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Giving Thanks for Good Food!


Well, two full days of Thanksgiving celebrations are over and clean-up is pretty well done. We had family Thanksgiving 3 times - once at my mother-in-law's new digs in a retirement home where we could use a family dining room with full kitchen and dining table. Several of us brought food and we ate very well - turkey, wild rice/sausage stuffing, mashed potatoes w/kale (from our garden), butternut squash (also from our garden) with a brown sugar, toasted walnut topping, cranberry chutney, corn pudding, pecan pie, pumpkin roll, apple-walnut-caramel cake. Then in the evening, went to my mom's where her caregivers made turkey breast, mashed potatoes, the ubiquitous green bean casserole, and we brought a mincemeat pie and the pumpkin roll. Then Friday, our house was jumping, with daughter and her family, two grandmas, and two friends from out of town who spent the weekend - fresh turkey from the people who process our chickens, sage and sausage (from our pigs) stuffing, more garden potatoes and squash, corn from the garden, and the desserts. Two days of cooking/eating/cleaning up. Right now I'm cooking down the turkey carcass for stock. It is very rewarding to sit down to a dinner where most of the ingredients came from our farm, and what didn't get grown here was natural, raw ingredients. At some point this weekend, we will transform all the leftovers of turkey, stuffing, potatoes, corn, plus garden carrots and peas into lovely turkey pot pies that we make and freeze to eat all winter. Simple, and tastes like Thanksgiving dinner every time we cook one. You can check out the recipe here: http://goodfooddownonthefarm.blogspot.com/p/chicken-recipes.html. The beauty of this plan is that YOUR pot pies will taste like YOUR Thanksgiving dinner - whatever your stuffing and gravy and turkey taste like, based on your seasonings, is what your lovely pot pies will taste like!

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