In the Kitchen

Happy turkey day, everybody! We’re having everyone come over here tomorrow, for a total of eight people. On the menu:

• Turkey (17 lb)
• Stuffing (Homemade, like the delicious stuffing my Dad makes)
• Corn
• Mashed potatoes
• Butternut squash
• Cranberry chutney
• Cranberry sauce
• Homemade eggnog (one batch with rum, one without)
• Pumpkin pie
• Apple tart
• Layered Jell-o thingy

All but the desserts are being made here. The cranberry chutney and sauce we made ourselves… yummy! It’s really hard to find holiday food without forbidden ingredients (high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils) so we’re making pretty much everything from scratch. I did end up buying some white bread for the stuffing that has HFCS in it… we stood there and looked at every stinking brand of white bread and could not find one without it. So we picked the best of the worst – at least it’s made with white wheat. I didn’t want to make bread because I didn’t think I could get the right texture – I want it to be as close to Dad’s stuffing as I can get!

So take care everybody, and enjoy the holiday. Talk to you soon!

My Dad sent me a link to this video… thanks, Dad! And thanks to Mom, too (she forwarded it to him). I had seen an article on eHow on doing this, but could never get it quite right. Now I see!! Cool.

Close Bags Without a Clip

I use Opera for my web browser, and one of its features that I just love is that it will keep your current windows open for you. So, when I exit Opera at night and come back to it the next day, everything I had open is still there. This works for me and against me, because most of the time I have like 20 pages open and it gets to be a real mess. So from time to time I have to go in and figure out what to do with all those tabs… for each page, I try to decide if I should keep it open, blog about it, or close it. In today’s go-round, I found several articles which are related to healthy eating… I don’t want to forget about these articles, so here they are!

The Ten Best Foods You Aren’t Eating

Top 100 Foods to Boost Your Productivity

26 Top Calcium Food Sources

Hope you find something good!

I love to cook, but sometimes it does get to be a chore… all the prep work, the actual cooking, and then the cleanup. So I was delighted to find this list the other day…

101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less

Some of the ideas are great and I can’t wait to try them. I’m thinking these will be good for lunches, too. Often I just take a quick break in the middle of the day to have a bite to eat. One of my favorite quick lunches is “Cheesy Rice Stuff”. I heat some coconut oil in a pan and throw in a bit of garlic and onion. When that’s soft, I add some brown rice and a handful of mozzarella cheese and stir it until the cheese melts. Drop in some chopped parsley, roasted red pepper and salt, and it’s lunch! Mmmmm.

The other day I was looking for a recipe for something with cream cheese in it, and I just had to make these for a family gathering today:

They’re made out of olives, cream cheese and carrots. The scarves are roasted red peppers. Aunt Susie made a little sign that said “Save the Penguins!!” hehehehe (I think she was having a little trouble eating them). I found the instructions on AllRecipes.com.