2016 Thanksgiving Day

Nothing is more important than to spend good time with family and friends and with good foods. This year Thanksgiving Day is celebrated with a fried turkey and delicious other side dishes like mac and cheese, sweet potatoes, deviled eggs, greens, beans, chips, cakes, cookies, pies, etc.

Mr. Big cut a big piece for my plate. I finish this in a jiffy. It was finger licking good. The meat was moist and seasoned perfectly.

The picture above is the electrical deep fryer and the peanut oil I used to fry the turkey.

I prep the turkey in garlic butter and Cajun seasoning for more than 4 hours before frying the turkey. This bird weighted about 14.3 lbs. The fryer took 45 minutes to heat the oil to 375F. For each pound, I need about 4 minutes. This bird cooked thoroughly in 50 minutes. The garlic butter that was injected into the meat really give a nice flavor.

I stuffed the stuffing into the cavity as soon as the turkey was taken out of the hot oil. The stuffing was cooked separately. It was a surprise to everyone since they thought they are not going to have stuffing. I really had a great time on Thanksgiving Day.

Sand Tart -Part 2

Sand tart is a simple cookie to bake. It has been the favorite of Mr. Big. I usually bake the sand tart for him during holidays. Sand tart is delicious and crunchy if rolled thinly. Mr. Big like it with a dash of cinnamon sugar. Even though it was easy to bake a sand tart, but rolling the dough thinly are time consuming. Firstly, I sat the unsalted butter at room temperature overnight. Since the weather is nice and cooling this morning, I quickly ate my chocolate muffin that I have bake last night and drank a cup of hot tea with milk for my breakfast before I began baking the sand tart.

Unlike in the previous years, posted here , my sand tart recipe was made from scratch, this time, I am customizing the recipe using a ready to use sugar cookies dough and mix it with a stick of butter, 1 egg and 1/2 cup of all purpose flour. Combine all of these ingredients to form a dough.

The taste was awesome. Mr. Big ate all of the cookies while I haven't finish baking all the dough. I took about 2 hours to finish the batter. The dough must be rolled thinly and each cookie is dusted with some cinnamon sugar before going into the oven at 350 degree F for about 10 minutes or until slightly brown.

For the cookies cutter, I am using a pastry cutter. I chose number 2 from the set of 6 pastry cutters. I bought this pastry cutter when I was visiting a family in England years back. When I see something I like and I know I will use it for sure, I surely will get them. This pastry cutter is very handy and durable.

I am glad my new try out with the sugar cookie dough worked. Enjoy!

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Thanksgiving Dinner

I am glad that the weather was very nice yesterday on Thanksgiving. Mr. Big Guy set up the turkey fryer in the front lawn. We do not need to set up the tent after all. The rain has stopped since Wednesday. I was busy chopping the onions and celery for the stuffing in the kitchen when Mr. Big was setting the fryer in the front yard.

Mr. Big had injected the turkey meat with flavored butter the night before. We are going to fry the turkey around 1:30 pm. It doesn’t take long to fry the whole 12 lbs turkey. We only need about 30 minutes frying time at 300 degree F.

I sautee the onion and celery with a stick of butter as early as at 10 am in the morning.

I then mixed the sausage and the onion with celery before adding the bread and the chicken stock.

I like deep fried turkey. The meat is tender and juicy. We used peanut oil to fry this bird.

Delicious...bread pudding.

Mr. Big likes the stuffing so much. I used chicken with tomato and basil sausage this time. The flavor was sweeter than the Italian sausage. I also add apple to the stuffing. Mr. Big usually mix everything and then bake it in the oven. This time, I cooked the sausage, onion and celery separately before mixing them with the chicken stock. I then bake the stuffing in the oven on low temperature until we are ready to leave the house.

Delicious...my favorite...sweet potato.

My MIL. Thanksgiving dinner went well at Mr. Big’s niece’s house. I was hoping for a quick stop at the shopping mall near to her house after dinner. But it was getting late.

Delicious...juicy meat carved by Mr. Big Guy.

Delicious...mac and cheese is a must too.
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Thanksgiving and Black Friday

Mrinate the turkey with butter first.

Then sprinkle a thin layer of cajun spice on the outside.

It was raining on the morning of Thanksgiving Day in my neighborhood. Honey doesn't want to let down his family, so he went out to the store and bought a big tent. I am sitting here waiting fo the peanut oil temperature to reach 320 degree F.

The oil is ready for the turkey.

Finally the turkey is in. Every 1 lb of the turkey, we need about 3 minutes frying time.

Our dessert is a cheese cake. This is a truffles cheesecake from SAM's. Delicious.
The next day, I was not able to go for a black friday shopping. Luckily all the items I needed are available online. I am not sure if the tom yam I had 2 days ago is causing my heart burn. I drank glasses of home remedy, a ginger tea but it didn't help. I feel better today after taking dr. prescribed med.

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Thanksgiving Dinner

Honey and I have the honor to prepare our signature turkey dinner on Thanksgiving this year. We marinate the turkey with butter and garlic over night.

Around 10 am we started to set up the fryer outside the house.

For quite some times we didn't fry the turkey after our fryer had a hole at the bottom. We bought a new fryer from Pro Bass. Our turkey is big and it fit just right in the fryer with extra peanut oil than recommended.

The time to fry this turkey is only 3 minutes for 1 pound of turkey. It was really fast and came out juicy and crispy. It took us 45 minutes to fry this 15 pounds turkey.

Here are the vegetables I used for our turkey stuffing. I have chopped celery, chopped onion and chopped apples. I mix all of these vegetables with chicken stock and bread stuffing.

I bake them in the oven at 350 degree F for about 45 minutes.

We took our food at MIL house. The turkey was a big hit. Everyone enjoyed the crispy dark meat. We also brought ready to use turkey gravy.

Overall, we had a great thanksgving dinner. My MIL stayed at our house tonight so that we all can go out for black friday shopping at 2 am.

Tomorrow is also Eid for the muslim. Happy Eid to everyone.

Turkey on Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a celebration that I adopt since living in the state. For this year thanksgiving dinner honey and I prepared our usual meal. We cook turkey, potato salad, sweet potato and delicious greens. Above picture is my potato salad that I sprinkle with some paprika as garnish.

Greens...I love my mother in law's greens. But I never learn from her how to make this dish. For this year's thanksgiving, I am giving a try to cook this greens since honey has no confidence cooking it. I bought greens that sold at regular produce market. I forget the name of this delicious greens.

Firstly, I boil about 2 cups of the vegetables stocks. Then I add few pieces of those delicious cooked turkey meat. I seasoned the broth with salt and pepper. I also add a bit of sweet soy sauce. Once I am satisfied with the taste of the broth I add the greens that I have cleaned and cut into bite size. Cover the pot and let the greens cooked down for about 10 minutes before I turn off the heat.

Walla! Our turkey is done. This turkey is rubbed with some spices that smells so good. Honey used spices that I bought from the store called Sweet Mixed Spices. There are coriander, cinnamon, caraway,dill, fennel, ginger, clove,turmeric and nutmeg mixed in this spice packet.


My nephew is asking for more of my sweet potato. yippea!

I forgot to take a picture of my sweet potato. Everyone loved it. I made it very simple, just sweet potato mixed with brown sugar and lots of butter.