Early Thanksgiving Dinner

Last night my small group had a pre-Thanksgiving Day dinner together that was light on the traditional Thanksgiving food and heavy on, as I saw it, some Texas foods and flavors. Pork ribs, baked potatoes, macaroni and cheese, biscuits and salad. Matt and Kristin fired up their grill and made some excellent ribs that were not too messy for my taste. The mac and cheese, courtesy of Sharon and Dan, was really good and a little spicy thanks to the inclusion of Ro-Tel tomatoes. Brian and Kathy provided the biscuits and salad both of which were superb. Aaron baked some taters using our man Alton's instructions, which are:

Preheat oven to 350.

1. Clean your russet potato of dirt and pat it dry.

2. Use a fork to poke holes all over the spud.

3. Lightly coat surface of tater with canola oil, which makes for a nice little crunch on the skin.

4. Sprinkle the potato with kosher salt.

5. Place the tater directly on the rack in middle of oven.

6. Wait about an hour and your spud should be done.

For my contribution I made two pies, with mixed aesthetic success. What should have taken about two hours for both pies took pretty much all day. The problem? The crust. Apparently there was an unequal distribution of butter in one of the pies, which yielded mid-baking sinking of the sides of the crust. So, in the end, I ended up with one pretty pie, one sunken pie crust, and one pie with sunken edges that were Frankensteined here and there. Meringue covers a world of ugly, that is all I am saying.

Pie #1 was old-fashioned fudge pie, which I had made before and turned out even better this go round. It is simple to make, looks like it took a long time, and tastes amazing.

The second pie is where the troubles began. A week or two ago, I was reading of my regular blogs, Homesick Texan, and she wrote of a "new favorite" pie she is sharing with her family this Thanksgiving - peanut butter pie. Immediately, I knew this pie would be featured in my month of November, even if I had to make it and eat it all myself. I heart peanut butter.

Sadly, this is the pie where my crust did not want to cooperate, so the second crust attempt for this pie (Franken-pie, if you will) was the one presented to my dear groupies. Thankfully, the pretty meringue distracted from the ugly pie crust.

In my flurry over the crust debacle, I failed to heed the recipe's advice to either use unsweetened peanut butter or lower the sugar if you use sweetened PB. I used sweetened PB and the full sugar amount and it came out a little on the sweet side, in my opinion. Also, when the recipe says stir the sugar, egg, and milk mixture until bubbles and thickens, it may take more than 10 minutes and wait until it thickens. I almost placed custard soup in my crust, forgetting that a few minutes in the oven to brown the meringue would not magically thicken the custard - that would have been bad. However, the subtle star of this pie show was the cayenne. I may have been the only one to notice it since I was the only one who knew there was a dash of it in the custard, but added this whisper of heat at the end of a bite that brought the pie up a notch or two, in my opinion.

All in all, it was a fantastic dinner with friends and a wonderful evening of laughing at one other's phonetic skills at Mad Gab - Deal of France!