Non-Traditional Thanksgiving, Part 4

We celebrated Thanksgiving this year in a terrific little rental house in Pacific Grove, on the Monterey peninsula.  The house belongs to Donna Schaffer, a professional painter who does seascapes.

Our appetizer was Jiffy Pop Shrimp (recipe here) from Emeril's Christmas, a little celebrity cookbook I picked up at a yard sale.  Before:

After:

This was amusing and fairly good.  However, as you can see from the picture it was kind of hard to get all of the popcorn to pop before the shrimp became overdone.  Mind you, it's possible that I wasn't using the best popcorn.  Anyway, it went well with our apertif, Segura Vidas Cava.

This was followed by a roasted beet, mandarin orange and pecan salad, recipe from Williams-Sonoma's New Orleans.  According to this and one other cookbook, madarins come into season just before Thanksgiving in Louisiana as they do in California.  This was excellent and I'd make it again.  Wine accompaniment: Fume Blanc from Sierra Vista winery, a great pungent dry white.

For the main course, my in-laws had brought 2lbs of halibut caught by their neighbor in Oregon.  This was quite fortunate since there is no dungeness crab yet this year.  So what we have above is: seared halibut steaks topped with Creole Sauce (recipe from Tom Fitzmorris's New Orleans Food), Pat's cranberry relish, and PG-13 Rice with mirltons (own recipe, to follow in a later blog post).  The mirltons, also called chayote, are because these squash are a traditional holiday menu item in NOLA according to at least one of the cookbooks I checked out.  Our main course wine was Tobin James' LaGrein 2008 Reserve, an excellent deep-flavored tannic red.

Dessert was a stunningly decadent double-chocolate brioche bread pudding with salted caramel sauce.  Bread pudding recipe from Dam Good Sweet; caramel sauce from Trader Joe's.  No dessert wine, though; we were boozed enough.

As well as giving us some variety, the great thing about not doing the typical turkey+starch+starch+starch is that we didn't feel horribly bloated at the end of the meal ... or the next day. You should give it a try next year!

Although Pat said that she wanted to swipe someone else's turkey bones when she got home just so that she could make soup.