Thanksgiving is Coming!!!

Wow! Thanksgiving is almost here and for the first time in MANY years I will not be cooking.
I'm not hosting, and I'm not going to a relative's home with a side dish...I'm going to be on vacation and will probably be eating my turkey in a restaurant.

Now, I usually LOVE hosting Thanksgiving because it means making the turkey - which we always brine Alton Brown style.
The sides are typically the traditional.....mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, bread and sausage dressing (never stuffed into the turkey!), cranberry sauce and applesause.

But I was thinking, what if you're tired of those typical sides? What would you make?
So I dug into my archives for some inspiration:

For some simple pre-turkey munchies you could put out some pickles! They're crispy, zesty, nutritious, you can make them WAY ahead of time, and you can plan in variety!

For a twist on the use of pumpkin/squash/sweetpotatoes you could do a soup! If you don't want the Thai influence simply leave out the curry powder and the coconut milk and add some allspice and nutmeg and you've got a nice standard butternut squash soup starter to your meal.

Instead of the usual greenbean casserole you could try a greenbean saute! And it's one less item for the oven!

If you have the time, fresh applesauce is a real treat!

And to finish the day Thanksgiving Cookies can't be beat....of course they are good ANY time!
Please share your traditions or breaks from tradition with me!

Whatever your traditions and whatever you make, I hope your Thanksgiving is delicious and good for your soul!

Home-made Applesauce/Fruitsauce

When I first joined our local CSG (community supported garden), about 10 years ago, we received a little fruit, but certainly not an abundance.

There was a pint or so of stawberries and one of raspberries in the spring, and hearty kiwi if you were lucky, in the autumn.

This has been changing gradually.

The past year or 2 we've been seeing some peaches, some asian apples, and some paw-paw.

This year we also received pears and apples.

There is not an abundance of fruit per distribution for sure, and the autumn fruit is like what I was used to seeing from the "orchard" in my home yard as a child...smallish and quite blemished.

Certainly not apples/pears my kids would want to find in their lunchboxes.

So, being that we're a family that eats a largish amount of bottled applesauce with dinner all year long...thanks to my hubby's passing his love of it on to the kids....I decided to take my distribution and do something the whole family would enjoy.

A few weeks ago (I know..should have posted it then) I made my first batch of applesauce.

I cut the fruit and left all the skin/seeds intact and cooked it all. I added a small amount of sugar and spices (cinnamon, allspice, ginger) and then put it through a food mill at the end.

I got 3 pints out of that batch. 2 are gone, one is frozen.

So, when we received some more fruit, I decided to do it again. Now, this distribution had pears and paw-paws as well as apples and Asian apples, and I decided to make the sauce with it all.

In the picture above, the asian apples and pears are hard to distinguish from each other, and the paw-paws are in the lower portion of the picture.

Since things were busy over the weekend and I didn't get to do it then, I decided to make the applesauce via the crockpot method...overnight in the crockpot...and since I'd be dealing with the finished product in the morning as I was trying to get ready for work, I didn't want to have to put it through the food mill. So I peeled/cored/and seeded this time.

I added a tiny bit of water to the crockpot, but probably didn't have to.

Again I added a small amout of sugar (1/4 cup) and some spices to the pot. And in the morning we woke to a delicious apple aroma. I mashed it up with a fork, so it's chunky instead of smooth, and put it in a container. This batch made 2 pints and is even more delicious than the first.

So there you have it...two methods and two very delicious apple sauces ( I suppose you could also call the second one a chutney).