Thanksgiving cooking... Part II

I started today up at 10am, which is way too early for me but I was dreaming of cooking food and woke up without an alarm. At 11 I put the rolls out to rise:

Of course I've got my handy excel bar chart schedule to let me know what to do when. Plus it helps me not overload my oven or stove top. Who does anything without the help of excel I want to know...

At 1:30 we started getting the turkey prepped. And because deep frying the turkey isn't fattening enough, we must inject it with Tony Chachere's Cajun Butter too!

After prepping the green beans and corn I started the bacon, onions, and celery for the stuffing.

I think it turned out pretty good!

While the turkey cooks the ham goes in the oven. Also, the giblets and neck get cooked down for the gravy. Looks gross now!

But turned into this:

In the end we had so much food. It was delicious and well worth the hard work. Well, worth the hard work considering we only have to do it once each year.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Let the cooking begin!

With Thanksgiving drawing near it's time for me to start the cooking. I started this morning making the whiskey cream sauce for the pecan pie. Darn you pioneer woman for your wonderful recipes!

Then on to the pecan pie. 1 1/3 recipes made 2 pies. One for tomorrow and one to share.

Oh Apple Pie - this is my favorite. Will I be able to wait until tomorrow to sample this? We'll see...

Now, last but not least for desserts - pumpkin cream cheese truffles. I'm trying this in lieu of pumpkin pie this year (with Kenneth's blessing of course). This is a recipe I found on pinterest. It sounds good but there is NO WAY this makes 30 truffles unless they are tiny. This is what one recipe made. It's chilling now and we'll see how it turns out. I might need to double it.

The recipe made 21, and that was using my small scooper. These were about 1" diameter.

I did have to sample one. The cook can't serve food without tasting, right? If food network has taught me one that it's that! I'm surprised to say that they are good! I'm not a pumpkin lover and never eat pumpkin pie... but I'll definitely have more of these. I'm hiding half of them from Kenneth now! The orange zest really stands out and adds a fresh taste. They don't just scream pumpkin but are very good!

And now the cooking is complete for today... the turkey and ham are thawing and I'll set the rolls out early to rise tomorrow. Time do do some laundry and dishes.

The Bar is Finally Open!

In 2008, wow - it's been that long. In 2008 I knocked a lovely hole in the wall between the kitchen and living room. I thought it would open it up (and wanted to watch tv while cooking). There's always ulterior motives, right?

Then in 2009 (or '10, it's been so long I forget now) Kenneth got me a lovely chunk of rough cut cedar to build a bar with. It was to match the mantle (as seen above) and would fit in the nice new opening.

But I couldn't just put a rectangle piece o

f lumber in the hole - oh no, that would be way too easy. So, I came up with a plan of how it needed to be cut here and notched there. Seeing as how this is 4"x12" cedar not just any saw will cut what I wanted to cut.

To the point - my wonderful friend Bob was able to cut just what I needed and FINALLY - the bar is open. It looks like we knew what we were doing. I've got a sealer that I need to put on but other than that it's up. And it only took 3 years!