(Last) Sunday Dinner

With the holidays fast approaching, this week kind of got away from me, and I realized I never finished this post about the excellent dinner that Kirk made last Sunday. We've been doing our Advent Sunday celebrations up right this year, with really excellent dinners to enjoy while we light the week's candle and reflect on hope, peace, love, and joy. Last Sunday was the Sunday of love, and we observed it with a December turkey dinner.

Along with turkey comes stuffing, and it's easy to see why that's a traditional food at this season of the year. The things we have from the late fall garden are exactly what we need for stuffing:

Here we have the dried out ends of bread, and a pan of diced carrots, leeks, and the last of our celery. Kirk cooked them a bit to soften them up, then used his hands to mix it all together in a big bowl. Also in the mix:

That’s thyme, sage, and rosemary. Although we cut large bunches to dry before frost, we still have these herbs available fresh in the garden. I'm surprised at how long they've lasted, actually, and we'll use them fresh for as long as we can before dipping into the dried reserves. 

When it's all mixed up and ready to go into the bird, it looks like this:

Last Sunday's dinner was inspired by our visit to Strawbery Banke's Candlelight Stroll. Each December they open the buildings at night and have holiday-themed interpretations in each of the houses. There's also a bonfire, carolers, and carriage rides, as well as cider and cookies to eat along the way. Our favorite house, the Shapiro House, was demonstrating a 1919 Hanukkah celebration. They were making latkes as we walked through, and the rest of the menu included beets, roasted chicken, applesauce, and green beans. 

We were inspired! It smelled great while we were there, and that list was full of things we still have in the garden. Here's our version:

We had our beets in tart form, with blue cheese. We also had the latkes with our potatoes from storage, plus our turkey and stuffing. We made a last minute substitution of cabbage for the green beans we had been planning. Some of our (very small) cabbages were starting to die back on their lower leaves, so we picked a few and had some curried cabbage instead. Our frozen green beans will last much longer, so we'll save them for deeper into the winter, when nothing fresh is available.

This dinner was a hit with everyone, which is always nice. Well ... the beet tarts were mostly enjoyed by the adults at the table, but everything else was equal opportunity deliciousness. Yum!