Food Traditions

Small post on Thanksgiving food traditions.  Every family is a little different in their likes & dislikes when it comes to food.

I grew up with the traditional baked turkey, Mom baked it all night in a slow oven and it fell apart when it came time to eat, no carving necessary.  We made our dressing/stuffing the 'northern way' with white bread, chopped celery & onions, seasoned with sage, salt & pepper, moistened with turkey broth and baked in its own casserole dish.  Gravy was simply turkey broth thickened with a flour & water paste.  Sides were usually green beans, sweet potatoes with brown sugar & marshmallows, cranberries, carrot & celery sticks, pickles of several sorts, radishes, and my favorite..spiced crab apples.  Of course rolls & butter and various pies for dessert, pumpkin being one of them always.

In later years we added something we call rolled up onions, a piece of Buddig corned beef lunchmeat slathered in cream cheese rolled up around a green onion.  Half were already gone by dinnertime, we had to taste test them :-0  Later on we decided deviled eggs were not just for Easter and added those as well.

With only 2 of us here I scale back a lot.  The turkey now gets cooked in the pressure cooker as the oven does not work, but it always comes out delicious, moist and tender.  Same dressing and gravy, rolled up onions & deviled eggs.  I only make sweet potatoes because the resident poet likes them, I'm ambivalent.  This year I tried a new recipe from a Colonial Cookbook.  Layers of cooked sweet potato slices and pared apple slices in a casserole dish, drizzled on was a small amount of orange juice, mead (was supposed to be rum but I forgot to buy some) butter, cinnamon & allspice.  It was very nice thought I think the resident poet missed the marshmallows.  No green beans or rolls, we just can't eat that much, and spiced crab apples are no where to be found here.  I did use the last of the cream cheese in some celery and of course had homemade cranberry relish.  No pies this year, the RP does not care for pumpkin and I wanted to make a cherry crumble, so I did!  As a nice treat I used the bottle of mead (honey wine) and mixed in some fruit juices I had along with the mulling spices.  I'm having a nice warm cup as I type, yum!

Some friends were chitchatting on Facebook about their menus and one lady said she didn't know stuffing could be made with cornbread!  Oh, my!  I mentioned that some people put oysters in it, some put in the gizzards and such, each to his own.  Personally I won't eat the gizzards and innards, they are a treat for the cats.  There's a reason the medieval people called that stuff 'garbage', lol... just my opinion...but don't get me started on the 'green bean casserole' everyone here seems to love--I just think it's nasty.  The other item I thought was weird was a friend told of a lady that floated slices of hard boiled egg in her very thin gravy...can't for the life of me understand why.  It's sometimes a whole other world living in Texas.

Hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving Day food traditions whatever they are and enjoyed your time with family and friends.