Thanksgiving...one week late

I just realized I better blog about our Thanksgiving before November is up! (Which, on the east coast, is less than 4 hours away). Daiku and I spent a lot of time designing the local menu that we entered into the TreeHugger 100-mile Thanksgiving contest. (You can read more about that here) However, the contest deadline was 2 weeks before Thanksgiving, and by the time the actual day came around, we had either used up the local ingredients we had procured (you can see some in this post) or had grown tired of the recipes that we had already eaten. So our actual Thanksgiving meal turned into a mix of the TreeHugger menu and more traditional fare. Most of our ingredients were still local, though.

But first, here is what Daiku and I are thankful for this year:

• Whisper the turkey, who arrived just in the nick of time (read about her here)
• The incredibly warm weather (it was in the 60's in Syracuse today! yesterday, I walked around the neighborhood in a t-shirt)
• Our wonderful blogging community of friends who teach us so much and inspire us
• The chance to participate in the TreeHugger contest - and the fact that the menu we designed won!
• And, just the fact that the two of us were together, able to eat (out of the last 6 Thanksgivings, we have been apart for 3 and one or both of us had been too sick to eat for 2, so it was a treat to be together and feeling well enough to cook and eat!)

I will give you photos without too much description. Everything we ate was homemade except for the pie we had for dessert and the gravy. (There was just a limit to how much we could cook/bake with time, kitchen size, etc.) We deliberately made too much food to have leftovers, which were all happily gobbled up in the next 3-4 days.

Thanksgiving Day breakfast: banana chocolate chimp muffins from the October issue of VegNews magazine (p. 63) so easy, SO good!



Roasted pumpkin seeds with cocoa powder, sugar, Earth Balance margarine, and chilli powder



Homemade rolls, rise 1



Homemade rolls, rise 2



Homemade rolls fresh out of the oven (plain, poppy seed, sesame seed)



Stuffing for the main course: cornbread, Gimme Lean sausage, celery, carrots, onions, pecans, vegetable broth, sage, marjoram, rosemary



Main course: portabella mushroom caps with stuffing, about to go into the oven



Soup: Daiku's take on French onion soup, French leek soup (slow-cooked leeks, vegetable broth, red wine)



Sweet potato casserole, made from Jess's recipe on Let's Get Sconed



Mashed potatoes (organic heirloom corola potatoes, you can see a before picture of them here)



One of our 2 cranberry sauces: cranberries, local apples, chilli, orange juice



salad: the yellow tomatoes you see are survivors from our summer garden!!



Roasted brussels sprouts and leeks



the pie: perhaps those horrible cracks are our punishment for getting a store-bought pie?...



Dinner table (hard apple cider and sparkling water in background)



Dinner plate

One last thing to be thankful for: When we went out to clear our garden from the summer, we found that one of our pepper plants had kept producing, even though our garden had been neglected for over a month and the weather has been cold. You can see those peppers, along with some bell peppers from our container plants in the above picture.

I hope everyone enjoyed Thanksgiving, whether for the time with friends and family, the food, the time off of work or school, or any other reason!

Thanksgiving...one week late