Making Thanksgiving Dinner

The day before the main event is when we make most of our dinner. My husband cooks the turkey and makes oyster dressing. I make two pies and cranberry relish. Tomorrow, we'll make the green beans w/ onion and bacon, bake then mash sweet potatoes. Carve the turkey, heat, and serve. 

Except I only got one pie done today. Above is a pumpkin cheesecake pie with a chocolate pecan crust. It is gluten-free as I used almond flour along with pecans. It turns out that I forgot to add whipping cream to my food order and these days you don't run out to the grocery store for one item. Whoops! I thought about what I had on hand and what would work with pumpkin--cream cheese!  That could work. I found two recipes and neither was gonna work 'as is' so I borrowed the idea and created my own. The pie filling passed the taste test, so into the oven it went. 

We had to get the turkey going since it's a 20# bird and will need hours to cook. I went ahead and made the cranberry relish next. We use the Frugal Gourmet Cooks American cookbook. This relish is just raw cranberries, oranges, and coconut sugar. Pulse in a food processor til it looks like relish. I use half of the sugar called for and it is not too tart. Another taste test confirmed as much.

Tomorrow I'll make the veggies and the blueberry pie that I didn't get done today. Our daughter-in-law is bringing mashed potatoes. They live 20 minutes away. She's a teacher and has been home since last Friday and our son works from home. 

This is the deal about making a blueberry pie for Thanksgiving. For 14 years we lived on a farm with 45 blueberry bushes (and  thankfully not that many apple trees), so we always had 25 +/- gallons of frozen berries in our freezer. I picked blueberries every day for an hour or so from around June 18 to about the 4th of July, each summer. Our sons helped. My husband helped. Even the chickens and wasps helped. Every creature likes blueberries. I picked the majority of them. All those years we always had a blueberry pie at Thanksgiving using our own frozen berries and an apple pie from my own canned apple pie filling.

We sold the farm 6 years ago this past summer but the non-traditional tradition of the blueberry pie at Thanksgiving continues. I still miss picking blueberries when the season comes around.