Thanksgiving, finally!

Yes, we finally gorged ourselves for Thanksgiving with a huge meal today. Our annual feast was delayed for us due to what seems to be another annual event - colds and bronchitis. With everyone feeling better, we deemed this year's phlegm fest to be over & time to eat!

Boogie and I prepared the menu, a host of traditional foods for the day. This is the menu he helped design:
We started of with Devilishly Good Dijon Deviled Eggs, a real family favorite. I used jumbo eggs this time, so I had to adjust the measurements up a bit. Our main course was also a variation on our regular. I made a ½ turkey from Jennie-O, an "Oven-Ready" turkey. This worked out very well for us since we were able to just keep the turkey in the freezer without having to worry about thawing, and since there would only be 5 of us for dinner, a whole turkey seemed to be a bit much.
On the side we had my favorite potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes using the easy recipe from Cook's Illustrated. The recipe can be found here and here (pdf version). I've made this recipe several times and it comes out perfect every time. It also gives me an opportunity to use my wonderful 50-some year old Ecko Flint potato masher. This time, though, I added a layer of mini-marshmallows on top for Karen, and popped the casserole into the oven with turkey and beans for a few minutes, just to toast the marshmallows.
Our other side dish was traditional green bean casserole. Usually it comes out great, but despite the good reviews from my family, I wasn't pleased with it this year. The beans were off - I couldn't find the right beans. I prefer frozen french-style, but no one seemed to have them so I wound up using frozen cut green beans. It just wasn't the same for me.
The Sister Schubert's yeast rolls were good, though - Karen discovered their great taste a few months back. I'd seen them in the store but hadn't tried them before. They're readily available pretty much everywhere since the Columbus, Ohio-based T. Marzetti Company acquired them a few years back.
And what can you say about store-brand canned jellied can-berry sauce? Is there anything better on this cranberriest of cranberry days? God, I love that stuff (ColumbusFoodie has a great photo of it here, better than the blurry shots I kept taking...)

For desert we had a Mrs. Smith's Cinnabon® Apple Crumb Pie. It's huge, heavy and comes with a bag of cream cheese frosting to drizzle over the dutch apple pie style sugary crumb crisp topping. Yeah, that was pretty darn good. Grandma brought a variety of Kroger Private Select cheesecake slices - I had a couple of those, too, plain and turtle. Yum.
Here's a really bad photo of the spread before I sat down.

Besides the good feeling of a full belly, I also felt thankful for my family, my health (crappy as it's been lately, it's still better than many), my work, my good fortune, and my life in general.
All in all, a pretty good Thanksgiving. I hope yours was good, too.


Enjoy,
Lorence