Happy Thanksgiving

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

I just want to wish everyone here a Happy Thanksgiving, and I hope that you and your families have a great holiday.

I haven't been on the forums much lately, but I hope that everyone is doing well. We have been expanding and are starting a new business, so we have been busy with that.

I took a quick look at some of the active topics and I saw you talking about Thanksgiving movies, I'm surprised that nobody mentioned the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles. We always watch A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving as well.

[Murfreesboro]

I do have Charlie Brown in my rotation.

My husband, who has the week off from school, has been into comedies like Free Guy and Lost City. Nothing seasonal for him. Also lots of WW2 documentaries, his favorite period to study.

Congrats on the expansion of your business! That's exciting news!

I'm hopeful we'll have a good holiday. My older son is flying in tomorrow. I expect to cook most of the day tomorrow so I don't have to slave so much on Thursday.

[Andybev01]

PTAA is such a good movie, I didn't list it because it's a given that I'll watch it every year.

Peanuts is also on heavy rotation.

Tomorrow is vegetables shopping so hat they are as fresh as can be without buying them Thanksgiving morning.

[Murfreesboro]

I'm cooking everything except the turkey today. I'll chippy chop for the dressing today, too. The cornbread is already made for it.

[Andybev01]

I love cornbread but for some bizarre reason it gives me acid indigestion.

I make sourdough, heavy on the herbs.

Do you dress or stuff your bird?

I do both.

[Murfreesboro]

I call it dressing, but I always stuff it. Any leftovers get tucked into the nooks around the outside of the bird.
I've never had any dressing other than cornbread, but I do also combine it with about half a loaf of white bread.

I chop lots of onions and celery, and I use tons of spices. Mostly sage, lesser amounts of thyme, rosemary, basil, marjoram, and parsley. Then I use 6-8 eggs to bind it all. I rub the bird inside and out with handfuls of table salt.

I learned to do this from watching my mother, who learned from her mother. It had never been written down, until I did so for my kids several years ago.

[Andybev01]

That is a lot of eggs! I use 1 or 2 depending on the volume of bread.

[MauEvig]

Happy Thanksgiving y'all! I haven't been active much on here either, but I wanted to at least pop in and wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving.

Just put the turkey in the crockpot myself. It's a nice small turkey breast, just big enough for us. No sense in getting something big for two people, but we'll certainly share with our furry kids.

What kind of pies do you all have? I feel like pumpkin is the standard, and I bought a Marie Callender's. I really miss the Edward's pumpkin spice creme pies though. Best dang pumpkin pie I'd ever had. Meanwhile I'll be sure to have a little pie with my cool whip!

Free Guy's a good movie. Charlie Brown's always a nice classic. When I used to work for the High School they put that on before Thanksgiving break. It's interesting how they interacted back then, the kids all in a stationwagon with no seat belts. Definitely a different world.
Murf I call it stuffing myself, even though ironically I never stuff our bird. I usually just make it on the side when the bird is close to being done.

[Murfreesboro]

That's funny, that we say the reverse of what we do. I think it's more of a Southern thing to call it dressing. I don't know if that means Southerners were more likely to cook it outside the bird, but my family never did. Back in the 80s, when I first started cooking it myself, there was a lot of talk about people getting food poisoning from stuffing it inside the bird, but I paid it no mind. I knew my mother and grandmother had never poisoned anyone.

Andy, my grandmother's dressing was the holy grail in my mother's family. My mother and aunt tried every year to replicate it, and every year both of them swore that it never achieved her excellence. Mine probably doesn't, either, but I know that combining the cornbread with white bread, and using at least a half dozen eggs, was part of what she did.

Mau, we're having a Marie Callendars pumpkin pie today, too! I always have pumpkin, but if I needed a second one, I'd choose pecan. That's because I have a thing about making sure that the primary ingredient of each dish has New World origins.

I made 2 pumpkin pies from scratch in Oct, but for Thanksgiving I always buy a frozen one. I do all the cooking, so I have to cut corners somewhere.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

I hope that everyone had a good Thanksgiving. We went to my mother's place this year, it was my family, my sister and her family, and my wife's brother and his family, so it was a small gathering. Well, it was small compared to the amount of people we usually have at Thanksgiving.

Murf - I sure hope that your family appreciates the time and effort you put into preparing Thanksgiving dinner for them, I know that I'm thankful to still have my mother around, and that she still makes a feast for the whole family.

On a side note, I just want to say that my favorite thing to eat at Thanksgiving is actually the stuffing, there is just something about the way my mother makes it that I have loved since I was a kid, and I can, and have eaten plates full of her stuffing. She prepares it both ways, inside the bird, and on the side. I also love the pumpkin pie, as she always makes it herself.

I noticed some good new topics come up, I do have something to say on each topic, but I've been really busy, so I'll try to get to them later.

Congrats on the expansion of your business! That's exciting news!

Thanks Murf! We have had some extra space in the building with the bakery that was sitting there for years but we didn't know what to do with it, so we finally decided to turn it into a Café. We already serve coffee at the restaurant and bakery, but specialty coffee is big business right now, in particular in this area, so we are confident that we made the right choice.

We had to do extensive renovations, buy new furniture, appliances, and equipment, and hire and train new employees, so as you could imagine, it's been chaotic around here, but it's coming together and we should be up and running by Dec. 1. The holiday season is always the busiest time of year for us, and it looks like another great season is coming.

[Murfreesboro]

Oh, the local coffee shops are the best! I hope yours is a great success.

I would think I was having an enormous Thanksgiving if as many people as you all had were to show up at our house. I never have more than the five in my immediate family. And I do think they appreciate the meal.

I think the most popular dish at our meal is the cranberry sauce, honestly. It's the simplest thing on earth to make, and making it from scratch makes a huge difference in the flavor. I get a lot of bang for my buck with that one. It is the only thing my daughter ever asks about and the first thing that disappears. Since I make several loaves of cranberry orange bread at Christmas, I am buying sacks and sacks of cranberries during the holidays. At the end of the season, when they get marked down, I buy as many as I can fit into my freezer for the next year. They keep.

But everything tasted good yesterday. We all enjoyed it.

[Andybev01]

When I make cranberry sauce I substitute pre maple syrup gor the sugar.

It's a more palatable sweet that way.

[Murfreesboro]

I've never done that, but I bet it's great.