I think I may have messed up cross-referencing to another post.
Anyway, does anyone have experience with Thanksgiving takeout from Seasons to Taste or Summer Shack? I ordered from both this year. No more messed up/dealing with big-ass turkeys for me (at least this year)!
Continuing the discussion from The 2022 Thanksgiving Thread!:
ETA: Well, I still have to cook the damned thing from Seasons to Taste. Hope it’s idiot-proof.
Looks like you just have to reheat, not actually cook, the stuff from Seasons to Taste - and it looks very tasty!!
our kids, and before them . . . blood relatives . . . “demanded” specific dishes that were on the Thanksgiving/Christmas table . . . and no matter what.
reheating anything was not on the list.
it’s was 3+ years of experiments to re-create Granny’s “corn pudding” - nailed it. as per her grandchildren/my cousins . . .
our DIL family did Thanksgiving/Christmas dinners on nuked frozen “sides” and “mains” - our son had major issues with that approach. a “family custom” he had issues with . . .
oh well, folks be different . . .
As someone who has cooked many thanksgiving meals over years, I don’t understand the concept of no reheating for some dishes.
I also wonder if the protesters just ate the food and didn’t observe every moment of food preparation, how they would even know the difference in taste between just out of the oven and reheated. Many Thanksgiving dishes are better when reheated. And no kitchen can turn out the whole spread just out of the oven.
Thanksgiving seems to be the American holiday where family customs get sealed in as absolute imperatives. I personally like to mix it up a bit or a lot. Each to their own.
Exactly. I’m only cooking holiday meals for three at this point and everything but the turkey (and sometimes dessert) gets made the day before. It’s absolutely fine. It’s not like I’m pre-slicing raw fish for a crudo app for this. And it cuts down on the possibility of interlopers hovering needlessly in the kitchen when I am trying to work because they think it’s a good time to “help” or be social.
We did the spatchcock turkey from Branch Line two Thanksgivings in a row. Not hosting this year or we would do it again.
Just a plug for the pies from the Barbara Lynch group, which I think are really exceptional: https://www.barbaralynch.com/thanksgiving
If we’re not talking turkey, Forge Bakery in Somerville has had consistently terrific pies – we’ve been ordering them for close to a decade now. (Yes, yes I should bake my own, but you try flying back from NY late on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, then handle all the prep, the dry-brining and so forth on Wednesday and make a brace of pies.)
And definitely not turkey, but interesting nevertheless if you want something different.
We had terrific pies from Forge through Clover two years ago
Comedy of errors that doesn’t always come through via words. But it was all good.
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Sorry about that - don’t know what happened. Tried to edit but it went to delete. I used to spend days preparing Thanksgiving dinner. I’m not well or hungry enough to deal with that anymore. My DH cooked for us - he roasted our bird on Wednesday because our dear friend had hip replacement surgery the day before and we wanted to take a nice meal to her on the holiday. I did contribute - made cranberry relish and and mashed butternut squash. He put (gasp) chopped garlic in the stuffing and I was initially pissed off about it but as it aged it really didn’t suck - gravy does cover a lot of sins LOL!.
Thanks for the link. I don’t wade through those long cooking posts, but enjoyed hearing about your specific meal. Sorry to hear about subpar gravy and pies. We just had our work holiday meal (I hesitate to call it a party) at Summer Shack on Saturday, and I was SO underwhelmed with everything, especially the service. They had sunk low on my list for the past decade or so, now they’re off the list. I probably won’t bother a full write up, but suffice it to say I ordered halibut, which was on the online menu because they only begrudgingly gave our table of 12 a few menus to share, and rather than inform me they did not have halibut, they brought me haddock. When the server walked around the table trying to figure out whose plate of haddock he had, and I was the only one left without food and said “oh, I’m waiting for the halibut” then and only they did he tell me they didn’t have it. D’oh.
Thanks for the report on Summer Shack. I’m sorry for your experience. Boston or Cambridge? Last time we went was to Cambridge and that was over 15 years ago. Had gone even more down hill way back then from the previously steadily worse visits before then. I can’t believe they are still in business. Is Jasper White still in charge?
Also I don’t get the restricting quantity of menus. It’s long been known that Covid is not spread on surfaces, so there is no reason to restrict menu distribution or to insist on QR menus, as happened to us at The Porch in Medford a couple of weeks ago.
Barely. I won’t even get into the rigmarole they gave us about scheduling the dinner. They tried to get us to work with their special events coordinator, then wanted a set menu, probably because my colleague had called saying we were having a holiday party. They wanted a $1000 minimum because they said it was their busiest time (Saturday night), and we weren’t sure we’d meet that. Finally I called back and pretended to be a different group and just made a reservation for a table of 12 with no problem. The restaurant was less than a third full the entire time we were there. It was the Fresh Pond Cambridge location, and our party had the entire upper level to ourselves, along with about 8 empty tables, for the duration.
Utterly infuriating, the whole thing.
Jasper, we hardly knew you before you became…
