Thanksgiving Feast!

We got these neat flowers as a hostess gift for Georg's mother, for hosting our dinner and letting me take over her kitchen all day. I love how wintery and festive they look.
Here are the humble beginnings of a cranberry sauce. It was one of the first things I made since it's better after it sits anyway.
I wanted Georg and his family to experience turkey with a traditional cranberry sauce, so I made one with cranberries, halved kumquats, and lots of sugar. It's amazing how much sugar you have to use to take all the sourness of the cranberries away! I decided to put the stuffing in pumpkin cups. I had to prebake the pumpkins so that they'd be tender enough to eat after the stuffing cooked inside. I used hokkaido pumpkins, because with this variety you can eat the skin, which means less hassle.
Here are my brussels sprouts cooking. The recipe I was using called for the sprouts to be hashed (trimmed, cut in half, and then sliced), but after I halved them they looked so pretty that I didn't have the heart to hash them. Besides, if you did that, how would brussels sprouts be any different than regular cabbage?
Here are our finished stuffing-stuffed pumpkins. The stuffing consisted of cornbread, white bread, saltines, celeriac, chestnuts, onions, garlic, eggs, and stock made from the turkey neck.
Georg's mother is an avid soup-maker. I don't have much experience making soups, so I usually avoid them, but hers are marvelous. She is a very adventurous cook and puts lots of flavors together that you wouldn't expect. Our Thanksgiving soup was made of an array of different ingredients (red peppers and ginger were two of the ingredients I remember) and it was delicious.
We didn't want to carve the turkey at the table (too messy), but we needed the obligatory "turkey on the holiday table" photo. We brought the turkey out of the kitchen just to take this picture, and afterwards we just picked the turkey up and took it back into the kitchen to carve it. Kind of silly, but I felt the need to do it because in print and commercials you always see a proud woman carrying her in-tact turkey to the table and everyone marveling at it, and I didn't want to do any differently.
Here's a close-up of the turkey. It turned out really well this year! The skin got evenly browned for once and it had a really good flavor from the sage leaves and butter that I so rudely shoved under the turkey's skin. It's kind of barbaric, but it's a good method: you put flavored butter between the skin and meat of the uncooked turkey. This way, the butter is forced to stay in the little pocket under the skin (instead of running down the turkey and into the roasting pan), which keeps the meat moist. I also put quartered onion and lemons in the cavity so that those flavors would be released during cooking.
Here's my roasted sweet potatoes and fennel flavored with lime, parmesan cheese, and a mystery spice mix that Georg's mother's friend gave to her. I still don't know what the spices were, but this dish was delicious.
Here's the finished brussels sprouts. They're flavored with mustard seeds and lemon. I usually flavor them with bacon, which is good, but this was really interesting and different. The lemon brightened up the flavor of the sprouts, while the seeds made them slightly spicy.
Here's my assembled Thanksgiving plate!
I ate so much and had worked so hard all day long on the meal that I was tired afterwards! Plus, as we all know, turkey contains tryptophan, which makes one sleepy (I had a lot of fun amazing my company with all of these little known Thanksgiving facts). Here I am staring into space with a glass of wine.
Oh yeah, I made a dessert, too--the cranberry, caramel, and almond pie--but it was not so pretty. I had some leftover phyllo dough in the freezer and decided to use that instead of pie crust, since I had it on hand. Only, when it thawed, some parts of it got really mushy and some really dry, which made it hard to handle. By the time it was assembed, the dough was too fragile to brush with butter, and since butter between the layers is what makes it crispy, it kind of fell flat and was a little soggy. It still tasted good and we gobbled it up, but it is nothing worth emulating so I won't include it here.

I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving!!