Post-Thanksgiving.

Well, I hope you all are well-fed, are doing great, & had a nice Thanksgiving. We spent our Thanksgiving at the house of friends of ours. We brought a brined turkey, two pies, & a soup to their house. (We brined the turkey using an Alton Brown recipe.)

The soup was one of my favorites: Roasted butternut squash & pear soup. I got the recipe years ago from Eating Well. It's in regular rotation on the menu around here. What's interesting about the soup is that it calls for sprinkling a little Stilton cheese (or blue cheese) on the top of it. Without the cheese, it's floral & delicately flavored. With the cheese, a sharp flavor and creaminess are added. It's almost two different soups!

Using our leftovers, we've made a turkey stock (about a gallon), & we plan on making turkey quesadillas.

For those of you interested, our menu looked like this:
Roasted butternut squash & pear soup
Crudites with sour cream dip & hummous
Apple Cranberry Almond Stuffing
Mashed Potatoes
Turkey using an Alton Brown recipe
Kris's family recipe cranberry raspberry sauce
An adhoc gravy where we added rosemary and red wine - yielding yummy purple gravy
Pumpkin pie with rum - don't follow the cooking directions - it'll never set
Cherry berry pie
plus a few wines including a Jordan Chardonnay.

Now that the floodgates to Christmas have been opened, it's officially cookie baking time! YAY! I've planned out 13 different recipes that I'd like to make. Today's the day to figure out how many I'm actually making this season. Stay tuned!