No Room For Pie

     It was a good Thanksgiving dinner -- even though we had it for supper.  (I slept in.)

     We have a favorite main dish and side.  A five-pound turducken roll, with a little spicy sausage inside the chicken, surrounded by duck and enveloped in turkey.  I put it on a rack in an oval roasting pan over a slow fire in the covered grill, and once it was up to temperature, added big chunks of turnip and parsnip and about a cup of chicken bone broth.  I topped the turducken roll with a sliced, peeled orange and a couple of pickled piparra peppers, and eventually added carrots, celery and a red onion.

     I did other things for an hour and a half.

     That left plenty of time to cut up some baking potatoes into medium-sized pieces (unpeeled; YMMV) and stack them on paper toweling to dry while I fried up six slices of lightly peppered applewood-smoked bacon, producing about a quarter-cup of fat.  I started microwaving the potatoes in a big Pyrex bowl.  With the bacon draining, I added a quarter-cup of flour and kept stirring while it got darker and darker.  When I thought it was ready, I added about two cups of mushroom-chicken bone broth* and kept stirring.  It got a little thicker than I wanted, so I used up the remainder of the plain chicken bone broth and kept stirring.  When I was happy with the consistency, I snipped all the bacon into it.  Made with the broth, it's a dark-brown gravy, rich and smoky.  I'd kept zapping and stirring the potatoes; I went after them with a sharp knife, added some butter, used a knife a little more, then added milk and switched to large dinner fork.  This is more work than a masher or a mixer but I like the results.  It took an entire container of UHT milk, call it one cup, to get them the way I liked.

     The turducken was nicely done by then; I brought it in and stashed it in the oven while Tam and I rounded up the cats and set up tray tables.  (We've been watching, of all things, a somewhat-debunking documentary on the Stanford Prison Experiment that may show a bit more about human nature -- and "permission structures" -- than it purports to.  Either way, it leaves rather a lot to be thankful for.)

     Potatoes, meat, vegetables and gravy: there was no room for dessert.  But it sure was good!
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* No, I have no idea how that works with mushrooms, either.  They sell the stuff in boxes.  The smallest size is just under two cups.  The chicken-mushroom version is ideal for bacon gravy.