Our Thanksgiving

I always enjoy reading how others spent their day and what recipes are traditional for them, so I thought I'd post about our day. We had a quiet Thanksgiving, we didn't have family to visit, and our best friends were out of town, so it was just us - which is fine, Mr. B is rarely home, so a day to just be together is always special. He played Scrabble with the boys, we had WDAV playing (classical internet radio), and Miss M made a pest of herself trying to get into everything by pulling up a chair so she could reach the counter while I was trying to work in the kitchen.

In the evening we usually watch a Thanksgiving video - we have a few things we taped off TV years ago - The Mouse on the Mayflower cartoon, a cartoon about William Bradford, a 1950's movie called Plymouth Adventure with Spencer Tracy, and a special from the Discovery channel about wild turkeys. I like to read something like Margaret Pumphrey's Stories of the Pilgrims during the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, but it didn't happen this year.

I did not stay on my raw diet. I planned beforehand to allow myself some turkey (plain, not even salt on it), stuffing-flavored rice (gluten-free), and a plain baked organic sweet potato, and I stuck to my plan.

For the rest of the family, I made everything traditionally. I'm a simple cook, we don't have gourmet tastes, so there's nothing particularly unusual about any of our recipes. Most of them are like what my mother always made. Turkey, simple bread stuffing (from the Better Homes and gardens Cookbook, my mother says), canned sweet potatoes with a little bit of margarine and drizzled with just a little maple syrup, mashed potatoes (dairy-free; I use rice milk), gravy from a jar (almost fat free!) and canned jellied cranberry sauce. There was also apple cider, frozen microwaved corn, baby carrots with margarine and tarragon, frozen green beans which I heated in the microwave and added grilled onions, a dark green salad, bread, and pies for dessert - pumpkin and apple bought frozen and baked the day before, served with Cool Whip (Lite).

I forgot to make biscuits the day before and realized I wouldn't have the oven to bake them on Thanksgiving day, so I went online and found a recipe for a Thanksgiving Bread that goes in the bread machine. My family liked it, so it's going to become our new Thanksgiving tradition. I made a few alterations because I didn't have corn meal, sage or minced dried onions, and I used partly whole wheat flour. Here's the recipe I used with my alterations:

1 cup warm water
1 egg
1 Tablespoon softened margarine
2 Tablespoons brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/3 cup cornbread mix
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups unbleached flour
2 teaspoons dried onion powder
1 1/2 teaspoons celery seed
1 teaspoon poultry seasoning
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) active dry yeast

Place everything in the bread machine in the order listed. Use basic white bread setting, 1 1/2 pound loaf size.

---------------------------------

And here's my gluten-free substitute for stuffing. It's the same recipe I've always used for bread stuffing, but with rice instead of bread. Miss M and J love it. They won't even eat bread stuffing any more. Too bad, since I made a huge batch of bread stuffing, and now Tim's the only one who will eat it. I'm making a second batch of rice stuffing today, and doubling the recipe. It won't fit in the rice cooker, so I've got it in the crock pot. I expect it will take 6-8 hours.

Stuffing Rice

Saute:
1 minced onion
1/4 c margarine

Add:
2 teaspoons poultry seasoning
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Throw in the rice cooker with:
1 1/2 cups brown rice
4 cups vegetable broth

This was done well before the turkey, so it warmed in the rice cooker for about an hour, which might have made it even better. This was the only part of the meal that Miss M went for in a big way. She wouldn't touch the bread stuffing.

This is the same recipe I use for bread stuffing - except that I use a loaf of whole wheat bread, toasted and cut into cubes, instead of rice, and less chicken broth.

-------------------------------

I also found an online site that praised the benefits of roasting a turkey frozen instead of defrosting it first. My turkey was already half thawed, but next year I'm just going to leave it in the freezer. There's no thawing raw juice to leak, and the white meat gets less dry because it's still thawing while the dark meat is baking.