Friday Thanksgiving.....

Or, better late than never. Thursday was Thanksgiving, but not here in Canada. I always celebrate Thanksgiving though because you can take the girl out of American, but you can't take the American out of the girl. Thursday was jam packed and I had to work in the evening so no turkey on Thursday. I made it Friday instead and Robin and I had a nice quiet dinner at home.

My oven is seriously whacked. I cooked a 14lb turkey in 2.5hrs at 325. The oven needs serious calibration. The pop up thermometer popped and who knows, it could have popped at 2 hrs. The turkey was slightly dry.

I also made some boursin mashed spuds, and baby roasted spuds for Robin. I made the ubiquitous green bean bake as well. I made a corn bread/wheat bread apple mushroom dressing that I put in the crockpot at 1pm. That freed up oven space and kept the dressing nice and moist. I had a cornbread in the freezer from July. It was originally destined for a grilled cornbread/arugula salad as we were having guests, but I had some weird gallbladder attack and ended up in the ER. The cornbread has been sitting in the freezer since then. I just chunked it up and toasted it with half a loaf of wheatbread( in hindsight, it was too cornbready). Butter, onions, mushrooms and grannysmith apples followed suit. I made a really rich wild mushroom broth in the morning( I got 3lbs of shiitakies for 99 cents) and that moistened the stuffing. I used some broth for the gravy too. Way back in July, I also blanched some sweet Ontario corn and I froze that. I pan sauteed it with some thyme and added a splash of half and half for my very own version of creamed corn.

I made a regular old pumpkin pie for dessert but I was too full to eat dessert.

No cooking today, plenty of leftovers.

Lasagna Soup.....

Forgive my lack of posting. I've been working the last few days and I'm pretty tired when I get home. Yesterday was a Christmas Party at work. We prepped Tuesday and yesterday morning for the party. I made a huge carrot cake, pumpkin raisin bread, date nut bread, rum balls, mollases cookies and white chocolate brownies. I also made salmon salad, tarragon chicken salad, hot spinach dip and various other goodies. Surprisingly, I still felt like cooking dinner when I came home last night.

I threw together this soup in 15 minutes. This is another recipe from CuisineatHome soup and stews magazine. I sauteed garlic, onion, mushrooms, Hot turkey sausage and carrot in some evoo. Chicken broth and chopped tomatoes are added next. I also added some oregano and a pesto spice blend. Malfadina pasta is added directly to the broth. Lastly fresh spinach is stirred in and then you ladle the soup over cubed mozzarella or provolone. Parmesean and basil finish this dish off.