Thanksgiving Roundup: The Dinner

Ah, Thanksgiving. Have I mentioned how much I love it? We were lucky to be hosting some great friends who also happen to be transplanted Pennsylvanians like ourselves:


Good friends and good eats made for a great holiday! Let's get a closer look at the dinner we enjoyed:


Clockwise from the top, we had turkey (of course), green bean casserole, parsley mashed potatoes, candied yams, cranberry sauce, and turkey stuffing.

This is all pretty standard fare for Thanksgiving, and we wouldn't have it any other way. Tiegan made the cranberry sauce by following the time-honored direction on the bag from Ocean Spray (we only had a handful of cranberries of our own this year, which I have other, more garnish-like plans for). Kirk added fresh parsley to the mashed potatoes to use it up, but it was a nice addition.

The green bean casserole, though, is a homemade riff on the old Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup-using invention (which I will admit to loving). It's a pretty tasty upgrade!

Homemade Green Bean Casserole

8 oz mushrooms, finely chopped 
2 Tbs. butter 
2 Tbs. plus 1 cup flour 
salt, pepper, thyme, and cayenne pepper to taste
1 cup heavy cream
1 gallon bag of frozen green beans 
1 leek, chopped into half-inch pieces and separated into rings (a little--don't gp crazy worrying about that)
oil for frying

1. Melt butter into a saucepan and sauté chopped mushrooms over medium heat until softened. Then stir in 2 Tbs. flour to make a roux before stirring in the cream. Cook cream down on low heat so it thickens. Season with salt, pepper, and thyme to taste. This is your not-from-a-can cream of mushroom sauce.

2. Add your green beans to the sauce (or vice versa), mixing thoroughly in a casserole dish. 

3. Add 1 cup of flour to a mixing bowl, adding salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper to taste. Toss leek rings into the mixture to coat them, sifting off excess flour. 

4. Heat cooking oil in small saucepan over medium-high heat (a deep fryer would work if you've got one lying around). Fry leeks in small batches until crispy; drain on a paper towel. Sprinkle these evenly over the top of your casserole. These are you not-from-a-can French Fried Onion Crunchies. 

 5. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes (easily accomplished while the turkey is resting). 

6. Eat in mass quantities on Thanksgiving. Also good throughout winter for as long as you have frozen green beans!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w...
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin...
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel...
Read more