Thanksgiving Food and Fun

I am sure by the time this is posted you all are all making like turkeys and are stuffed.

Just wanted to share a little of what the last 2 days have been like here in my little corner of the south.  I was so blessed yesterday to have Mini home from school.  She and I spent part of the day cleaning and running errands and the last half cooking.
I haven't told you much about Mini but this is an important fact.  Mini is NOT domestic at all. Not only is she NOT domestic, but she has no desire to be.  As a matter of fact, she took a class this year called Family and Consumer science (she loves science, so she figured she would like this, hehehe).  Imagine her surprise when she went to her first class and figured out this was the new name for that little class many of you that are my age took, we called it Home Economics!  She was not happy and promptly made this known, which landed her squarely on the teacher's naughty list.  It probably did not help that BDJ and Wonder Hubby dubbed this class her Housewife In Training class.  That being said, Mini is a wonderful cook.  Unlike me, she applies all that love of science and detail to cooking and her endeavors always turn out well.

Yesterday she made her first pie crust and a chess pie.  This is probably her daddy's favorite and will go a long way toward making him less sorry he took off tomorrow to take her black friday shopping.  Smart move girl!

Making her first pie crust

She did a great job.  In fact I was a little jealous since breads and crusts are not my strong suit.  I work in too much flour and end up with a crumbly mess.  Not Mini. Her crust rolled up on the rolling pin for transfer to the pie plate perfectly.

Here is the finished product.

She did a great job....she always does whenever I can drag her into the kitchen.  Her daddy says it is a good thing she is smart and pretty cause her lack of desire to have and use "homemaker" skills would make it hard to move the merchandise!

I couldn't have cared less if the pie turned out well or not, the time we spent together was priceless.  Wish I could get that time everyday.


While Mini was working hard on her pie, I did a little baking of my own.  Back in the summer, my spare daughter Bri came home one day with a box of Gigi's cupcakes.  Oh my, if you have not had these, they are to die for.  If you haven't had them yet....run, don't walk, to the nearest location and get you some!
For those of us that have had them, you know it is a daily battle not to storm their store for more. 

One of the cupcakes Bri brought home was a pecan pie cupcake.  I'm sorry I can't think of the proper name right now(could be the turkey coma I am experiencing).  If you like pecan pie you will LOVE these.  It is like eating the gooey part of the pie with caramel icing.  I was in love on the spot.  The nearest location of Gigi's is 35 miles away (thankfully) so I can't always get there when I have a craving, so I started playing around with doing a knock off version.   I spent most of my research time working on the icing and experienced many epic fails. 

Finally I stumbled across a couple of recipes that I thought I could tweak and get close.  Of course everyone knows not to try something new before a holiday/big event/dinner party but I just knew I could perform under pressure.

So I whipped up the pecan pie muffins.  Simple ingredients I had in my pantry.  Yea I was on my way! 

While my muffins/cupcakes cooled, I tweaked on my icing recipe.  I will admit that the consistency was off in that unlike Gigi's I was unable to pile it up 3 inches high (okay truth is I couldn't do that if I had their icing).   No problemo...since the cupcakes are more of a muffin consistency I just put them in dessert cups and drizzled more icing over them (you can never go wrong with more icing, right?).   The taste, however, for both the cupcake and the icing was dead on.  Yes, you heard right....I nailed it (happy dance happening now)!

Sadly, the recipe only made 9 (weird huh?) cupcakes and don't you know just after I iced them one had a tragic accident and flipped upside down in the fridge requiring clean up me to try it immediately.

Doesn't that look yummy?  Here is the best part.....only The Nana and Wonder Hubby and I like pecan pie so I don't even have to hide them :)

This is some of what we enjoyed today.  I can barely stand to look at it all now I'm so full but I thought I would share.  How blessed we were to have wonderful food.

This is the star of the show.  I know many of your will be surprised to find out I did not pull a Martha Stewart this year (I was serious about the low stress approach)!  So our Tom turkey was not golden brown and trimmed out beautifully on a platter.  No sirree..he was cooked perfectly albeit a bit pale.

The Nana's famous fresh cranberry sauce/salad...YUM

Oh my, it was all so good.  I hope you all enjoyed food, family, friends, and made some priceless memories of your own.

Now that Wonder Hubby has taken Friday off....Mini and I are gearing up to hit those Black Friday Sales...bet I'll have lots to say about that later.