Leftovers

One of the best things about big food holidays is the leftovers. If you have extra turkey, try it on a roll with Brie and cranberry sauce. I make my cranberry sauce with horseradish, which is great on this sandwich too. The kick is especially nice when it's cold and raining. I hope everyone had as wonderful a Thanksgiving as I did. I feel truly blessed. And very full.

Pumpkin Stew

Thanksgiving week has started! Its the best cooking week of the year, so I like to try a few new things with the traditional. Tonight, my sister and brother-in-law arrived at the beach with us, and I made an Argentinian Pumpkin Stew in a pumpkin shell with cracked pepper biscuits. It was the first time I made a stew inside the pumpkin, and I was disappointed that the pumpkin wasn't as tender as I'd hoped on the inside. Next time, I'll cook it less in the pot ahead and longer in the pumpkin. It looked great though - very festive. And the stew was incredible. It came from a recipe on cooks.com that my old violin teacher, Lynne Webster Sawyer, lead me to last year. As we give thanks this week, I'd like to include that I'm thankful Lynne is still in my life, that Lindsay and Scott are awesome and willing guinea pigs, and that I'm able to indulge in my love of cooking for a whole week with my family. Cheers!

http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1948,144178-239207,00.html

(PS - the only changes I made were using beef stock instead of broth for a more robust flavor and swapping the sherry for white wine.)

Getting Ready...

Thanksgiving is coming up quickly - Hal and I are having Thanksgiving with my family in Hilton Head this year, and we're taking the whole week off. Woohoo! That means we're leaving in one week. So today I've spent my non-football-watching time making some food to freeze and take with us. I also made some Wassail in the crock pot, and have been drinking on it all day - one of my favorite holiday traditions: getting half drunk while I cook. My wassail is easy:
1 gallon apple cider
1 bottle red wine (I like something light, like a Pinot Noir)
12-16 oz of orange juice
12-16 oz pineapple juice
couple of cinnamon sticks and cloves
Mix together, heat it up. You can make it in crock pot, large stew pot on the stove, or a large coffee percolator. Its also very easy to cut that recipe down for consumption by only two people while cooking.

I hope everyone is getting as excited about holiday food as I am. Most of my make-aheads today were breads - blueberry croissant French Toast, cracked pepper biscuits and cider-pumpkin muffins. I'm getting my plan ready for the rest of the make-aheads that I'll take care of closer to time also, to make Thanksgiving as easy as possible since we'll have a lot of people in the condo kitchen. And all I'll want to be doing is drinking anyway. :)

Cider-Pumpkin Muffins

My new favorite trick: make a box of instant pumpkin bread mix (I made it as muffins), replace the water with apple cider. The extra flavor is subtle, but quite lovely. I actually tried this out for tailgating a few weeks ago, and got great feedback. This is one of those tricks that's easy to apply to other things: such as replacing water with Frangelico when making brownies. Any other ideas? Cause I'm in a baking mood as the weather gets colder...