menu for success

Before I give a full report on the Thanksgiving dinner project, I wanted to give a shout out to one of my favorite websites, allrecipes.com. Every single recipe that I used for Thanksgiving dinner was new, never-tried-before in my kitchen, which I admit is a pretty big risk when cooking a special occasion dinner for guests. But, I felt pretty confident since I garnered 90% of my recipes from the allrecipes site, where people who have tried the recipes can rate them and offer suggestions on tweaking the recipe to make it even better.

The final menu:
Winter Salad
Deviled Eggs*
Herb Roasted Turkey
Grandma's Cornbread Dressing (which I tweaked to make vegetarian)
Garlic Mashed Red Potatoes
Parmesan Asparagus
Green Bean Casserole
Roasted Vegetable Medley
Broccoli Cauliflower Bake*
Corn Pudding*
Fresh Cranberry Sauce
Yeast Rolls
Double Layer Pumpkin Cheesecake
Spiced Apple Cake
Coconut Pecan Pie*
(*in fairness, I can't take credit for these items--they were brought by guests)

My favorites of the bunch were the Winter Salad, Roasted Vegetable Medley (who knew I would enjoy turnips so much?), and the Pumpkin Cheesecake.

Cooking everything was a 2-day enterprise, but it was worth it. My least favorite part was, yes, preparing the turkey-especially dealing with the innards. At one point, in removing the bag of junk from the body cavity, one of the reddish-purple body parts slipped from the sack and fell into the sink. Ugh. And I thought to myself, this is one of the reasons that I am a vegetarian, because I don't like having organs fall out of my food while I am preparing it. Although, I have to say that it felt like quite an accomplishment when I finished it. And, according to my guests, it was quite good. I think I'll just take their word for it.

I will post pictures soon...I hope everyone had a wonderful and delicious Thanksgiving (and if you're still hungry, feel free to drop by--we've got plenty of leftovers!)

**new editor's note: I goofed in this post...I gave a lot of credit to allrecipes for the success of my dinner, but I failed to recognize the woman who actually taught me how to cook. So, thank you, Mom, for helping me learn my way around a kitchen. Next time I bake a cake, I'll save the batter bowl for you...