post Thanksgiving

I'm finally able to think about something other than making food and entertaining guests! Thanksgiving is past. We enjoyed having many family members at my house: my husband, son and myself, my parents, my sister and her two daughters, and my brother, his wife, two sons and their dog. A dozen in all. 15 with the dogs!

Our preparations started the weekend before when my son and I turned our dining room into a giant table (6x8 ft!) that held us all. It was feat for me to locate seasonal items: my little salad plates with turkeys on them and my orange napkin rings. And the stores were long past stocking Thanksgiving items when I finally shopped for seasonal linens that fit the giant table. But we managed.

I forgot to take pictures of most things, so there are only a few odds and ends here. I put together a menu that included all of our families traditional Thanksgiving items, pulled out and copied all of the recipes, then planned out who need to do what task and when. Everyone did their job to perfection! Dinner was delicious and we had a great time being together.

I'm always pleased to be able to serve things that I grew in my garden. Here's my list: homemade pickles, homemade tomato salsa, my mashed potatoes, my sweet potatoes and butternut squash, celeriac and beets that I mixed with other roasted root vegetables, my garlic and canned tomato sauce in the eggplant parmigiana, fresh parsley, sage and rosemary generously added to various items, sliced salad radish, a really big bowl of freshly picked salad greens (lettuce, escarole frisée, baby beet greens and parsley), and a nice winter squash ("Blue Ballet" and small version of Hubbard) that made the perfect pumpkin pie. Almost everything else was homemade if not homegrown. Amazing. It's a good thing we don't eat all this every day!