Thanksgiving Menu

I wanted to write down all the things that we made for Thanksgiving dinner so we can remember next year.

The nigh before Thanksgiving, Ron got dough ready for four loaves of bread. He's been using Ken Forkish's book, Flour Water Salt Yeast for his bread. He made two loaves that were 10% whole wheat and two that were 40%. They were both delicious. It was colder than it has been, so they took longer to rise and we didn't get to cook them as early as we wanted, but still in time for a small lunch and of course for dinner.

I was going to make the cranberry sauce the day before, but it got late after all the cleaning, so I just made it early in the morning. I just followed the recipe on the bag, but added some lemon zest. I wanted to add orange zest and some juice instead of just water, but the oranges just aren't quite ripe. Maybe I'll make some for Christmas with oranges.

The stuffing turned out tasty, but dry. We didn't put any in the turkey and I think I just needed more liquid. I found a recipe from Ina Garten. I didn't follow it exactly, I just wanted to get an idea for the ratio of bread to liquid, but either I used too much bread, the bread was too different (I used some of Ron's) or not enough liquid. But the flavor was great and I know that my kids loved it, so that's what really matters, right? I added sausage, granny smith apples, onions and celery. The only herb I used was oregano, but like I said, the flavor was great!  

I also made green beans with garlic and pine nuts. I made them before and that is now my favorite green bean recipe. You just boil the bean until they are barely tender, saute garlic and pine nuts in a olive oil and then add the green beans to the garlic and nuts just to coat them. They are quite tasty! 

We ended up with two turkeys because Costco had small hens. One was 11.8 lbs and the other was 10.5. That meant we needed two ways to cook them, so one was roasted and one was deep fried. We thought the roasted one was going to take at least three hours, but it was done in like an hour and a half. Ron put onions, apples, fresh rosemary and cinnamon in the cavity of the one we roasted which gave it a very nice flavor. Good thing to remember about small turkeys, those hour per pound estimates don't work. 

Now we have a big deep fryer for outside. We will be using it to heat up the water to help with de-feathering the chickens once we get around to butchering them. Maybe we'll try deep frying chickens, though they are getting old now, so they will probably need to be cooked differently.