Cranberry Orange Relish

I made cranberry orange relish today, just like every Thanksgiving. It's the earliest thing I can remember cooking — grinding the oranges and cranberries with Russell, the hand grinder clamped on a chair covered in newspaper.

The recipe is unimportant; I basically use what's on the back of the Ocean Spray bag — one orange, one bag of cranberries, and between a half-cup and 3/4 cup of sugar. No cinnamon or any of the other fussy stuff.

What's absolutely critical is the hand grinder. I tried it once in the food processor and it was mushy. I tried it once with the meat grinder attachment on my Kitchen Aid and it was...OK. But the hand grinder is perfect.

I think it has something to do with this:

All that juice runs off during the grinding process, and I use it to make drinks. It's not sticking around mingling with the sugar, making things mushy.

Here was my setup today.

 I use the middle grind size.

Cooking A Goose

Yes, there were many jokes about our goose being cooked.

For Christmas I was going to roast a duck -- the perfect two-person holiday meal, with just enough delicious leftovers and rich stock. But the grocery store was out of ducks, so Lawson bought a goose instead. (A very expensive goose, as it turned out, so we felt extra-compelled to use every little bit of it.)

I proceeded to read everything I could about cooking geese. I decided to skip Joy's complicated two-day process for drying out the skin; decided to skip stuffing, too. I read about goose anatomy and goose grease. I'm glad for it, too, because it prepared me for some of the strangeness of goose.

The bird weighed 11 pounds. It was big, but just short enough to fit on a regular pan, unlike a turkey.

I took off the wing tips, rubbed the thing with salt, put it on a little folding metal poultry rack, set it in a deep pan and roasted it at 400 for 30 minutes, then 350 for a few hours. I flipped it from breast down to breast up halfway through the cooking time. I let the meat temp get pretty high since there was so much fat -- maybe 175 in the breast and somewhat more in the thigh.

Here were some of the strange things about goose:

Fat
An incredible amount of fat rendered off that goose. More than a quart and a half. It filled the deep roasting pan twice over, and there was still plenty left in the skin, not to mention the chunks I'd pulled from the cavity beforehand. Pre-cooking, the whole bird felt greasy and weird, like a hunk of sheep.

I have a lot of it left over in jars in the fridge.

It's great fat: snowy white and mild, really delicious. I roasted potatoes, beets, sweet potatoes and turnips in it to great effect. I intend to use it in tamale dough soon.

Goose Cracklins
The skin on the goose was still pretty blubbery, so I didn't serve it. Instead, I cut it into strips with scissors and put it in the roasting pan at about 290 degrees to render further, per Julia Child. Now I have a container of crispy goose cracklins. They are incredible.

Connective Tissue
Parts of the goose are clean and easy to eat. But parts -- particularly the back, wings and the part of the breast closest to the bone -- have a ton of connective tissue, almost like the muscle fibers are wrapped in casing. You know how you can sort of push meat off a chicken backwith your thuumbs? Not so with a goose. It meant some meat loss, as some of the bird wasn't good for regular plate eating. The dog got some gristly bits, and some went into stock.

Big Cavity
There's a lot of space inside a goose. I understand the desire to stuff it, but I think leaving it empty helped it cook better and render more fat.

Tight Joints
That's how Joy described them -- and they were right. I wish I had pictures of me grappling with that bird before roasting. It was bony, very bony, and I found out what "tight joints" meant when I tried to trim the enormous wing tips. Much twisting and crunching of bone ensued. The dog was impressed.

After roasting, the bird remained tight: prying a leg off was quite hard.

Good Stock
The carcass made lovely stock -- copious amounts of it, too. The enormous gizzards, the heart, and the two-foot neck helped, too.

Goose Liver is Not Foie Gras
The liver was just a regular liver, not fattened and yellow and mild like foie gras. It was tasty, though: I sauteed it and sliced it, then deglazed the pan with a few drops of Cointreau and poured that over it. It tasted like duck liver, fairly dark but not at all bitter and only faintly musky.

Amazing Gravy
I made a simple, classic gravy with pan drippings, red wine, black pepper and flour.

The Final Yield
Two big meals of roasted goose with root vegetables and gravy.
One goose liver appetizer.
Five quarts of stock.
One batch of goose tortilla soup (chicken tortilla soup with goose stock and goose meat).
One week of dog dinner supplementation with goose scraps.
One cup of goose cracklins.
Two pint jars of pure goose fat.

Christmas Tamales

This year I used my regular pork filling recipe, though I see now I forgot to use onion. It's missing that flavor base, for sure.

For the dough, this year I rendered my own lard instead of buying the sketchy shelf-stable hydrogenated stuff. I just put some chopped up fatback in the crockpot for a day on low; that worked pretty well. The lard was a little softer and meltier than other lard I've encountered, but mild and delicious.

With the tamales we had homemade beans and a sort of ad hoc cole slaw made from brussels sprouts, lime juice, yogurt, olive oil, salt, pepper, and toasted cumin seeds. I made a batch of classic red chile sauce to spoon over the tamales.

Bûche de Noël

I'm not sure I'll ever do this again, but it sure looked cool.

Inside:
a "hot milk sponge cake" from Joy baked in a jelly roll pan
Kahlua-flavored buttercream

Outside:
chocolate buttercream
meringue mushrooms
powdered sugar
a rock from the yard
a pine branch with pinecones that I found in the street

The meringue mushrooms got gooey pretty quickly in the humidity.

These shots make it look a little campy, but indoors, in person, it looked quite pretty and log-like.

It tasted merely okay -- the cake was a little bland, and the Kahlua buttercream not quite perfect. The lemon meringue pie I also made for Christmas Eve dinner was much tastier.

Thanksgiving Wrap-Up

We had a wonderful turkey this year, a free-range bird from Sprouts weighing just under 19 pounds. I soaked it in a light brine overnight, stuffed it traditionally with bread stuffing, and rubbed it all over with my usual paste of salt, paprika, and olive oil. I roasted it at 325 degrees for five hours. It was really dark brown and much more done than usual--falling apart, actually, so it didn't carve too neatly, but it had so much flavor. Yum.

Another highlight of the meal was the trio of pies Kathy brought: pecan, pumpkin, and apple crumb.

Looking back, we had a completely conventional menu. I did my sweet potato chunks with butter and maple syrup. I mixed my advance gravy with the turkey pan juices and a little more flour and water and the final product was great. We had eleven people but I seem to have cooked enough for twenty-two. Look at my refrigerator:

The Last of the Easter Ham

Since we're not religious, we tend to celebrate holidays by feasting on traditional foods rather than by attending church. Grandma got a terrific ham this year--she un-traditionally didn't serve it until Tuesday when Greg and Katherine arrived for a visit. With it she served her best potato salad. Yum.

All of us got some ham sandwiches for lunch, and now the ham bone has ended up in a pot of large white lima beans. R.I.P.

New Year's Food

I guess this post is for both of us, Mom, since you called me from Texas last night to talk about cooking black eyed peas and will be nowhere near a computer for another week. I hope your black eyed peas with chorizo were perfect. My hoppin' John was tasty, but the rice didn't cook properly -- some of it was a little gummy, some undercooked. I have some work to do to become a perfect Carolina pilau chef.

Fortunately, the collards were glorious. And I ate plenty of both collards and hoppin' John, so in the New Year I will be both rich and lucky.

We also had homemade chocolate ice cream. It was delicious, but honestly a bit too intense and rich. Next time I will look for a more moderate chocolate ice cream recipe -- fewer egg yolks, less chocolate.

Happy New Year!

Real Plum Pudding

I mean that it's made with real plums, not dried fruit and suet. This may be Swedish in origin, or my grandmother may have found the recipe on the back of a can of plums.

A child can make this dessert. In fact, I think you and Russell used to do it. As for the sauce, it's so easy it's magical. You can use rum or bourbon, but Grandma always uses Scotch because that's what she has in the house.

Give a serving of this to even the crabbiest, bah-humbuggy person, and he will begin to smile.

Real Plum Pudding

1 cup flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Sift first four ingredients together.

1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 large can plums, drained, pitted, and diced
1/2 cup chopped nuts

Combine remaining ingredients and stir into dry mixture. Pour into greased casserole and bake at 325º for one hour or more, or until set in center. Serve with Rum Sauce.


My Grandmother's Rum Sauce*

1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
1 egg, well beaten

Combine first four ingredients in sauce pan. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly.

3 tablespoons rum, brandy, or bourbon

Remove from heat and stir in liquor. Serve warm.

*Actually I think my grandmother got this recipe from my typing teacher. She was a terrifying woman, and because of her I can still type 85 words per minute. I was astounded to learn that she was human and did normal things like cooking and eating.

What Happened to this Turkey?

It's easy to be daunted by a recipe that begins: "Disjoint a 12-pound turkey and brown the pieces in lard." All you need to disjoint a turkey is a big old sharp knife and maybe some poultry shears, but let's be honest--the process is gross no matter how you slice it.

I made the browning easier by doing it in a 450 degree oven, then poured on some water and finished poaching the turkey by covering it with foil and continuing to bake at 300 degrees for about 2 1/2 hours. It's aromatic and delicious.

It's cooling now. Next I'll take the meat off the bones, then make broth with the carcass. Tomorrow this deconstructed turkey will become Turkey Mole for Christmas dinner.

Christmas Food Traditions

This reprint of an older Slate article is right in one way: because there's no single Christmas meal tradition in this country, one never knows what to expect from someone else's Christmas dinner. But unlike the author of the article, I think it's wonderful. People save their old, old, traditional family recipes for the holidays, which keeps ethnic foods part of America but not part of mass culture. If not for Christmas, would I have grown up regularly eating Swedish and Norwegian food, except at the odd family reunion? And all my best friend's Hanukkah dinners I went to in high school -- where else in America do you get to eat food like that? I've never seen a restaurant with Manischewitz on the wine list. That kind of food stays around because of the winter holidays.

Still, I love Swedish meatballs, but not enough to make them for the non-Scandinavian Lawson and nobody else (we usually spend Christmas Day alone together). And I'm not going to make lutefisk, even if I could even find a source in South Carolina. But one needs a dramatic central item for a meal as important as Christmas dinner. So I have thrown myself into what is sort of but not completely a family tradition: tamales. Because of all the time our family has spent living in the Southwest, they seem traditional, even though we're not Mexican or Central American. They're festive and warming and delicious; and they're pretty laborious, so I wouldn't want to make them just anytime. They remind me of home. And if I make a huge batch I can freeze them and we can have a few tamale meals later in the year.

I'll document the tamale-making on Sunday.

I'm writing about future food, not food already prepared, because I've been busy and a little stressed out and forgetting to take meal pictures. Last night we had Thai takeout. The night before that, quesadillas and roasted sweet potatoes. Before that Lawson made these awesome giant square rice noodles with stir-fried beef. So we're surviving just fine. And now that I've got some time off work, I can get back to writing here a lot more.

Pie for Breakfast

I never have room for pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving day; fortunately it makes an excellent breakfast the next morning. Here is the menu from yesterday's meal for six:

Tapenade* with Crackers

Cherry Tomatoes, Green Onions, and Radishes from Dad's Garden

Black olives from Raymond's tree which he cured himself!

Champagne

###

Portuguese-Style Turkey with Linguisa Stuffing and Pan Gravy

Mashed Potatoes with Garlic

Sweet Potatoes from your recipe--very popular yesterday

Chunky Applesauce

Port Wine Cranberry Sauce

Scalloped Corn

Green Bean and Tomato Salad

###

Pumpkin Pie

Mince Pie

*This is James McNair's recipe. It was a perfect appetizer because it was sharply flavorful rather than rich and bland. Easy to make ahead, too.

Tapenade

1 cup pitted Kalamata olives

1/2 cup basil leaves

3 tablespoons capers, drained and rinsed

2 tablespoons chopped garlic

2 teaspoons grated lemon zest

1/4 cup olive oil

2 tablespoons lemon juice

Chop first 5 ingredients in food processor, then add olive oil and lemon juice to make a smooth paste. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Thanksgiving Ho

I just wanted to post this reminder to myself and everyone else that we won't be eating gravy and butter-based dishes forever. Someday, maybe around the middle of next week, we will again eat lightly sauteed greens and pork-free beans and shiny golden beets and things like salads and whole wheat tortillas. Onward to the future.

I'll be out of town for a few days but will return with many stories of the way other people eat. Happy Thanksgiving.

Pies and Pielets

Monday I made pie dough (after hollering about James McNair's cookbook in an earlier post I used his butter crust recipe); Tuesday I made a pumpkin pie; and today I made a mince pie using a meatless Joy of Cooking recipe. I used great restraint and didn't eat all of the mincemeat filling with a spoon; it is a wonderland of apples, raisins, lemon rind, spices, and brandy.

I love pie filling, but often leave the crust because it's too rich. I am going to work on pielets*: little individual ramekins of filling with elegant precooked pastry cutouts floated on top. I do like a bite or two of pastry if it's flaky and wonderful. Probably I could bake up the filling until it was bubbly, then put on the pre-browned pastry cookie, and heat everything together for five minutes. This is such a great idea that I'll probably become famous for it. I'll be asked to autograph pielets.

*Linguistic notes: Pie-ette is a better name, but hyphens are a pain, and it sounds like a brand name. Pielette is a problem homophone--I immediately got tangled up with pielettes and boats of pastry. Pielet is closer to piglet, so it works for me.

Planned Side Dishes

It's important to plan over a healthy breakfast.

Lawson and I are assigned the side dishes for his big family Thanksgiving again. We are going to be much less ambitious than in years past, so I am feeling pretty good about it all. Here's what we're making:

- Collards, traditional Southern style. This involves a ham hock and several hours of simmering with plenty of water.

- Green beans, traditional Southern style. This involves a smoked turkey neck and several hours of simmering with plenty of water. Are you getting all this?

- Spinach-rice. Because the turkey is smoked, it isn't stuffed, and every year Lawson pores over stuffing recipes and spends hours making it and nobody eats very much. His stuffing is good, but I don't think it's a stuffing-eating family. So we're going with rice and spinach this year.

- Macaroni and cheese, which I have noted in the past is the weirdest of the traditional Southern Thanksgiving foods. We will be using the absurd Macaroni and Cheese Supreme recipe of the illustrious David Wade, TV chef and object of my scholarly and acquisitional interest. I can't wait. The recipe includes 2 cups of sour cream. It will clog arteries from 8 yards away.

- Cranberry sauce. I adore the extremely tart raw cranberry-orange relish we make every year with the hand-cranked meat grinder, but I'm going to try plain cooked cranberry sauce this year to see how it goes over.

- I may make some gingerbread.

So, all in all, it should be pretty low key. The only bad part is that we have to procure all our groceries tonight, along with the rest of the city.

Southwestern food

I wish I could eat some Patagonia tamales! Last Christmas I made green chile and pork tamales and froze a bunch; if I have time at New Year's, I may do the same thing.

It's been a Southwestern cooking frenzy here for the past 24 hours. We had huevos rancheros for Christmas brunch. I made a surprisingly good recipeless salsa using broiled tomatillos, a few soaked New Mexican red chiles, a can of diced tomatoes, half an onion, cilantro, garlic, and lemon juice from Lawson's very bitter Meyer lemon tree. My egg-frying skills mysteriously abandoned me, but salsa is good for covering up messes like that. We had some excellent pineapple on the side.

Then, because the border foods cookbook you gave me is so inspiring and because Lawson gave me a tortilla press for Christmas, I made red chile sauce and homemade corn tortillas and assembled some stacked New Mexican sour cream enchiladas for dinner. We ate them with Anasazi beans (my last bag). The tortillas were not quite thin enough, but that was fine for stacked enchiladas. They had wonderful corn flavor.

For lunch today I made some flour tortillas, and we ate them with melted cheese and the rest of the salsa.

I love a lot of things about that Peyton cookbook, but I especially like that he confirms many of my own cooking methods. I never presoak beans, and he says most cooks he interviewed don't either. I always use the blender to puree soaked red chiles for enchilada sauce, so there are tiny flecks of chile skin in my sauces; I tried a food mill once, and it was messy and inconvenient. The book says my way is standard home technique. I use olive oil to make the roux for red chile sauce, something you taught me, and that's what he recommends as a substitute for lard in that particular instance (not all -- he says tamales require lard, and I agree). I never realized how New Mexican my cooking is -- I always figured I'd just adapted and bastardized things, but actually my red chile sauce recipe is completely identical to his.

I also like how well he describes the profound craving for Mexican food that he experienced when he moved overseas -- some need for the combination of chiles, corn, and cheese that no other cuisine can match. I felt much the same thing when I moved out to South Carolina, and it's only in my own kitchen that I can satisfy it. In no restaurant outside of New Mexico can you get proper New Mexican enchiladas.

Tonight I'm going to use my beautiful new Le Creuset casserole. The Peyton book has a recipe for rabbit stewed in red chile sauce; I think I'll use chicken parts.

The Annual Tamale Hunt

I was bored with the turkey idea after Thanksgiving this year. Often we have had turkey at both holidays, but this time I couldn’t get excited about it.

So tonight we’re having a variation of the traditional Scandinavian Christmas Eve supper of lutefisk and Swedish meatballs. I’m making a dish called Capilotade--salt cod stewed with red vermouth and onions--which is traditional on Christmas Eve in Nice and Provence. We are keeping the meatballs (otherwise I think Dad might revolt), and Grandma Oty’s plum pudding.

Tomorrow it’s tamales! We had our usual struggle to extract the tamales from the Catholic church in Patagonia. After many confirming phone calls we drove down there last Tuesday, and the office and church were locked up tight. The waitress at Santos Restaurant made several calls on our behalf, but couldn’t rouse a soul. We found a message from the priest when we got home empty-handed, saying the secretary had been sick. Dad drove down again on Thursday and mostly succeeded: that is, he paid for three dozen but only got 30 tamales.

Now, I know we could buy tamales right here in Tucson, or even make them, but this is sport, like hunting or fishing. By the way, it snowed hard on us returning from Patagonia, reminding me of the time we took Lawson and you there last year.

I’m concluding the Mexican Christmas Day feast with mince pie. I bought jars of mincemeat from England this year, and doctored them in my customary way with chopped apple, raisins, and rum. I continued Dad’s family tradition of making a pie vent in the shape of “M” for Moore.

Cold Leftovers

So Thanksgiving dinner is over, and it was wonderful. I have to confess I missed Russell a lot yesterday—I am getting used to your having your own life far away, but his absence is newer. Besides, he always mashed the potatoes and made the gravy, and quietly did a lot of butler duties.

Do you remember this turkey roasting pan? I’ve had it at least 35 years. Once when we lived in Alaska I brought it in my suitcase to Tucson to cook turkey at Grandma’s. It got badly dented, which shows you how your luggage gets treated. I like to smear the turkey with a paste of olive oil, salt, and paprika, then pour half a bottle of white vermouth in the bottom of the pan, and bake at 325 degrees, covered for the first two hours. This method yields really good gravy.

Our complete menu was quite traditional:

Pesto Appetizer Torta with Crackers
Chile-Roasted Macadamia Nuts
Several bottles of wine
Mozart’s Sonata in B-flat for piano duet
***
Turkey, Bread and Herb Stuffing, Gravy
Baked Sweet Potatoes with Olive Oil and Chile Powder
Garlic Mashed Potatoes
Corn Pudding with Green Chiles
Applesauce
Cranberry Chutney
Port Wine Cranberry Sauce
Green Beans with Balsamic Vinegar
***
Pumpkin Pie with Whipped Cream
Apple Pie with Ice Cream
Coffee

It was the warmest Thanksgiving I’ve ever experienced, in the low eighties, and we were able to sit out on the patio before and after dinner. Now I’m looking forward to turkey soup and turkey à la king—but first and best of all, cold leftovers.

Traditional Food

Last night I made meatloaf using Grandma's recipe, plus baked buttercup squash (I'm really excited about squash right now) and steamed green beans tossed with olive oil and zest from those Meyer lemons you and Dad sent me. The lemons are wonderful! I'm going to make lemon meringue pie with some later today.

We're having Thanksgiving on Friday with Lawson's family, including a lot of older extended family -- a very conservative, unsmiling bunch who ignore us for the most part, though there are some fun younger cousins. Like last year, Lawson and I have been delegated the task of preparing everything but the turkey and dessert. Right now we're in the middle of menu negotiations. I would happily forgo stuffing and white potatoes and such, but we have to keep it pretty traditional.

So far we've decided on: mashed sweet potatoes (butter, orange zest, rum); some kind of stuffing with pecans and sausage; cranberry-orange relish (I can't have Thanksgiving without it...don't know if anyone else likes it); scalloped potatoes; and collards cooked for many hours with a ham hock. We want to make green beans...Lawson was looking at a green bean casserole recipe with added sausage, and I suggested we find a simpler, fresher recipe, but he didn't think that would fly. So we're still working on that one. I just want one dish without cream, butter, sugar, or meat.

I think cooking and eating this meal will break me out of the traditional American food phase I've been in lately. I didn't grow up eating things like meatloaf and pot roast very often -- I remember some Kraft dinner and hamburger hash early on, but for the most part you always cooked homemade breads and garden vegetables and wonderful light ethnic foods. Also, being a vegetarian from ages 11 to 25 meant I never ate things like sloppy joes or corn dogs. I think it's been partly living in the South, partly eating meat again, and partly curiosity, but for the last year I've been making and eating very classic American foods. Lawson excels at making Thai and Vietnamese and Chinese and Indian stuff, so I've been making pies and hamburgers. But after tomorrow's looming cholesterolfest I will probably be done with traditional foods for a while.

Moroccan Food Three Nights Running

Last night we had Moroccan Salmon in Tomato Sauce, tonight Dad made a Chicken and Eggplant Tagine (excellent!), and tomorrow it’s some kind of Moroccan lamb stew.

We must be inoculating ourselves against the blandness of turkey and accompaniments. Every year I try harder. I put a whole head of garlic in the mashed potatoes. I rub the free-range turkey with spices after I brine it. I make cranberry chutney, not cranberry sauce. My stuffing is made with leftover homemade bread and fresh herbs, my sweet potatoes are roasted with olive oil and chile powder. We have live music, and ethnically diverse guests! (Well, okay, one of my Chinese students.) We have our pumpkin pie outside on the patio with coffee made from freshly ground beans. Still the meal remains overly rich and indigestible. It must come down to the amount of butter, what do you think? Or maybe that’s the whole point of feasting.

One aspect of Thanksgiving that I adore is that after Thursday, no more cooking is done for at least 48 hours. We get to rest from the orgy.

I exaggerate anyway. Kathy is bringing pies, Raymond is making his port wine cranberry sauce, and Grandma is in charge of the corn pudding with green chiles and the applesauce.

Two pies

Last night I baked pies for my office Thanksgiving party. The event is like a massive potluck; every year, the Thanksgiving committee posts sign-up sheets with Southern Thanksgiving food categories: green beans, greens (usually collards), stuffing, sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese, turkey legs, pies, etc. There are about 100 of us. Multiple people sign up for each category, so any one person is making food for about 20 people. This means you get to sample five different pots of collards from five different family recipes (if that's your thing) (and it's very much my thing). Then the committee buys and cooks some turkeys and hams. And my coworker from Puerto Rico makes this amazing stewed turkey with green olives. I have no idea what's in it, but it is consistently incredible.

So, I spent the evening making pies. First, though, I had to install a new bake element in our oven. The old one caught on fire and cracked (or cracked and caught on fire -- not sure which, though it was exciting in any case) a month ago, and it took us a while to track down the part. It was surprisingly easy to change except for getting the rusted screws off, considering it was nighttime and I was working by flashlight because I had to cut off the breaker. Anyway, the oven works beautifully now.

I started with a pumpkin pie. Pumpkin pie is not especially popular at my office; people there say they prefer sweet potato pie. The differences are so slight -- same seasonings, same color -- but I don't particularly like sweet potatoes with sugar added, so I stuck with what I know. It was the only pumpkin pie there, and about 4 people out of 100 had a slice. The four sweet potato pies disappeared. So I brought over half the pumpkin pie home.

I also made a chocolate pecan pie. The recipe is pretty much the same as for a regular pecan pie: toast some pecans, and mix them into a custard made with eggs, butter, Karo syrup (Norwegians represent!), sugar, and rum. This just happened to have 6 ounces of bittersweet chocolate in it as well. It was wildly popular. I was pleased. The Joy of Cooking came through yet again.

Did I mention that I buy prebaked pie shells? Yes, after making my own crust a few times, I finally came to agree with you that it's absolutely unnecessary.

This year's Thanksgiving party was a little slim on the vegetable categories, but I did have some wonderful homemade mac and cheese, excellent collards, and a good slice of coconut cream pie. I was disappointed to find that the slice of ham I got was spiced ham. It tasted like Captain Morgan's. Yeccch.