The Thanksgiving Feast

For the past several years, we have spend Thanksgiving on our own, no extended family, no friends, just our immediate family.  This year, we decided to invite some friends over, and boy are we glad we did!  We had such a lovely time shooting the breeze, eating TONS of food, and watching our kiddies play together.  We’ll definitely be inviting people over every year, I think!

But back to the food.  I have NO. IDEA. why we had so much food.  There were four adults and four children under the age of five.  We had so much food left over, we were eating left overs until Sunday!  And it didn’t help that our friends left all of the food they brought and didn’t take anything with them!  We still have dessert in the freezer (and that’s only because we put it there . . otherwise, we would have finished that off first!)

Come and take a tour through our spread!  Pretty much everything was something totally new, either recipes from friends, magazines or foodie blogs.  Most everything was delish, some more than others.

The main entree . . .. tofu.  Every year, DH uses tons of tofu to make some sort of dish with stuffing.  This year, it turned out quite good (the first year was pretty much a flop!)

(For some reason, I don’t have a picture of this.  I KNOW I took one, I just can’t seem to find it now!  Oops!)

Next up, stuffing.  I made Artichoke Parmesan Sourdough Stuffing.  It was pretty good, not to die for delicious like I expected, but good, none-the-less.

We had two different green veggies:  brussel sprouts and broccoli.  These were brought by our guests, so no recipes to share on these.

I roasted some sweet potatoes ala smitten kitchen, and then made a cinnamon butter to go on top.  (I only following the roasting instructions, didn’t make the topping as it didn’t sound all that good to me.) The butter was really yummy, and was perfection atop the pull apart rolls I made.  I’m not much into making homemade bread . . . but this was an easy recipe and they were soooo good!

The spread would have been incomplete with out cranberry sauce.  Can’t say that I really liked this recipe all that well.  Found it in my Parents magazine . . ..  .it was REALLY tart and had lots of orange zest.  But, it was really quite good in the cake.

And now for the desserts.  First up:  Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bundt Cake. . . . need I say more?

Remember that cake I mentioned earlier?  It was a regular made from a mix bundt cake that had some of the cranberry sauce swirled into it after placing the batter in the pan.  I also tried to make a glaze . . .notice I said tried.  For some reason, it was SUPER runny and it didn’t have that nice white look that I was expecting.  It DID add a nice flavor, just not as pretty as I was expecting.

Our guests brought an apple pie with the most delectable crust . . YUM!

So I bet you aren’t surprised that we had oodles of leftovers, right?=)