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because i promised my mom, and also because i love it so much, here’s a closeup shot of the thanksgiving apron she made for me.

omfg, i love food!! tried another new recipe this evening; one that i found in the new costco recipe book, and of course i tweaked it a bit. it’s basically seared sea scallops in a red grape and shallot cream sauce layered between cracker bread and fresh baby spinach. i just had to take pictures. we didn’t really know how to eat it at first, what with it being all stacked high and stuff, but we picked at it a bit with our fingers and found that it was incredibly delicious. num!

i’m tired and sick of cleaning and shopping, but i thought i’d take a few moments before family guy comes on, after which i’ll be heading to bed, to mention our incredibly delicious thanksgiving menu that was prepared this year. so here goes…

we started out early in the morning with pumpkin walnut bread and cranberry walnut bread with cream cheese to spread on top (made by jessie). we busted out the seyval vidal and blueberry wine some time around 11am. the wine kept pouring throughout the day, and we had a nice surprise from heather and jon; they brought a bottle of bv pinot noir. for apps we had deviled eggs, crackers and cheese, black olives, shrimp cocktail, baked camembert (a wheel of camembert cheese w/ raspberry peach champagne jam and toasted almonds on top, then wrapped inside of a pie crust and baked) with apples, raisins and pecans, and crabbies. all of which were made/prepared by yours truly, with the exception of the crabbies; they are a tradition of gerry’s mom’s so she gave him the recipe (crab meat, velveeta, butter and mayo all mixed together and baked onto toasted english muffins) and he made them all by himself. so cute! ;)

we also had a soup course, which was a butternut bisque with lots of yummy spices like curry and ginger in it. ed made this wonderful concoction, and he even made a spicy roasted red pepper puree to go with it. i think he even brought sour cream and fresh thyme to top it off, but those were forgotten in the fridge by the time we ate the soup. it was still awesome without them though.

for the main course we had: turkey, 3 different kinds of stuffing (one bread stuffing made by my mom, one vegetarian stuffing made by me with apricots, walnuts and mushrooms, and one meat stuffing made by me with sausage), mashed potatoes w/ garlic and chives (made by me), cranberry sauce, mashed sweet potatoes (jess), roasted butternut, spinach and feta risotto (me), butternut squash roasted in the turkey pan, mashed turnip (jess), steamed carrots (made by me, but forgotten in the microwave where i had put them to get them out of the way and keep warm), homemade applesauce (jess), greenbean casserole (heather), corn pudding (christina), gravy and crescent rolls. it was a heck of a lot of food! the cooking and everything went over well though. there was the one mishap with the carrots and then at the very end of the “get everything served all at once rush” i burned my hand while taking the rolls out of the oven. if you look at the photos from thanksgiving you’ll see one pic in there of me crying a little, and this was why. the burn hurt a lot. i was rinsing my hand under cold water and gerry came over to take a picture of me and he didn’t even realize i was crying or that i had even been burned until after he took it. anyway, on to talking of the yummy desserts.

i made banana pudding, which was a new recipe for me (thanks to scott’s mom) and everybody loved it! it was the one dessert that was actually almost gone by the end of the night. i also made a pumpkin cheesecake, which i have yet to try, but it didn’t seem to look as good as it has when i’ve made it in the past. i do have a couple pieces left in the fridge so i may taste it soon. jessie brought over three amazing pies…she made a pumpkin pie, an eggnog custard pie and my little sister becca helped her out and made the apple pie. not only were they all delicious, but they each had a fancy crust – the pumpkin pie had little pumpkin cutouts along the crust edge, the apple pie had apples and the eggnog custard had maple leaves. they were so damn cute. gerry’s mom made a ginormous chocolate cream pie. my gram made two kinds of brownies; one with nuts and one with raspberry swirl. and my brother and his girlfriend made another pumpkin pie and some really tasty chocolate peanut butter cookies. i also broke out the pumpkin pie martinis at dessert time, because they so tasted like dessert. i ended up just doing the pumpkin vodka, the vanilla chai ice cream, some whole milk and a teeny bit of caramel in the blender. they were strong, but really tasty. we finished about 3/4 of the ingredients by the end of the night, and then finished off the rest of them by friday night. so that went over well.

i think that’s it, although i very well could have forgotten something. it was such a busy day, but i really enjoyed all the cooking and getting to host and visiting with everyone.

ok, now that it’s even past thanksgiving, i really need to change my colors at the very least, nevermind the entire layout.

i will soon post the details of thanksgiving, the delicious menu and what not, but at the moment i just wanted to mention the wonderful day i’ve had today. heather and jon were here relaxing here all day with us. jess, my mom, yoda, alex and danielle all came over earlier on (around 11.30 or so) and we ate a whole bunch of leftovers for brunch. then i spent a while doing some cleaning and cooking and relaxing. i cooked up some select parts of the ginormous turkey we had and made some delicious stock, which i used to make yummy turkey noodle soup. my mom, yoda, alex and danielle all came back over this evening to join us for dinner, which consisted of snacking on cheese and crackers and eating lots of soup and onion poppyseed bread and wheat beer bread. yay! now we’re (alex and danielle and me and gerry) are enjoying the last of the pumpkin martinis. gerry is attempting to teach alex how to play magic (the card game) and danielle is attempting to finish up her 50,000 words (she is participating in the whole “novemeber is novel writing month” thing). so yeah. and we put the tank girl dvd in, so we’re just a little silly. i am so fucking happy that today is friday and not sunday. fuck yeah.

thanksgiving was fantastic. there are pics in the photos section for anyone who’s interested. 8)