Ahhh Thanksgiving.  A glorious holiday whose sole purpose is to make us eat good food. This holiday always gets a big thumbs up from me. This year I went with my moms to her friends’ residence in upper montgo. There was the requisite turkey, of course! This one was about 15-ish lbs? I’m a dark meat person, how about you? Although every bite was a bit nerve-racking as I had just watched this clip from the Today show talking about how terrible dark meat was for you. F em, I say! Corn. I love me some corn. Do you see the fancy plates and such? This was a proper meal!
We had a bevy of sides, of course, some traditionally thanksgiving, some not. This broccoli cheese casserole was a nice surprise. Instead of the green bean casserole, it was broccoli, and I ate it up. Mashed sweet potatoes. While I love plain old mashed potatoes, nothing beats mashed sweet potatoes. This is all in line with my preference for sweet potato fries over plain. Brussel sprouts and sliced carrots! Ok, I’m being honest.  I didn’t touch this plate. Ha!
Stuffing. Good ‘ol stuffing. For me though, I’ve never been much of a stuffing girl.
And to round out the sides we had cole slaw, green beans, and mashed potatoes. Some cranberry sauce for you? Why yes! And of course, the thing that makes thanksgiving what it is – GRAVY. I admit it, I would put gravy on just about anything. I am a gravy girl.
We had three desserts with this meal. And even though we were all stuffed, we forced everyone to try all three. The first was the standard pumpkin pie. It’s one of my favorite things about fall. That and sweet potato pie! We also had this pumpkin cheesecake from an argentinian bakery in northern jersey. It was so damn cute it was nearly a shame to hack in to it. But hack into it we did.
And to round out the thanksgiving dessert trifecta, we had this berry tart. All in all, my stomach was beyond satisfied. Oh, and I also drank some homemade cactus flower hooch. It was so odd tasting, yet fascinating. It was the color of beet juice, yet thick. And it was super sweet touching the lips but then had a bizarre savory aftertaste. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever tasted! This was an especially memorable thanksgiving spent with great people over some great dishes!

I picked this up on a whim the other day while I was at Trader Joe’s. I’d never tried one of their frozen chinese meals before, so I thought why not. In reality, I could just get chinese from my takeout place around the corner, and it would require no effort, but I thought I would just try it. I love it! It turns out that this is a best seller, if not the best seller at TJ’s. And I can totally see why. There’s multiple ways to heat this up (it comes frozen) but I did it skillet style. So it takes about 10 minutes to cook and you end up with something that genuinely tastes like it could have come from a chinese restaurant. And I got 4 decent servings out of it. And I think it was like $6-7? Totally worth it!

With the onion loaf from Acme Bread and the leftovers from Walzwerk, it made the perfect little sandwich. Sauerbraten, cabbage and carrot salads, in between toasted onion loaf. Awesome. And colorful too.