Thanksgiving Feast 2015

It's official, we now have a family Thanksgiving tradition. 

We get dressed nicely, making sure everyone looks their best. 

This is the one day during the year that we get dressed up and have a nice semi-formal sit down dinner at home.

I love dressing up! Besides, it also gives our 8-year old to get dressed up because he is our little GQ man. It's so cute seeing him happy walking out of his room showing off his outfit. He has actually asked for a suit to wear for school pictures! 

Aside from the clothes, Thanksgiving for us is a very special and unique day. We look forward to a hectic day of snacking all day while cooking a great feast to dine on for dinner. 

The husband, the father of the home, is in charge of making the turkey and owns the honor of carving the turkey. This is his second year of using the same recipe. A couple of tweaks here and there, both turkeys turning out perfectly, but this year's turkey more delicious than last with crispier and tastier skin. 

This year, we had twice the amount of food. I prepared a few things that I cooked for the first time ever and I am grateful they turned out really good. So good, we're keeping all of them as part of next year's Thanksgiving feast.

I put out a beautiful table scape and we sit down to dine.

For this Thanksgiving we tried out some new recipes -- all of them keepers. 

Here are the dishes we made.

Stuffing, more specifically Stuffing Muffins

I have never met a stuffing that I have truly had a liking for. The husband hasn't either. However, stuffing is a Thanskgiving staple so I wanted to try one more time.

Since I've been a SHM (stay-home mom) I'v been able to watch quite a bit of different cooking and home shows, including a Rev Run Thanksgiving special. They made this dish called "stuffing muffin" and although they didn't show much of it, they sold it as one of heir best dishes ever. They described what it was like and said it had sausage and corn bread in it. 

...SOLD!!!

I had to make it. It had the uniqueness that has been tickling my fancy these days with recipes I choose to try, AND, it had meat in it! We are definitely meat lovers in this family so having meat in the stuffing was the perfect ingredient to us loving stuffing. 

The recipe was easy and the ingredients weren't hard to find. Mos important of all, we loved it! Next time I'll use non-flavored sausage though. I only found Italian sausage and used that. The spices were just a little bit too strong four our little man, Zenon. 

Aside from that, I'll maybe add some crispy bacon and it will be perfect! Definitely a mainstay in our Thanksgiving spread.

For the recipe I simply googled, "Rev Run stuffing muffin". 

Cranberry Sauce 

My first western Thanksgiving was at my Lt's house. All the Airmen in our squadron were invited for Thanksgiving dinner at his house with him and his wife. That was when I found out that cranberry sauce is another sauce option to have with your turkey. I tried and didn't like it. I chalked it up to the fact that it was canned and not fresh. So I decided I won't decide not to dislike it completely just yet and try it again when I get the chance to try it when it's made with fresh cranberries.

I never got to until this Thansgiving when I finally decided to give it a try. 

So I googled to see if The Pioneer Woman, my favorite cooking show host, had a recipe for cranberry sauce. I used her recipe and the cranberry sauce turned out amazing! 

Unfortunately, I still don't like it with my turkey. I need to figure out what it will be good with because it is very yummy...maybe corn bread? 

I can always just have it on its own, too. Mmmm~~~....

Bacon wrapped asparagus

This is the only way I am able to make my 8-year old eat asparagus! How? Because bacon is awesome.

We are a family of bacon lovers so it was no surprise he loved it. 

This time instead of having individually wrapped asparagus, we did it in 3's. 

Creamy Mashed Potatoes

I have a fool-proof, super easy recipe for for mashed potatoes and they turn out very creamy but when it gets cold it becomes clumpy. 

So this time I added cream cheese and a little bit of half-and-half, put it in a baking dish, put butter on top and popped it in the oven to brown the top. 

The very creamy texture of the mashed potatoes went perfectly with all the food we had made. 

Corn and green beans

My husband loves corn! I've liked corn a lot, too but I can't say I love it. Well maybe not before my husband and I got together. After we did, corn is a staple in our home.

A couple of months ago, I got lazy and didn't want to cook green beans and corn separately. So chopped up a couple of cloves of garlic and sautéed both green beans and corn in butter with some garlic together. It turned out tasting amazing. So from then on, it has been how I prepare these two veggies. 

Simple, easy, fool-proof deliciousness.

Pumpkin Spice Leche Flan

Leche flan is a creamy, custard-like, classic Filipino, Spanish-influenced dessert. 

I made this the day before Thanksgiving. I started a small home-made Filipino food and Filipino fusion food business this month. One of the Filipino dishes I offer is leche flan. 

Inspired by Thanksgiving and my love for Starbucks' pumpkin spice latte, I started to imagine what pumpkin spice flavored leche flan would taste like.

I make my leche flan with whole eggs so it's very creamy. I personally prefer the simple classic leche flan but since I already had an order for a couple of them  and my husband loves the pumpkin spice flavored one, I just made an extra one for us. It is thanksgiving after all so pumpkin spice is perfect.

Lastly, 

Turkey Lumpia

I changed my Turkey Lumpia recipe completely. I used to make it the same way I make my Pork Lumpia. They both turn out good, but the turkey didn't seem to shine as much. 

So this time, I experimented and voila! The flavor of the turkey definitely shined through! 

I tried making Cranberry Chili sauce using  a recipe I made in my head. The lemon was a little too overpowering but the husband said he likes it a lot. 

Sometimes I wonder if he ever dislikes anything I make! Although I remember him hating leche flan when I made it for the first time last year. 

He did not like the texture of the leche flan. Ooh, he hated it so much! It didn't help that he is not big into dessert. I don't know what happened this year but he has been converted into a leche flan lover!

This is our Thanksgiving feast. We added some salad to try to add something completely health so we can enjoy guilt-free food binging! We bought the fresh fruit pie from United Market Street and it is definitely fresh and amazing. I ate the whole the whole thing by myself over the 4-day Thanksgiving weekend. Oops~~~

I had salad, too. See? Guilt-free! It works! 

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving with lots of love, laughter and good food!  

Food is beautiful

I love taking photos of food! Food has so many rich, vibrant colors and textures that are so unique. I love how you can change and manipulate these colors and textures even when you're just simply slicing it. 

I love to cook so I get to work with all different kinds of ingredients. I love how you're able to build up flavors as you go, especially when I'm experimenting. 

Here are some of my most favorite pictures of food that I've taken. I hope you like them and enjoy them as much I do. 

Pork lumpia that I made last night. I took a picture of it because I'm starting a little side business of selling them freshly made every week.

I was slicing up some strawberries to make strawberry flavored ginger ale when I looked down at the chopping board and fell in love with what I saw. Of course, I had to take a picture! 

Last night's dinner was one-pot pasta. I got the recipe from Pinterest. 

It's a Western tradition to keep the top layer of the wedding cake for the couple to eat on their first wedding anniversary. We did just that and I kept the sugar flower that adorned the roof our cake, too! It tasted as good as we remembered it from taste testing and our wedding!

Beautiful pesto pasta and chicken. The pesto is Giada de Laurentis' Lemon Parsley Pesto which I got from googling pesto recipes that do not use basil. I love the vibrant green and the sliced chicken just completes the look of the dish. Unfortunately I didn't like the flavor profile of the pesto because I realized I am not a fan of parsley. 

Steakvores!

This year was Andrew's first official Father's Day after we got married last year. 

I decided that the best gift I could get him was a grill. A grill just screams DAD to me. I don't know if that's my dad in my head because grilling is "his thing" or if it's just all those commercials that have gotten to me. Either way, there wasn't any other idea that I could think off that was better than a grill.

This year, we were also expecting our baby but he wasn't due until after Father's Day, so Andrew asked me if we could push off Father's Day until our baby finally arrived. He wanted to celebrate Father's Day with our new baby in his arms.

We still celebrated Father's Day on the day itself, though. A simple but very happy and meaningful Father's Day dinner at the local Rib Crib. We couldn't just let it pass without doing anything. This was, Andrew's first one as my husband -- officially part of Zenon's and my life and then a new baby on the way. To top that off, just a few weeks before, Zenon said he wanted to take Andrew's name. 

This was very random. Zenon was registering his entry to the bug catching contest and said his name was Zenon D. It made my heart melt and Andrew will never admit it, but I saw a little twinkle in his eye, and that was most definitely a tear! 

A few weeks after Father's Day, we had Zayden! So finally a month or so after that, we celebrated the continuation of Father's Day and finally got the grill. 

Since then, Andrew has been grilling at least twice a week. His first quest was to perfect the cook on the steak. He took this quest to heart and researched and experimented. All that work has definitely paid off and he is now a master of steak

grilling. His next quest is to perfect the grill marks on the steak and his first try was already near perfect. 

Although Andrew's quest to cook the perfect steak started a few months ago with him purchasing a cast iron grill. I want to say that his steaks on the cast iron grill were good but I think because he enjoys being outside with the whole family -- the fresh air, the dogs running around in the backyard, and just the overall atmosphere, he was able to put more heart into making the steaks on the grill. This has made the steaks he made on the grill so amazing and it didn't take him long to get it perfect either.

Zenon used to not want anything to do with steak yet we used to go to Texas Roadhouse almost every weekend at one point. Now however, Zenon has finally opened up and allowed steak into his life and he has embraced being a Steakvore like his parents. 

We are definitely a family of steak lovers! So, until we either get snowed in and can't grill anymore, Andrew will be out in the backyard grilling while the kids and dogs and I wait impatiently for the deliciousness that is about to come.