Thanksgiving 2011 Post 1: Rumaki (p. 83) and Clam dip (p. 72)

Thanksgiving!  And, yes, I realize this just shows how amazingly behind I am but, hey, I'm catching up!  Thanksgiving has started becoming a problem but I will get to that in future post.  (Note from Future Jessica in 2019: I never finished this set of blog posts but I remember what the problem was.  I had made every normal Thanksgiving recipe in the book and I was starting to have to branch out into stranger recipes nobody was excited about.  Taking a break for a decade really helped with that).

Those of you who have read the blog for a while know that for Thanksgiving at our house, I cook an appetizer-style lunch.  This has been getting more difficult because I have made so many of the TJOC appetizer recipes already.

Rumaki (p. 83) is not one of my favorite things.  That's likely because I really don't like liver.  TJOC pointed out that I could use whole water chestnuts instead of chicken livers, so that's what I decided to do for half the rumaki.  I thought it was a decent compromise.

I needed to grate ginger so I used the world's tiniest shredder.  I put it next to the water chestnuts so that you could see how truly tiny the shredder really was.

I mixed together soy sauce, dry sherry, the grated ginger, and brown sugar:

The whole chestnuts went into half the marinade and the livers went into the other half (I didn't want the livery flavors to go into the water chestnuts), where they sat for a few hours:

I made some of the rumaki the real way and some of them without liver.  If the rumaki included liver, I used just a slice of water chestnut and a quarter of a chicken liver.  For the rumaki without liver, I used a whole water chestnut.  I wrapped them in a half slice of bacon and skewered them with a toothpick:

They went in to the over for about ten minutes:

Rumaki is (are?  I'm not sure if we are talking singular or plural here) super common appetizers, so it was fun to try my hand at making it.  Super easy.  And strangely delicious--it has bacon so it's hard to go wrong.  People who don't have my hatred of liver thought they were both equally good.  And the toothpick made them easy to handle and easy to eat.

I love, love, love my modified version of the Becker sour cream dip, so I was confident that Clam dip (p. 72) would also be delicious (since it's essentially the exact same thing, with clams). That's exactly what it was--the sour cream dip with Worcestershire sauce and canned clams:

You almost can't go wrong with that dip recipe, it's that good, so, although I don't think the clams added anything, they didn't subtract either.

The easiest way to feel popular?

Cook.  All of a sudden everyone wants to be hanging around with you!