Thanksgiving Dinner

We celebrated Thanksgiving on Friday because my brother had to work Thanksgiving day. He and his family drove over on Friday afternoon and we had dinner around 2:30pm. His wife left that evening and drove back home, but Stewart stayed with the kids all weekend long.

For Thanksgiving dinner, Gropius roasted a turkey breast and a spiral-sliced ham. I made clover-leaf rolls, bundles of green beans (wrapped in bacon and roasted in butter and brown sugar), and marshmallow-covered sweet potatoes. Mom made my grandmother's famous fruit salad, kernel corn, and stove-top dressing. And we also had jellied cranberry sauce (for my father) and an olive tray (for my brother).

Turkey


Dinner Table


Sweet Potatoes (with a streusel topping on one end for Gropius)

Spiral-Sliced Ham

Stouffer's Stove-Top Dressing


WV Wine (we brought it down with us two years ago but Mom couldn't drink it due to chemo/radiation therapy--she liked it though!)


My niece and nephew had cut-up wienies, corn, shredded cheese, and mustard. My nephew had coffee to drink with his meal. I think my niece had Tang? We put them at their own special place-settings at the bar behind the table.



After dinner was through, my sister-in-law lay around while Gropius, Mom, and I put away the leftovers and washed dishes. My brother herded his children and my father and grandfather sat and watched college football.

Stollen Update

So, Gropius and I made a recipe that produced two stollen loaves yesterday. Unfortunately, we mis-read the recipe and the first loaf was improperly sized (still delicious, but not as pretty as its twin). We included candied orange/lemon/citron peels, brandied cherries, currants, and marzipan in our version. We based our recipe from the one in Kaffeehaus by Rick Ro(d)gers. His recipe used dried fruits, but we went with the traditional European stuff instead. Here are some pictures of how it all turned out (these loaves won't last through Thanksgiving, fyi):


the one on the left is how stollen is supposed to look (the right one is trying to pass as German biscotti!)



big chunk of marzipan there on the right


YUM! I love Christmas......

Catch-Up meal(s).

Things have been busy lately. Nothing like being out of town for most of last week and having Thanksgiving looming over you to make you feel pressured and over-worked. (irony of ironies, we are studying Marx in my History of Econ Thought class right now).

So, I have neglected the blog in my (futile) efforts to get caught up with my to-do list. The following is a mish-mash of various meals from the past week, but there are a few good pictures among them, I think.

schnitzel with german potato salad and asparagus (this is Gropius's plate with my asparagus tips--I don't like the tips)

prosciutto-wrapped, quince chicken in a white wine sauce on a bed of leeks with wilted swiss chard and carrots


coffee cake muffins (Saturday's breakfast)


beet risotto (recipe from Martha Stewart)

we liked this one because it used beet greens, too.


We have spent the weekend in the kitchen doing some pre-holiday baking warm-ups: christstollen and kastanove bramburky (chestnut potatoes). I will have better pictures of those efforts posted later, but for now you can see some preliminary results on flickr.

We also made a quick trip to Home Depot and acquired a new vent hood for our stove-top. The puny microwave vent hood that the flippers installed in the kitchen before we moved in just isn't sufficient. We looked at several more expensive brands and (we think) lucked into a cheaper line by an Italian company known for more expensive range hoods. Will have more pictures of how that projects turns out later, too (after Thanksgiving though).

Guys never make passes....

....at girls who wear glasses....

Stages of Scones

Here are the various stages of the cranberry-almond scones Gropius and I enjoyed yesterday for breakfast:

Stage One: crumbly dry ingredients (cut with butter)


Stage Two: "kneading" the dough until it barely sticks together with some help from Saran-Wrap



Stage Three: gently brushing some half-n-half (or cream) on top and sprinkling with a little demerara sugar


Stage Four: resting out of the oven



Stage Five: Breakfast!

breakfast

cherry-almond scones, guatemalan coffee, mango-acai fruit smoothie

close-ups of scones


afternoon snack!

Borscht

Hellen loves beets, but she had never had borscht, so Gropius and I made some for her on Tuesday night for dinner after our running group was over. It was a vegetarian borscht, so it's not like my babushka used to make, but it was very tasty (if you love beets).

And, yes, those colors have been corrected, that's the actual color of the beets!


(I'm drinking a combo of cranberry juice and orange juice)

Happy Hellen