We celebrated an early Thanksgiving with Cam, Shana and Theo on Oct. 8, which Jody points out is two days away from Canadian Thanksgiving. We omitted the dressing, and Shana brought a bountiful salad, but even for just the 5 of us, and some deviations from my usual T'giving prep, it was quite a production: sweet potato whip (bourbon, lemon zest, the Vitamix was the champion here), brussels sprouts, rice, ginger and orange cranberry relish (no cranberries on the shelves so I had to get a canned jelly and fish out the berries), gravy, and one of the best-behaved turkeys (breast only) I'd ever cooked: 6.6 lbs, 2 3/4 hr in a 350 oven, and the little thermometer popped out exactly when my thermometer read 161 degrees. And this was a regular Giant fresh, but not organic breast. I didn't do the whole brining routine. It was succulent and sweet in its own way. I had searched on the Giant website for giblets and just came up with catfood. We passed on that, but Reeves made an excellent gravy with a few pieces of meat, thickened with whole wheat flour.
This pumpkin pie recipe is from the back of the can :
15 oz pumpkin; recipe calls for 3/4 c sugar, but I omitted that in favor of the cream, below
3/4 tsp cinnamon, 1.2 tsp nutmeg (fresh off the microplane), 1/4 tsp ginger1/4 tsp cloves, 1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs and ~8 oz heavy cream, mixed; recipe called for 12 oz can evaporated milk
all mixed together and poured into frozen shell and baked at 425 for 15 min then 350 for 40 min. Omitting the sugar really highlighted the spices.
We finished off with little chocolate turkeys, Cocoa Mill not yet being in production.
