What a great day! We had a lot of fun. My parents and brother and his family and dog Bannor visited with us. Our menu was very traditional this year: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, etc. With some special highlights. My husband grilled a fantastic turkey that had I brined in bourbon and orange slices. The recipe was from "Grill It", a Schlesinger cookbook. The stuffing, a Chez Henri recipe with fennel and dried apricots (recipe link) was excellent. I was able to pick even more fresh lettuce from my cold frame than I had hoped. And my mom made the most fantastic candied sweet potatoes from my home grown potatoes! We ate and talked all afternoon. Skippy and Bannor enjoyed themselves too. What a very nice day.
I thought I would need to pick all the baby lettuce in my cold frame to fill our salad bowl, but it was over filled with maybe one fifth of the lettuce. I left most of it still growing. I hope it will stay warm for a while and we will work on eating the rest of the lettuce soon. Since its my first fall with a cold frame, I don't yet know how long the lettuce will last. Our temperatures have been getting down to 30*F outside, 34*F inside the frame so far this fall. I have lettuce, escarole, spinach, kale, and broccoli still growing in the frame. I picked all of the dill, as I think its less hardy.
The other homegrown Thanksgiving item was the sweet potatoes. My mom has made candied sweets every year for maybe the past 30 years. As long as I can remember. They're always delicious, but this year they were exceptional. Maybe because I grew them. It was my first year growing sweet potatoes and I have a mix of yellow and orange varieties. Or maybe it was because we added "a bit" of rum to the recipe. My mom stirred the sauce and said the aroma was great.
Candied Sweet Potatoes
(I will try to find Mom's recipe and add it here soon.)
That is so fantastic that the cold frame produced enough greens for your salad. How wonderful. It's so great that you also used your own homegrown sweet potatoes! Those candied sweet potatoes sure look delicious.
ReplyDeleteno doubt, Skippy and Bannor were on high alert for any escaping turkey pieces! Happy Thanksgiving.
ReplyDeleteHi I am not sure how cold it gets there but here in the middle of the UK last year I was picking fresh lettuce from my unheated greenhouse on Christmas day so you may be having lettuce for a bit longer.
ReplyDeleteIt all looks delicious. Happy Thanksgiving.
ReplyDeleteYour dinner table looks beautiful with the lovely flowers. I love sharing a leisurely meal with loved ones and good friends. I am looking forward to next Sunday, we get together with a bunch of great friends and family and make our Christmas Wreaths around a big kitchen table, then we clear up and eat a huge festive pie and glug red wine and laugh a lot.
ReplyDeleteMarian (London UK)
Good job on thanksgiving, glad you all had a good time.
ReplyDeleteThat's great, still cranking out produce when it's this cold. All I've ever heard re: growing your own potatoes/yams is they're SUPER tasty. They look amazing, and I expect we all would have had the same expressions on our faces as your dogs while your mom was cooking. "Is it ready yet? Now? Is it ready now?" Delightful!
ReplyDeleteI am so jealous of your lettuces. I will be interested in knowing how long your cold frame protects them. I've had several mornings below 25 F.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful vegetables for dinner. We have a dog named Skippy as well!
ReplyDeleteBedford, MA Zone 6A. For reference Dill is more hardy than you would think. A frost might do some damage to the ferns but the plant will keep coming back until a hard freeze.
ReplyDeletewww.planetnatural.com/site/xdpy/kb/growing-dill.html
Excerpt Below:
Dill is frost-tolerant but will not do well in prolonged freezing temperatures.
Just harvested my broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts. You should get another month out of that cold frame if it has a heater cable. I've seen cold frames go to Mid-January on a good year!
That meal looks amazing; we also had a nice Thanksgiving thanks to our local CSA. We recently moved from an apt to a house and haven't had time to build cold frames yet, but I am glad to see that they work. Your veggies from your cold frame look amazing. I am looking forward to more posts on them.
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