i suggest you make yogurt cheese

Because it’s freaking delicious. Basically you take some yogurt, drain it (either in a yogurt drainer or doubled up cheese cloth) for a few days, roll it into balls and marinate in a mixture of dried chiles (i used the ubiquitous arbol), garlic and dill. It was unbelievably good when I served it for hors’deouvres on Thanksgiving. Though next time I might just scratch the whole ball making step as it was frustrating and impeded me getting these balls in my mouth. However, if you just did a bowl of this stuff swimming in the marinade, you lose out on fun jokes about marinating your balls. Of which I made a few that weekend. I am a garlic fiend and these totally hit that sweet spot of garlicky goodness.

Adapted from Victoria Jenanyan Wise

Here’s a picture of the yogurt balls in their natural environment.

home for thanksgiving

I haven’t been home for Thanksgiving since I left for college in 2000. OMG, that is a total travesty. I miss my mom’s stuffing so much! So this year, I traveled back to Chapel Hill with Miguel to visit the fam and eat lots of my mom’s cooking. But my brother has also invited his girlfriend, Katie, who is a vegetarian. So Mom changes the Thanksgiving menu to all veggie except for the turkey and apparently stuffing is no good without chicken broth, so no stuffing on the menu. Thank god we were celebrating Xmas two days later, so my mom ingenuously made turkey stock out of the Thanksgiving bird and used it to make the best stuffing ever.

The players:
My mom, the brilliant but sometimes absentminded chef. There was a lot of chard preparation on Thanksgiving and the caramelized onions didn’t make in into the frittata.

But, there was homemade hard apple cider to enjoy with spiced nuts during the cocktail hour.

My dad does a mean grilled turkey.

Katie might be having second thoughts on vegetarianism after checking out the turkey.

My plate is looking supremely tasty. Starting with the cranberry sauce and moving clockwise: cranberry (my dad’s recipe, best ever), garlic mashed potatoes, caramelized onion frittata with smoked tomato sauce, chard with pinenuts and raisins from the Cafe Pasqual cookbook (see picture of Miguel and cider), buttered carrots, cornbread, and turkey.

David and Katie are almost too into the Arkansas-LSU game (for good measure-how many overtimes! plus Katie is from Little Rock) to enjoy David’s famous pumpkin pie. This year he made the crust from a Cook’s Illustrated recipe which replaces 1/2 the water with vodka producing a flaky crust that is super easy to roll out.

The next day we visited David at work at the Federal in Durham, NC. They have a great selection of beers on tap, many of them locally brewed. They also have very tasty food like the Carolina style bbq pork sandwich.

YUM!

Two days later it was magically Christmas which we always celebrate with Xmas crackers.

We enjoyed fabulous brussel sprouts, Julia Child’s roast pork loin (the end piece is the best!), wild rice pilaf, my favorite stuffing, and warm lentil salad with goat cheese. I wish I had taken a picture of the first course: salad with roasted beets with walnuts. Those were the best beets ever!

Surprise! It’s also my birthday. I think there’s a time/space continuum malfunction in Chapel Hill.

And, as we always say at my household “Tutti a tavola a mangiare!” Oh wait, that’s Lidia Bastianich’s family.