Thursday afternoon: Holiday food

Thanksgiving dinner is our favorite meal to make.  It's probably my favorite holiday as well, but with the kids living in Canada and us in the US, it isn't really practical for everyone to be together.  But I love the idea of having the people I love most together on a day set aside for being thankful.  I mean, what more could I ask for than this wonderful family of mine and the life the husband has provided for us?

While we were living in India, the husband would periodically travel to Singapore and one consistent piece of luggage was a large cooler bag that he would fill to the brim with the items on my marketing list.  Cheese, English muffins, bratwurst were always on the list, but the most important item (and the 'freezer pack') was a turkey.  And whenever he came back with these precious goodies, we would soon thereafter invite a group of friends over for a Thanksgiving dinner.  (They had to pay for the dinner by playing games afterwards, but that's another day's story.) 

The husband always does the turkey on the grill--YUM!!!  He also takes responsibility for the stuffing and gravy, which means I have the easy parts as far as I'm concerned.  Our typical Thanksgiving dinner used to include mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, spiced cranberry sauce, pecan pie (if we remembered to get the pecans in Singapore too!), and pumpkin cake.  Many of our Indian friends had not had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner before, so it was something we all looked forward to.  And of course, another reason to love it--LEFTOVERS!!!

Last year we left India on Thanksgiving weekend, so this was our first US one in years.  We actually had our turkey a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving--our supermarket gave us a coupon for a free turkey so we did a test run on the new grill, quite successfully as it turned out.  We decided to have prime rib for our Thanksgiving dinner--another food we hadn't had in years.  It was really good, but somehow not the same.

We are going to have turkey for our Christmas dinner when all 16 of us are here.  We don't think we can get a large enough bird on the grill (about 20 lbs seems to be as big as we can do) so I'll get a ham as well.  I'll do mixed white and sweet potatoes mashed together and skip the sweet potato casserole, and KT (formerly The Nameless One) has an excellent brussel sprouts recipe that we're going to do instead of green beans, but the rest will remain intact.  Some things just can't be improved upon...

I am already busy baking and have pretty much sorted out the meals I need to take care of.  People are arriving on various days, so I will be able to ease into feeding the multitudes.  But the truth is, I can hardly wait.  And not just for the food!