Thanksgiving #10: After The Fact

I know I'm very late with this post, but I'm backdating it to go with the Thanksgiving series. I just couldn't manage cooking and real-time blogging. Maybe for Christmas.

Anyhoo. Let's finish up the greens. In the last post, we'd gotten up to the boiling. After a 40 minute simmer, drain the greens and try to get as much water out of them as possible. Give 'em a good chop.

Make your cream mixture. This was a recipe departure. I added minced garlic, nutmeg and crushed red pepper flakes in addition to the required salt and pepper. Whoever heard of creamed anything without nutmeg?

I then poured this over the greens. Two things bothered me:

A) Was I messing up some good damn greens? As I poured the cream over the greens, I kept thinking, "This is so wrong."

B) I can't really explain it, but something about the pattern created by the greens in the cream (like the upper right of the pic below) freaks me out. I also don't like the site of dry, cracked earth. I'm sure that I'll one day pay somebody a lot of money to figure that out.

It's important to note that there isn't really a lot of cream in this dish.

I chose to use individual ramekins for this dish. It makes the leftovers so much easier. And yes, I skipped the breadcrumbs the recipe called for.

I baked them at 350 degrees. I'll share the finished pic later.

What else can I show you? The Pioneer Woman's squash. Isn't it pretty? The next time I make this, I won't go for the syrup. The brown sugar adds enough sweetness.

Let's knock out the rolls. I just didn't have the heart or time for my usual yeast rolls. I decided to go with Williams-Sonoma's Sally Lunn Herbed Rolls. No kneading? I'm all for it. The dough was very sticky. It was also more like a batter.

Check out all the herbs that went into these. What else can you expect from an herbed roll recipe?

Here's the dough after the first rise and a push down with a wooden spoon:

Now you have to get all of this goodness into a muffin tin. I used a large scoop to portion. Cover with plastic wrap and let them rise. The tops aren't perfectly smooth because I didn't do the greatest job of greasing the plastic wrap before I covered the rolls.

Brush the top with an egg wash and bake. You're supposed to put a whole herb leaf on the top of every roll. Maybe next time.

The winners this year were really the creamed collard greens, cranberry sauce and coconut cake. The disappointment was the turkey, but I'm blaming that on truffle butter that wasn't what it was supposed to be. I'll do separate posts for finishing the turkey and the coconut cake.