Thanksgiving Dinner 2009

We hosted an early Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year this past Saturday. We (the Laus) were cooking the meal, and told everyone else not to bring anything. But of course, everyone came with food in hand, so we were stuffed with goody goodness at the end of the night. There were 20 people total (3 being under 3). (It started out just being the 11 of us, then we thought the number might go up to 27.)

We made:
* Butternut squash soup – Make your life easier by using a hand blender instead of transferring.
* Sweet potato casserole – Golden brown is about 15-20 minutes depending on your oven.
* Apple-Cranberry sauce –  Oops! We only had sparkling cider. We’ll have to try this again with apple cider. It was a little tart.
* Pumpkin Pie – We used Pillsbury pie crust. It’s okay, but we’ll try something else next time to see if it’s better. This recipe is so easy that Melody did most of the work with my help.
* King’s Hawaiian Sweet Rolls – We had these already from Costco that Norm’s parents bought earlier in the week, so we just added it to the menu.
* We were also going to make banana bread but ran out of time.

Other items on the menu for the night were:
* Green Bean Casserole – Love the mushrooms in there. I usually make it from the classic canned recipe, but this was yummy! Eric made this.
* cucumber salad
* mashed potato and gravy
* ham
* Pepperidge Farm Baked Natural Cheese Crisps
* chip and salsa
* sodas and sparkling cider

And because it’s how we roll:
* rice
* fried chicken

Goody goodness from our guests:
* japchae
* sushi
* pumpkin pie from Costco
* little cakes from Sheng Kee
* hung yun dofu (almond tofu)

What are you having for Thanksgiving this year? What are you thankful for?

We’ll post some photos on Friday for Our Week in Photos album.