Happy Thanksgiving!


The gathering of tasty morsels begins well before the Thanksgiving Holiday - this year we purchased our turkey from Country Ark Farm - a nice 29 lb. bird - not our biggest but we will certainly have lots of leftovers.

The last pick up for our summer share at our CSA always comes right before Thanksgiving and we look forward to the brussel sprouts and cheese pumpkins especially.
I still remember the first year we joined the CSA (13 years ago!) and how amazed I was at the huge stalks of brussel sprouts - I realized my children have never known brussel sprouts in any other way! By the way, this year the boys discovered that the stalks make excellent swords after the sprouts are removed.
We had our pick of an assortment of root vegetables - these we will continue to see throughout the winter but Thanksgiving just wouldn't be the same without sweet potatoes from the garden.
We serve them baked - simply baked - it would be a high crime in this house to let anything even resembling a marchmellow anywhere near these lovelies!

The menu this year featured favorite simple foods in all their goodness

Roast turkey
Mashed potatoes
Sweet potatoes
Brussel Sprouts
Cranberry-apple conserve
Stuffing
Small rosemary sourdough loaves
Corn pudding (made by Grandma!)
Sparkling cider

There were actually two kinds of stuffing - a big batch of apple-celery- onion stuffing and a smaller batch of oyster stuffing that my dear hubby made just for me!

The table was set and ready, we like the napkin holders from the Toymaker.
And new on our festival table this year were two Native American dolls that joined our pilgrims that I made years ago. These really aren't hard to make - the directions for basic heads can be found in The Nature Corner. A little wool for hair, some embroidery floss braided for the headband and there you go -

And last but not least, dessert!

We always have Pumpkin Whoopie pies - they are so good - another great recipe from the International Cookie Cookbook. I also tried a new, untried recipe but I figured how could anything with chocolate and pumpkin turn out bad? A little daring turned into a hit -
Pumpkin Chocolate Tart .