• 3 shots ginger beer (we liked goslings and barritts best, with final nod to barritts)
• 1-2 shots vodka (1.75 was optimal, according to the tipsy guinea pigs — we used Prairie Organic vodka that we got at the wine source)
• a scant 1 shot of lime-ginger syrup (based loosely on this recipe)

Sweet, but not too much so. And deliciously tart and gingery at the same time!

Overall, I thought quantities were spot-on. More leftovers would have been eaten, but I think people were happy to get to move back to seafood, especially since Ali whipped up another amazing chowder on Saturday with a turkey stock base. This was an unexpected highlight of the weekend for me. But onto the annual fare breakdown…

As usual, we brined the turkey overnight. Then Aaron split the bird (17lbs, for 7-9 people, depending on how you count 1-year-olds and those who showed up for leftovers only) in half and we tied ‘em up into two nice bundles and roasted the halves over big pans of stuffing. The flesh was super tasty — nice and juicy — and the outsides were tasty too: one bird dry-rubbed with herbs and the other with a honey/cider/maple glaze. Definitely worth considering this method for future birds, although, as you will hear about below, I missed the in-turkey stuffing.

We made the same three cranberry sauces as last year, with similar results. One bag of cranberries for each recipe. We ran out of the raw sauces way before the cooked one, and too early, for my tastes. I think we would have gone through at least another bag’s worth of sauce, if not two. Of the two raw sauces (which were combined, upon leftover space-optimizing), I think consensus was that the ginger one was more widely liked.

Gravy was DE-LISH. Still not sure that it was worth three burners going for 5 hours to get every last brown bit and drop of fat from the turkey, but, I guess I can’t complain, given how much people LOVE themselves some gravy. Note to kitchen-elves: be sure to distinguish caramel sauce from gravy in leftover containers. There were unconfirmed reports of plates of turkey/stuffing leftovers being dumped in the trash after being inadvertently sauced with caramel.

I’ve been having mixed reminiscences about the stuffing. We made two batches this year — one with oysters (!!) and another that was nutty and dried-fruity. They all had some turkey-ness in them because all the stuffing fit into two pans, both of which were dripped on by cooking turkey for 3+ hours. Both had distinctive and good flavors (although one — the oyster one? — came out a little too salty). However, I missed the juicy, sticky uber-flavorful stuffing that you get from inside the bird — even if it means I just get a spoonful or two. I also wonder if in our attempt to make delightful and slightly adventuresome stuffing if we haven’t gotten away from something simple and delicious. I had one of the last nibbles of stuffing from my folks’ thanksgiving and it was scrumptious. Lots of crushed savory flavoring, a little mushy, and totally delicious. Note to self to push a pan of simpler stuffing next year.

Onto the veggies. I feel like we did a good job giving a diverse array of good veggies. Although honestly, I basically don’t remember much of them. I was glad to have them, they fill the edges and a bite or two takes the guilt away from all the other stuff. I think we did a good job of not spending too much time on any of these things (except maybe the sweet potatoes) this year.

• Mashed Sweet Potatoes with Banana and Brown Sugar was a winner.
• roasted brussels sprouts — cooked entirely while the turkey was cooling/being carved. These were awesome. Don’t believe anything anyone else says.
• green beans w/slivered almonds.
• salad. (great, but, after much argument about how much was needed, more was dressed for the big dinner than we needed and we ended tossing some out the next day. Moral of the story — as I see it at least — lots of salad is good, pre-dressing is bad.
• Mashed potatoes were good, as usual. Nice to have two versions, one which seemed to be more artery-crushing than the other. I missed the ritual of cheesy mashed potatoes, but my stomach appreciated having more room for other things too. Not sure how many pounds of potatoes we ended up getting. Anyone remember?

Desserts:

• Pumpkin bread pudding with caramel sauce. Need I say more?
• Pumpkin pie.  if sewer rat tasted like this pumpkin pie…
• Apple pie. This joy of cooking holiday staple got lots of compliments. Perhaps because it was square. Who knows?

Anyone else have thoughts to share for posterity and later recollection?

I’ve spent a few hours these last few days going through my digital address books and trying to sync them up. We’ll see if the system maintains itself. That’s the key — that I don’t really want to have to think about it much going forward other than the occasional adding/changing of an address. More details below the fold for those of you who want to skip to the baby pictures (I don’t blame you).

Here’s the (rough) instructions for how I took control of my contacts (at least for now). I am running Mac OS X 10.6.3 and Address Book 5.0.1.

1. Backup both your google contacts list AND your address book addresses. Both programs have simple export tools. Figure them out yourself.

2. In Address Book, went to Preferences > Accounts > Account Information. Selected the “synchronize with Google” box and entered my gmail account and password.

3. This automatically put the iSync icon on the menu bar at the very top of my screen. You can remove it by option-clicking and dragging it off the menu bar. But I wouldn’t do that just yet, as I did.

4. Open both your address book AND your google contacts page, side by side if possible. Run a sync by clicking on the iSync icon and saying “Sync now”.

5. Observe any changes and you might have to adjudicate some conflicts between similar contacts. This process didn’t really make sense to me, but it didn’t seem to disrupt too many of my existing contacts, although it did create a lot of duplicates. I tried to use the “merge contacts” function on Google, but it didn’t help.

6. Wait a few minutes, reload both apps, to make sure all the changes have gone through. I noticed that the total number of cards in my address book did not quite equal the total number of contacts in Google. It appears that some of my Address Book contacts are in the “My Contacts” list on Google and some are in the “All Contacts” list. For example, I have 389 contacts in Address Book, but only 317 of them are in My Contacts. The rest are in All Contacts. Google says that it only syncs contacts in My Contacts, but maybe that means that they only push changes that are made in My Contacts to the Address Book contacts.

7. In any case, this was when I started playing around. I made a few changes in one application and then synced and checked the changes. I found it much easier to navigate Address Book and make changes there. So I went through a huge number of cards, deleting old contacts or contacts whose info I don’t trust to be current anymore. This took a few hours. But I winnowed down the list from 900+ to just under 400.

8. I saved it, thinking of this as my master contact list that I would use to backup if anything happens.

9. Then I ran a final sync. This seems to have worked. No more dupes, mostly people who are legitimate contacts, etc…

10. Now there’s the issue of maintaining the list, and I wonder how ongoing communication through gmail will add to my contacts over time. Will the address book get muddled again? Will new duplicate contacts appear?

Overall, I was surprised that the programs don’t seem to use email addresses as some kind of primary identifier of records. It seems much more unique than anything else you could use, as the software seems to have made some choices based on names at different points.