With Thanksgiving only a week away, we've been busy figuring out our plans to see both my husband and my family. My son is eagerly awaiting the day that we tell him it's time to load up the car and make the drive to grandma's house. He loves his grandparents, cousins, aunt's and uncle's and has been asking me over and over when will Thanksgiving be here so we can see them all.
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| Thanksgiving 2010 |
While Thanksgiving can be a lot of work with cleaning and preparing food and even stressful as family comes together, I love this holiday. Growing up Thanksgiving was most often intimately spent with my parents and younger brother. My dad traveled a lot while I was growing up, but Thanksgiving day he was always around. My mom was and is a fantastic decorator (and cook of course ;D) and one of the things that brought her great joy and us as well, was to have our home beautiful, clean, with nice music playing and tantalizing aromas drifting from room to room, with an elegant table set with our fine china and crystal. It was always such a treat as a child to see everything so stunning. Things have become a bit more low key as we've all grown older, but the joys of being together and enjoying fabulous food is still wonderful all the same.
To this day, it always brings us, well my younger brother and me, a great deal of pleasure and laughter reminiscing about the not so perfect parts of Thanksgiving. While everything was always beautiful and the food fabulous, there was one little problem that we ran into countless times...
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| Thanksgiving 2010 |
Those darn turkeys... no matter how much you try, each year doing your best to perfect your roasting skills, sometimes they just don't want to get done. :-) One year I remember us waiting so long for the turkey to finish roasting, literally that bird had been in the oven all day and just didn't want to get to the right temperature, that by the time is was ready to eat it it must have been close to 10-o-clock at night. My brother and I were so tired we could hardly hold our heads up and in the end couldn't hardly eat a thing. Needless to say, with A TON of leftovers, we had our Thanksgiving meal the next night. It's happened often enough that the turkey just hasn't wanted to get done, that it always a joke to see what time we'll partake in our delightful, all be it, perhaps late evening meal.
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| Thanksgiving 2010 |
I remember on one occasion where the turkey did get done, we had gathered together at my uncle's home. All the aunts, uncles and cousins were together, a rarity that I truly wish could happen more often. My mother was getting the turkey ready and began pulling out the insides before preparing it to be roasted and start to make her fabulous gravy. Instead of the normal neck or gizzard coming out, there was actually a whole turkey head, feathers and all. Talk about startling, disgusting and hilarious all at the same time. Mind you this was a standard store bought turkey, not one from a farm, where you might want to "extra' piece. At that point in our lives the idea of butchering our own animals was far, far from our mind and seeing the turkey head (we'll just hope that the head and body actually belonged together) did a very good job of taking a bit of our appetite away.
Every year we try a new turkey recipe and different techniques, but have yet to find one that I think is so outstanding that I feel I must share it. So for now that will have to wait, however, over the years one thing I have loved to do is bake and learning to bake the ultimate pie has always seemed to go hand in hand with Thanksgiving. I think there is a bit of an art form to pie making and a whole lot of love. It takes practice, but once you figure out a great technique and recipe the end results are so delicious and satisfying that it makes the not so great turnouts worth it.
There are plenty of recipes out there that focus more on the decorative side of pie making with the pretty details you can do or add. While that can be fun, sometimes the flavor is forfeited for the looks. I kind of like the simple, classic looking pie that leaves everyone with a smile on their face after eating one, then two and just perhaps, since it's a holiday, three slices of pie. The classic pie has a homey and inviting feel that lends to that desire to sit down and relax, while sipping on a hot cup of tea and enjoying good conversation and a fun game or two. That, to me, is a wonderful end to a fabulous day.
Every year we try a new turkey recipe and different techniques, but have yet to find one that I think is so outstanding that I feel I must share it. So for now that will have to wait, however, over the years one thing I have loved to do is bake and learning to bake the ultimate pie has always seemed to go hand in hand with Thanksgiving. I think there is a bit of an art form to pie making and a whole lot of love. It takes practice, but once you figure out a great technique and recipe the end results are so delicious and satisfying that it makes the not so great turnouts worth it.
