Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving weekend, SGT T had 4 entire days off. Whoa. What did we do with all that time together, you ask? SGT T played computer games, I read and/or watched TV. What? We were in the same room, at least. Seeing as I have nothing else to do, I found some really incredible looking recipes for our Thanksgiving Day feast and went to work. Wednesday I made the pie (pumpkin, of course), bread crumbs for the stuffing, and prepped all the veggies for the stuffing.

Instead of Turkey I made Cornish game hens, with this Honey Game Hen recipe from Paula Deen of the Food Network. The reviews for the recipe were fantastic and I was excited to try it out. They sure looked good, coming out of the oven. Unfortunately, even though the thermometer told me they were well and done, once we made it through just enough of the bird to make it not worth reheating, we discovered they were, in fact, really, really not done. We then spent the rest of the night waiting to see who would get dibs on the toilet for the food poisoning festivities. But not before I ate as much pie as possible. What? Tell me you'd do different!


The stuffing, on the other hand, was great! I found the recipe from Crabby Cook and was extremely pleased with how it turned out. My only mishap with the stuffing came when making the bread crumbs. Apparently our oven is lame, or it could possibly be me, and I burned one side of two entire trays of bread. I went back to the store for another loaf and tried again, this time at 200 degrees and just kept checking them until they were done. Much better!


I've never, EVER, been a fan of the green bean casserole so I found an alternative recipe here. I altered it somewhat by skipping the blue cheese (I had to get SGT T to eat it somehow), and adding bacon (again, you can get him to eat just about anything if you put bacon in it!), and used regular yellow onion instead of shallots. I don't know if SGT T actually ended up eating them or not, he was too busy scarfing down a raw hen, but I really liked it.

And of course the best part of the meal, the mashed potato's, I didn't take a picture of. But holy cow, they were good! Seriously, like the best mashed potato's ever. EVER. I roasted some garlic (inspired, again, by Crabby Cook) the day before, used yellow potato's instead of regular old brown whatever they are ones, left the skin on because that's the way we roll, and added a bit of sour cream when I mashed. Yum. The gravy had to be made from a packet of Lipton's onion soup because the hens didn't really leave any sauce or drippings, so it wasn't fantastic but for a girl who has made gravy from scratch like, twice, I'd say it was quite fine.

Not terribly fantastic, but not bad. And, we escaped the food poisoning which was really lucky because we only have the one bathroom and I wasn't sure how I felt about using the tub while SGT T used the toilet.