Thanksgiving!

How was everyone's Thanksgiving? Mine was great! It was spent with lots of friends and family. The day before Thanksgiving, I made pumpkin pies. Just classic ones, nothing too fancy. I find that most people like to have classic foods for Thanksgiving, nothing too out of the ordinary. Anyway, since I knew we were going to be overeating on Thursday, I made a nice vegetarian soup for Wednesday night. It was Rachael Ray's Red and Green Winter Stoup. Filled with potatoes, onions, kale, tomatoes, and pureed roasted red peppers, you don't miss the meat! I served garlic parmesan toasts alongside for dipping. Yum!



On Thanksgiving day, I made my second dessert to bring to our friends house where we were having Thanksgiving. I chose to make individual apple tarts, and to try out my new mandoline! I practiced using it on an apple I wasn't using for the tarts, and I got the hang of it pretty quickly. The recipe made 8 tarts, and I cut out mini turkeys and apples from leftover puff pastry as a garnish.




While I was baking, I looked out the window to this scene, more appropriate for Christmas day:

Snow!

My Thanksgiving meal included: turkey, mashed potatoes (secret ingredient: bacon grease!), green bean casserole (not my fav., but I took some anyway), creamed onions (never had them before, but they were pretty good!) sweet potatoes with praline topping (my favorite part of the meal!), stuffing, corn, cranberry-orange relish, and crescent rolls. After that one plate of food, I was pretty full! No seconds for me, I saved room for dessert!

Have you started listening to Christmas music yet? I admit, I've been listening to it for over a week now. I feel like they play a lot of songs over and over again, and when there are 1,000's of holiday songs out there, they should have more variety. However, driving home from babysitting yesterday, I heard a song I've never heard before and I really enjoyed it! It's a song from a live concert by Dave Matthew's Band. I'm not a big fan of the band, but this song was great! What do you think?



Next starts my holiday baking for the season, which is my favorite part of the holidays! Any suggestions? I bake new kinds of cookies and other treats every year. Have a nice week everyone!
~Sarah