Thanksgiving Wrap Up

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We were lucky enough to have two Thanksgiving Dinner's, one at my in-laws on Thursday and round two at my parent's house on Friday. We are officially stuffed and lounging in sweatpants today. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be posting some recipes to help you in planning your Christmas Dinner, but for now I'll give you some highlights and tease you with some delicious looking food pictures.

We had two turkeys at my house, completely unnecesarry since there was only 9 of us, but my dad and brother wanted to fry a turkey and my mom wanted to have a roasted turkey as back up just in case. Both turkeys were a success and the house was pretty evenly divided on which one we liked better.

Now onto the sides, my favorite part. I could probably do without the turkey if we didn't need the giblets for my mom's stuffing. My mom makes an amazing stuffing and it's hands down my favorite part of the Thanksgiving meal. It's nice and crisp on top and not too mushy on the inside, I cannot wait to share the recipe with you. I am getting overly excited just typing about it.

We had some of this Chipotle Creamed Corn sans the chipotle, just some cooked frozen corn and some cream cheese, easy and addicting.

I didn't use chipotle in the corn because I made these Chipotle Mashed Sweet Potatoes from What's Gaby Cooking and doubled the chipotle in the recipe, and I was on the verge of overloading my family with chipotle. 

And we of course had some regular mashed potatoes.

My cousin made this delicious Spiced Cranberry Orange Jello, can't wait to share this recipe with you too.

There were more sides because there is always too much food on Thanksgiving, but I'm getting full just posting these, so we'll move onto dessert. In addition to her stuffing, my mom is known for her cherry pie and I look forward to it at every holiday.

My niece and I made my aunt's Black Bottom Pecan Pie, and my niece was quite the sous chef. She took her pastry rolling very seriously.

And was very happy with the end result.

Our pie looks a little different than my Aunt Dana's because I made a measuring error with the rum extract and made up for it by adding extra pecans, it still tasted really good. The rum whipped cream gets me everytime.

Of course the two pies weren't enough dessert so my mom also made these pumpkin cookies. Neither my mom nor I are big fans of traditional pumpkin pie (go ahead, judge me), so these cookies are there to fill that void.

Once again, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and I can't wait to share these recipes with you!