Pin-It Tuesday: Thanksgiving Dishes

I hope everyone had as wonderful of a Thanksgiving as I did. My brother and his wife ended up staying in town and that meant that my nephew (13 months old) was going to be around. I love that kid. My grandma was just moved into Assisted Living last week, so we picked her up and my Aunt flew in from California to surprise her and help with the adjustment of the new place.

Alex and Grandpa supervising the cooks!

With so many people going to be in town, my mom and I were emailing back and forth throughout the week with different recipe ideas. Of course we both had a ton, but we only had one oven to utilize, and with the turkey taking up a lot of the time, I had to cut my list down to just a few times.

Here is the list of everything that was served:

Turkey - 13 lbs.
Mom's stuffing
Corn bread
frozen corn
frozen petite brussel sprouts
roasted cauliflower
Mom's cranberry jello salad
mashed potatoes and gravy
sweet potatoes
pumpkin pie cheesecake
apple pie with streusel topping

I made the cauliflower and corn bread and want to share those with you in this blog. Stuffing and jello will come in a future post as they are my mom's special recipes and really good (and I didn't capture pictures of those - whoops)

I found the cauliflower via Pinterest and my mom and I both agreed that this would be a unique twist on a mostly "boring veggie." She isn't a fan of cauliflower smash like I am, and I hope to try to make a pizza crust with cauliflower in the future, so this would be something good for us.

We started with a rather large head of cauliflower and chopped it into florets.

Then in addition to the garlic, lemon juice, salt and pepper, I added some paprika, thyme and oregano to pump up the flavor.

It overfilled the 9 X 13 pan, but it still roasted up just fine. Immediately after you remove it from the oven, you sprinkle the entire dish with grated parmesan so it gets nice and melty over the pieces. The cauliflower was tender with nice browning on the tips of the pieces. The lemon juice added a tartness that we weren't expecting, but made it really enjoyable. This is one of the easiest dishes I ever created that tasted so good. And plenty of leftovers to enjoy this week.


My mom suggested I try to make a creamed corn, corn bread as I wanted to do a corn bread casserole, but my grandma always has bread with her meal and we didn't need another veggie dish (at almost 90, the woman gets what she wants after providing for us for so many years). I found one on GardenFork TV. We didn't have a cast iron pan to bake it in, so we used two darker metal 9X9 and 9" round pans.

This is another simple recipe as I started with corn bread muffin mix from the store. Just add some milk, creamed corn and eggs. We realized that there was no fat in the recipe and because we weren't going to melt it in the cast iron like the recipe said. So we melted a few Tbsp. in the microwave and added it to the mix. Then we scooped even amounts in the pan and guessed on about 20 minutes in the oven.

 The bread came out light and fluffy and was the perfect addition to the meal. Leftovers were eaten with my mom's black bean chicken chili on Sunday night.