Thanksgiving Prep Time always happens the day before Thanksgiving. There are too many things that need to be accomplished before sitting down to a delicious Thanksgiving meal. So, if possible, it is wise to start the meal the day before.
Today, to get a head start on things, I made pumpkin cookies, orange cranberry sauce, mixed apple pie, and riced potatoes.
Pumpkin Cookies
This morning, the first thing I did, was bake the Pumpkin Cookies. It was easy to break the cookies apart and put them on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Baking cookies on a parchment-lined cookie sheet results in quick clean up.
Pumpkin Cookies with cream cheese flavored chunks.
For Thanksgiving, I added a few black/white/and orange sprinkles to the tops of the cookies before placing them in the preheated oven. The sprinkles made the cookies look, almost, homemade.
After the cookies were cooled, I packed them between sheets of wax paper in an air-tight plastic container.
Tomorrow I’m going to festively plate these cookies with some pumpkin candy.
Orange Cranberry Sauce
While the cookies were baking, I made the orange cranberry sauce. Homemade cranberry sauce is generally pretty easy to do.
Basically, I used the directions on the back of the fresh premium cranberry package with a few slight modifications. My recipe is as follows:
Ingredients:
- 3/4 cup of water
- 1 cup of Sugar
- 3 cups of fresh premium cranberries or one 12-ounce bag
- 1 Orange – Two thin slices of orange zest plus the juice from one half orange.
Directions:
- Wash and pick over cranberries discarding any mashed berries.
- Bring water and sugar to boil in a medium saucepan. Add cranberries and return to a boil. Reduce heat and gently boil for about 10 minutes.
- If desired, mash cranberry sauce with a potato masher. Remove from heat.
- Add freshly squeezed orange juice.
- Cool and refrigerate cranberry sauce. Remove the orange zest prior to serving.
The orange zest gives the cranberry sauce a fresh orange taste.
I like to give the cranberry sauce a quick mashing with a potato masher. However, this is optional depending on how you like your cranberry sauce–chunky or smooth.
Homemade Apple Pie & the Thanksgiving Prep Time
I, actually, used up all the old apples I had in the crisper. I used an assortment of Gala, Corland, Honeycrisp, and Ginger Gold apples. Usually, I make homemade apple pies mostly with green-tart Granny Smith apples. So, I’m curious what the apple pie will taste like.
I cooked the pie filling for a bit on the stove to see if the pie would get done faster, but it still baked for about the same time.
Riced Russet Potatoes
Riced potatoes always go great with a turkey meal. About three large Russet potatoes were peeled and cut up into chunks. Try to cut up the potatoes to be the same size, so they all get done about the same time.
Milk, butter and water the potatoes were boiled in were added to the riced potatoes. A ricer kitchen tool always works nicely to get out all the lumps. The potatoes were placed in an air right plastic container and the potatoes were covered with a thin layer of half and half and refrigerated. You can also cover them with a layer of cream.
Tomorrow, I’ll use the ricer to make the deviled eggs filling ultra smooth.
When using a ricer, the resulting potatoes are lump free.
I donated my well-made vintage ricer to a historic house but found another almost new ricer in a secondhand store.
Guess what, the vintage ricer worked better than the newer model!
End of the Thanksgiving Prep Time Blog
The last thing I did was to hard boil and peeled the eggs. I’ll be making some deviled eggs tomorrow but, right now, I’m too tired to work on anything else.
It was a lot of Thanksgiving prep work but I’m glad most of holiday meal is done. I, also, defrosted the turkey in some cold water as it was still frozen.
After all today’s Thanksgiving Prep work, I said I was tired. The response I got was why was I tired?
All in the Day’s Work . . . Happy Thanksgiving!