so glad that my suggestion to use figs was taken seriously. Haha (yeah, I really shouldn't try to take credit for this dish but whatever). In any case, figs+meat is a delicious combination, as it takes into account the sweet and the savory--and there's just a nice mellowness that comes with the interplay between the two, which was complemented by the goat cheese between the prosciutto wrapping and the fig. Part of me wished that the cheese was a bit sharper, and that there was a little bit of a fruity tartness/acidity for the dish--for example (this is just me randomly thinking), if the prosciutto was brushed with some balsamic vinegar (the one on the sweet/syrupy side) so that it would caramelize while cooking, or if there was like a small piece of pear in between the cheese and the prosciutto...but yeah, it was good as it was. Asparagus was delicious too.

Squash stuffed with beef+Garlic mashed potatoes+cornbread: Squash was from Whole Foods--it was pretty good, I think they brushed some maple syrup on it. Mashed potatoes were very garlicky and fluffy--definitely disregarded the recipe at this point and just put a LOT of garlic (some roasted, some pan-fried) in it, which made it a lot better. Props to Mindy for looking up engineer suggestions for perfect mashed potatoes as a general basis (yay!). Cornbread was okay--buttery but slightly dry.

Lechon Turkey: From Uni-Mart, the Filipino grocery store nearby. Lechon is more normally thought of as roasted suckling pig over a fire, but other things can be called lechon. We asked the people working at Uni-Mart why they called the turkey lechon, and they said they used the same seasonings for this turkey as they did for the lechon, and just cooked it the normal way. It was delicious and very moist. It was also delicious as paksiw (stewed with liver sauce, vinegar, peppercorn, garlic, onions and sugar) a few days after.

Chorizo-Cornbread Stuffing (also done before I woke up): I really liked this, because I thought it stayed very moist, was slightly crisp (because of the browned cornbread), and was very flavorful because of the chorizo. Was also good (and not dry) as leftovers for the next few days after.

Gingersnap Pumpkin Pie, topped with ginger-infused whipped cream and ginger syrup (not in recipe): Of course, by this time we were all stuffed, but dessert is a must-have, and this pie was good. I liked how the crust (made from gingersnaps) had a more interesting texture and bite through the addition of the candied ginger to it (made by Jason the night before), and the subtlety of the ginger flavor was brought out even more with the ginger-infused whipped cream and ginger syrup. Normally I don't like gingery things, but it was just nice and subtle, and it just made sense in this pie.

Baumkuchen: When I read the recipe for this (not attached because it's not from online), I was blown away by the amount of butter it required (7 sticks--maybe more, if I'm not mistaken), as well as the large amount of skill+effort+time needed to do this laborious cake. I was in mild shock when I saw how much cake was made (one big ring+one big sheet pan), but the efforts were not in vain. Cake was good, a bit on the dense side though (but then again, I had eaten so much at this point, so that was probably affecting my judgement).

Overall, a successful Thanksgiving with a lot of eating...and can you believe we ate a lot again the next day?

Deep fried everything, the unhealthiest "meal" in my life (ever) and the itis.

Sorry that this is late. I started it the day I did it, but am only finishing it now (midterms+work+lack of sleep explain the long gap in between).

So it was Daylight Savings Time Day.

To celebrate, I suppose, the extra hour of the day, I spent two hours (or one hour, depending on how you look at it) learning all about deep-fried food for a school event (part of the Culinary Club). Suffice to say, it was very enlightening and extremely unhealthy, but there's just something about deep-fried food that both repels you and draws you in at the same time.

Deep-fried broccoli: I think that this cancels out the nutritional value of the vegetables, but the broccoli was surprisingly good--it was cooked all the way inside and was nicely encapsulated in its breaded...sphere.

Deep-fried sweet potatoes: Was a bit like eating sweet potato fries (which we also experimented with), but at first the sweet potatoes were a bit raw on the inside. The second batch of this involved par-boiling the sweet potatoes a bit before dipping them into the batter and frying them, which turned out a lot better.

Fried Chicken: Fried the chicken legs and breast pieces in Crisco (shortening) instead of normal vegetable oil, which we used for everything else. Using Crisco made the chicken skin much more crisp, such that its skin had a crackly texture. Of course, the chicken that we made couldn't compare with the chicken I've had in Southern Kitchen (or for that matter, fast food places like KFC and Jollibee)...but it was still good--and I have to say that it was very juicy on the inside and not dry (which is a common problem for a lot of fried chicken I've had in the past).

Deep-fried Snickers bars: Our "dessert" for that afternoon snack, the candy bars were first frozen (recommendation is to freeze them a day beforehand), then dipped in tempura batter (with a lot of sugar added to it) and deep-fried. These were probably my favorite part of the "meal," because they were so unexpectedly delicious, even though I was fully aware of the large amounts of combined fat and sugar I was putting into my system. The caramel-peanut filling oozed out of the Snickers bars when you bit into them, and the fried chocolate outer layer allowe everything to come together to completion.

...Oh, totally forgot.

The after-effects of eating deep-fried food, are called "the itis,"a general feeling of sluggishness, satisfaction, sleepiness and satiation. It was a lot of (unhealthy) food, and a lot of carbs. The entire experience made me come to appreciate what I had previously thought was a pretty crazy part of the American sub-culture of deep-frying (I mean, I still think it's pretty crazy, but can appreciate it more now).