Thanksgiving

This was our first time hosting Thanksgiving dinner and we had a lot of fun! Bruce's brother Mark and his family came down from Minnesota and stayed for a few days. We also invited our landlord Tom and his sister Teresa but they ended up having family come into town so had to decline. Thursday morning, Bruce and Mark helped in the kitchen while Karen kept the kids entertained and out of the kitchen. We had turkey, homemade cranberry sauce, oyster stuffing, regular stuffing, yam and apple casserole, squash casserole, mashed potatoes and gravy, broccoli with cheese sauce, and yeast rolls. For appetizers we had a veggie platter with ranch and bacon dip and a homemade cheese ball with crackers.

Having never cooked a turkey before, I read up on the different ways to keep a turkey moist and decided to brine the turkey beforehand (soak it in a pot of water with kosher salt and brown sugar for 24 hours) and then stuff the cavity with lemon and orange slices. It turned out super moist and delicious!



For dessert we had raspberry chiffon pie with chocolate walnut crust, blueberry pie, chocolate pie, pumpkin pie, and Shaker lemon pie. All the pies got votes for being the "best" pie except the Shaker lemon pie, which we decided the Shakers could keep. As you can see from the picture below, the whole lemon is used, rind and all. The recipe has you soak the slices in sugar overnight, which I expected to soften and sweeten the rind and be really yummy but in actuality the rind toughened up. But if you picked out the rinds it was a pretty good pie.


Afterwards, I was rewarded with a foot massage and nap and when I woke up, the kitchen was miraculously clean. What a wonderful treat that was.

The kids enjoyed playing hide and go seek in the orhards, setting off rockets, reading, and playing card games. For centerpieces I threw together a couple of baskets filled with apples and pine cones that I found outside. To make them more festive, I smeared them with glitter glue. Little Harriett (age 4) wanted to know how the apples got sparkles and someone told her that they came that way on a sparkly apple tree. Well, that afternoon she went out into the orchards looking for the apple tree with sparkles on it! Needless to say, she did not find her magic tree but I did pull down the glitter glue for her to make her own sparkly objects with. What a cutie!