Thursday, November 24, 2005

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! This is my favorite holiday of the year. There's nothing like ushering in the Holiday season with a great family dinner. You have all the other holidays to look forward to. This is the day when everyone in the country becomes a foodie. As I write this, NPR is interviewing celebrity chefs about their past Thanksgiving disasters and I feel like I'm home. I'll miss the Macy's Parade this morning (well my time, It'll be at about 3pm) and of course going to cousin Bill's for the afternoon and evening. Our family is very musical, at least that's what Gabriel said after Thanksgiving 2002 when Bill and my Dad took turns playing the grand piano in the living room and everybody else sang along. Gabriel, with a symphony conductor for a grandfather, had never spent an evening like that. Bill does a great job on the music and the food and keeps a Thanksgiving computer log of what he did, how he did it and what to change for next year. I ought to get him in on this blog; he's probably got a lot of good advice.

When your turkey is in the oven, you can start on the side dishes: mashed potatoes with butter and chives and sauteed fennel with Pernod. Gabriel will wive you the lo-down on mashed potatoes but right now, here's the fennel recipe:

SAUTEED FENNEL WITH PERNOD

Again, as with the soup recipe, I have to make something else up. Online you can find many great roasted fennel recipes that mostly call for the oven to be at 400F. This would be great if your oven on Thanksgiving didn't have to simultaneously be at 375F. I looked around for sauteed fennel recipes and found one, from Mario Batali that has garlic, anchovy and Sambuca. He warns that this recipe is very full flavored and so is best as an accompaniment to a full flavored main dish like braised lamb shank. Well, nobody's ever accused turkey of being full flavored, so I'm changing the recipe a bit. Here's my version: I've skipped the strong flavors of garlic and anchovy and exchanged the Sambuca for the less sweet Pernod. The result is mild, rich and beautiful with the bright green fennel fronds as decoration.

3 fennel bulbs cut in half logway and sliced to ¼ inch thick
2 tbsp olive oil
½ cup water
2 tbsp Pernod
salt and pepper to taste
reserved fennel fronds, minced

Place all ingredients except the fennel fronds in a large saute pan. Over high heat, saute until most of the water is evaporated (10 minutes) and the fennel is evenly tender. Place on a serving dish and sprinkle with the fennel fronds. Serve immediately.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey Sue its Brian. I'm just checking out your blog. I saved your blog on Billy's Favorites list in Internet Explorer so he can click on your link to view your page. Get some pics up on it!!! It'll look great. I just went on Jeremiah's website (michniewicz.com), but he took off the links to all our pictures. Oh well, as soon as he's back in Chicago I'm sure he'll get the website back up and running. Save his e-mail address for when he does, and check back within the next couple weeks. I'll get him to get back on it. MICHNIEWICZ.COM is the website.

So, I forgot to tell you one thing about my Mexico trip. On the plane ride back I sat next to this guy. He asked me what I did for a living and told him I work in the Tech dept. of a law firm in Chicago. He asked which one and I told him Greenberg Traurig. He chuckled a little bit and asked if I knew the key players in the law firm. I asked why, and he opened up his laptop and showed me Outlook. In there were about 50 e-mails from one of my law firms most influential shareholders. It turns out that this guy was at a conference in Singapore and Hong Kong along with a bunch of my attorneys. He told me that Greenberg Traurig is going to buy out another huge law firm. Right now its 8th largest in the nation (when I started it was 13th). He said after this acquisition GT will be in the top 4 in lawyer size in the country. They are going to get another office in Hong Kong, Singapore, or somewhere in India. This firm is going to be huge! He gave me his card and I did a little research on him. It turned out that WIRED magazine did an article on him not too long ago as the world's internet radio geek. When the .com thing blew up there were a bunch of people who sold almost all their shares in .com businesses. #1 was Mark Cuban (the owner of the Dallas Mavericks) who got away with $2Billion. This guy, Ken Rutkowski, was ranked 5th. It was kinda cool to meet someone who was so powerful. He asked me to send my contact info to him, so I sent it when I got back to work. He seemed like he was a pretty cool guy. We'll see where having his contact info takes me. Since then I tuned in to his internet radio show on kenradio.com. Its pretty interesting. He does news on new technology and IT stuff mon-fri. Its cool stuff. Well, it looks like I wrote a bit of a novel here, so I'm going to get going so that I can have some apple pie. I'm so full, but then again pretty soon I'll be living off of ramen noodles! Love ya!
Bria

12:14 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home


View My Stats