Thanksgiving Cooking

It took me four hours.  Four hours to do all the pre-Thanksgiving cooking.

I roasted four turkey legs with some carrot and onion, olive oil, salt & pepper and poultry seasoning for about two and a half hours.  I then de-glazed the roasting pan with a little chicken broth, strained it and I have the most beautiful turkey drippings to make gravy with tomorrow.  The reason I did this is because we always cook our turkey in the big turkey bag and, even though the turkey gets nice and brown, the drippings do not.  So our gravy has always been really blond.  I like darker turkey gravy so I did this to see what will happen.  Thank you, Tyler Florence (Food Network), for the idea!

I also made home-made cranberry sauce.  My mom always made home-made cranberry sauce and never served it out of a can.  So that is what I do.  One bag of cranberries cooked in one cup of water.  After they are soft, take it off the heat and stir in one cup of sugar.  Cool in the fridge and that is cranberry sauce.  Thick, sweet and delicious!

Next was the appetizers.  I made tuna pate to be served with crackers and a Green Goddess dip to serve with veggies.  The tuna pate is far too involved to describe here but it is tuna and cream cheese and a bunch of other ingredients blended until smooth.  My mom always made this for holidays and the tradition continues.  The Green Goddess dip is essentially home-made Green Goddess dressing with cream cheese added.  I cut back on the mayo and sour cream.  Just kept playing with it until I got the right consistency.  It turned out really good and it is different from Ranch dip.

After I made the appetizers, I made the broccoli casserole.  Another family tradition and another of my Mom’s recipes.  Broccoli, rice, onion, celery, etc. all combined with Cheez Whiz and mushroom soup.  Can’t have a holiday meal without it.

After all of that, I made two pies.  One pumpkin (again, Mom’s recipe) and one apple (my recipe).  Actually the first thing I had made when I started this cooking extravaganza was the pie crusts.  I’m not above using Pillsbury but making it from scratch is fun and easy and looks more homey.

As I said, all of this took me four hours.  Tomorrow, I haul all of it plus the rest of the ingredients for the Thanksgiving feast to my brother’s house to finish the meal there.  But he will help me with the rest so it will be easier.

Actually, I had a lot of fun doing it.  I really love cooking and it was such a blast to spend the afternoon putting it all together. I had classical music playing, I took my time to make sure each recipe came together properly and tweaked each dish to make sure it was at it’s best.

Tomorrow is the feast.  I hope everyone has an enjoyable meal and it is full of happy memories, both old and new!