Hosting Thanksgiving? NBD.

Nick and I are hosting Thanksgiving again this year and feel like we have things pretty well under control. Last year was our first year hosting, and we ended up doing a lot of research and planning to make sure things went smoothly. We kept things pretty simple and found this timeline from William-Sonoma super helpful in tackling not only Thanksgiving day, but also the days before. Luckily, most things that I set out to do in this blog post worked out, so we were happy to host again this year. That, and our guests actually agreed to come back!

Our Turkey!

We grocery shopped for everything on Sunday morning. The bread for our stuffing is currently sitting on our counter getting nice and stale. Our heritage turkey will be ready for pick-up on Wednesday. The rest of of the afternoon we will prep more of the food, set the table completely, and get the serving dishes out and label them (naturally!).

Dutch Apple Pie

In the beginning of October (can you believe how long ago that was?!) Nick, his sister and I headed to Smolak Farms to do some apple picking. While it was super crowded overall, we headed to the back of the orchard and hit the jackpot of cortland and macintosh apples. And, since I am a sucker for any type of souvenir, big or small, I upgraded from the apple bag to the big basket (not the easiest to carry through the orchard, but totally worth it). With a massive basket full of apples, pie was definitely in our future, along with a bunch of other delicious apple-based recipes.

Basket FULL of Apples

Dutch Apple Pie - it is basically as if apple crisp and an apple pie had a baby! This pie really allows for the apples to be the star and not to get lost between the pie crusts. We are a big apple crisp family, so needless to say this is the preferred pie for Nick and I.

Thanksgiving Day Planning and Menu

This year is a bit different for Nick and I - rather than showing up with an appetizer or dessert at a family member's or friend's house for Thanksgiving, we are hosting for the first time! This won't be anything too crazy - only 9 of us total - but I think on Thanksgiving the standards are a bit higher. Not only is the gathering bigger than what we have done before, there are a lot more courses to tie together!

Source - hopefully mine comes out that well!

Fresh Picked Blueberry Pie

When you go to Maine between the months of July and October (i.e., the first frost), blueberry picking is a must-do. When we were up in Maine recently, the weather was topping out at 75 degrees - not exactly swimming weather. When we set out blueberry picking at Crabtree Blueberry Picking, we each grabbed a large pail and set off into their blueberry patch that had about 10 different types of blueberries!  

Blueberry Farm

Joanne Chang's Milky Way Tart

Everytime I flip through my copy of Joanne Chang's Flour cookbook I always stop on the Milky Way Tart.  I usually passed on it because a) we didn't own a tart pan, and b) it just seemed too difficult.  However, when we got a tart pan off our wedding registry, I decided to go for it, and ultimately it wasn't that hard and it came out really well!

Milky Way Tart

While I won't publish the recipe here, these are the simple steps I followed.  The full recipe is available on Leites Culinaria, but I'd encourage anyone to grab a copy of this great book if it's not already a part of your collection.

At Least There Was Good Food....

In the wake of last night's depressing outcome, the one thing I will be focusing on is the delicious food Nick and I spent the day preparing.  One of the fun reasons to have some friends over for the Super Bowl is the excuse to prepare some dishes you probably would not otherwise prepare!  So, for the past two weeks I was trolling the internet looking for some inspiration dishes and came up with the following (forgive my Instagram obsession)...

First up was a Cheesey Pepperoni Pull Apart Bread that I adapted from Jen's Cheesey Mushroom Bread, as I have a friend who is not a mushroom fan.  This recipe was easy to pull together and very satisfying to put on the table with the "ooo's" and "ahh's" it received.  With its adaptability to almost anything this will quickly become a go-to appetizer.

Cheesey Pepperoni Pull Apart Bread

Next up was Megan's Buffalo Chicken Stromboli, adapted to add a lot more heat!  I doubled the amount of Frank's Red Hot and allowed the shredded chicken to sit in all of the sauce not taken up during the sauteing to make sure all the chicken was sufficiently ready to burn tongues!  If that were not enough, I picked up this great buffalo Cheddar at Whole Foods that even had bits of jalapenos added to it!  Needless to say the Stromboli had plenty of bite - good thing we had friends over who love spice as much as Nick and I do.

Plum Clafoutis - Difficult to Say, Easy to Make!

For the past couple of CSA weeks we have been getting a handful of small, sweet plums.  Since we had a bunch, I wanted to do something more than just eat them plain, so I started flipping through cookbooks until I found a recipe for Plum Clafoutis.  While I had never heard of it before, the picture in Joanne Chang's Flour cookbook looked delicious, and the all ingredients were something I had on hand - reason enough!

Plum Clafoutis

Traditionally, clafoutis is made with black cherries, but obviously you can use just about any fruit.  The batter is said to be more like a pancake or a flan-like consistency, so I was curious to see the final product.

Toasted Coconut Cream Pie with Lime Whipped Cream - yes its THAT good

After going to Joanne Chang's class at Flour, I was inspired to finally christen the Flour cookbook, and what better thing to attempt than to recreate the amazing dessert we had at Myers and Chang for dim sum: Coconut Cream Pie with a Lime Whipped Cream.

Coconut Cream Pie with a Lime Whipped Cream

Coconut is one of Nick's favorite things - if there is a coconut flavor listed among any groupings, he is going for it.  Really though, the same holds true for me as well.  However, the addition of the lime is what makes this dessert even more special.  When I saw the title of this recipe, I knew it had to be the first one to try from the cookbook, and thank goodness I did!