Pre-Thanksgiving Trial Run

This year, as we were planning our Thanksgiving dinner with friends, I was a little bold in what I offered to make. Not bold because they're unusual items or anything, just bold because I personally don't have much experience making these items. Our contributions were going to be yeast rolls, GG's cranberry salad, and apple pie. Before this week, I had made each of these items exactly one time each, and it was many years ago, so I decided that we needed to have a little test run before we offered these dishes up to large numbers of people.

The result was a fun afternoon and evening, and a lovely dinner that every member of our family helped with.

Lee Anna and I made the yeast rolls. They came out just perfect, so we did everything just the same for the Thanksgiving batch. The rest of the items on the plate were not part of the Thanksgiving trial, but did make for a delicious meal. Jason, the real cook of the family, got inspired by all the cooking going on around him and decided to make chicken panee from scratch. It was great--much better than those frozen ones we usually buy.

Sawyer's contribution was in the beverage portion of the meal. We had bought a sack of lemons so that I could have lemon juice for my recipes, and when the kids saw them, they decided they wanted to make lemonade. It was a family affair rolling and juicing our tiny little lemons (maybe 1/3 the size of regular lemons in the states).

The cranberry salad didn't get to be part of the test run because we were still in the process of collecting all of the ingredients from various stores around town.

Mmmmm...who made these rolls, anyway?

And here's dessert! This pie actually looked prettier on the outside than the inside. It tasted great, but was very runny and made me glad I had done a test run. I did some reading up before Thursday, and the one we took to our Thanksgiving dinner was much more pie-like in its consistency!

And here's the master chef! I don't know what we would do without him at mealtime!

And that picture reminds me of one more funny story: For some reason, Jason has a way of ending up with a dish towel on his shoulder when he's cooking. I find them all over the house because he walks out of the kitchen with them on his shoulder and then sets them down wherever he ends up. But if he's in the kitchen cooking, you can usually find a dish towel on his shoulder.

So the other night, I was giving Sawyer a bath and we were playing pretend. All of a sudden he slung the wash cloth over his shoulder and announced, "I'm makin' breakfast!" I couldn't figure out what the washcloth had to do with making breakfast until I remembered who does the breakfast-making at our house and what he always has on his shoulder. Then it made perfect sense!

Check back tomorrow. We might actually get to the real Thanksgiving festivities!