Comments on: Rob’s hot buttered rum

By: FrankC

FrankC — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:32:43 +0000

I have tried to retire her from the kitchen but she insists that it is still her domain. She gets it right about 60% of the time,

By: FrankC

FrankC — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:26:28 +0000

anything sparkling sounds like a cold drink to me

By: FrankC

FrankC — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:18:20 +0000

First of all I am mainly providing a location and yes a good portion of the food but everyone contributes a dish or something. These are usually pre-prepared and ready to eat when they arrive

I do some of the cooking (25 lb turkey and the dressing) but others will cook the sides. The hard part is making it all come out at the same time. It never does but it is close enough to work

Frankly cooking one dish for 20-50 is probably harder than a Christmas dinner. It takes a huge pot, a massive amount of chopping and dicing, etc etc and a long cook time

By: MaryAnne

MaryAnne — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 23:16:24 +0000

But can you drink it hot?

By: MaryAnne

MaryAnne — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 23:14:55 +0000

…the yolks are small and low in iron, so a kind of pale yellow, a suitable color to paint a bedroom, but nothing like a lemon custard ought to be.

Grade A Large or Extra Large eggs give a lemon custard that sunny color. The lemon is for flavor, not color. Extra Large eggs leave you with more whites for the meringue, too, which, let me guess, looked like a curly tan mountain.

By: MaryAnne

MaryAnne — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 23:01:25 +0000

The lady with the recipe for 50 was probably a mom, which means she had to be an organizational genius of sorts.

When Nana had Thanksgiving, and she always did until she was 82, there were Nana and Grandpa, a decreasing number of great-aunts & great-uncles (say about 5), my mom, her four siblings, and their spouses (10), and all 22 of us kids. That was a party.

My new son-in-law, an only child from England, experienced his first American Thanksgiving with us this year. We only had 12, and he thought it was ginormous. What makes me laugh is that he has been here for the Labor Day blow-out, with about 30 people at the house for the whole weekend, but that never looks like as much because one buffet bleeds into the next. At least at Thanksgiving, I get out of the kitchen!

Not that I’m complaining. It really is so much fun, if you like doing it, and I do.

By: TB

TB — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:32:10 +0000

Sparkling apple juice.

Comes in a lot of nice flavors, as much fun as champagne.

By: TB

TB — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:30:07 +0000

The key is lots of lemon peel, or “zest.”

The egg yolks help, too.

By: bowser

bowser — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:16:31 +0000

That is ambitious. I organized an alumni group for the treatment center I went through, and we had picnics, potlucks, Halloween parties and so on. One lady proudly brought me a recipe for some sort of goulash or stew for 50 people, expecting me to make it as I was responsible for this gathering.

I laughed and suggested that I wasn’t about to cook for 50 people. She had a ready solution – cut the recipe in half.

That wasn’t going to happen, either, and if fact we weren’t going to divide the recipe by 50.

But I admire you. 20 people is a horde as far as I’m concerned, and if you can feed that many yourself you are an organizational genius.

Have fun.

By: bowser

bowser — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:10:31 +0000

She followed me home. One of her talents was lemon meringue pie. She would buy any old lemons and go to work. When she was done it was bright yellow, absolutely beautiful, with nothing artificial in it.

Reading the ingredients in a commercial lemon meringue pie one discovers quite a list of artificial food colors. We never could figure out why? The natural pie was gorgeous. What did they use that required the poor pie to be painted?

I still don’t understand that.