Thanksgiving with POM!

Hi everyone! Hope all of those who celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday had a wonderful time! I am still not used to Canadian Thanksgiving, it seems so early! Ben and I had the house to ourselves, so we celebrated U.S. Thanksgiving in our own way.

This is Magic Lake, all frozen over. It got coated in snow overnight!

We slept in, and woke up to more snow! We had nutella in our oatmeal, then went to visit our pigs. Tobogganing  down the hill got lots of snow up my back, but it was SO fun! I took Izzie down with me a few times, and Ben and I went together. Tons of fun!

You can see our sledding tracks all down the hill!

Bird prints in the snow! Too cute!

Then we came in, put on Miracle on 34th St., and Ben made a pumpkin pie. We played Mario Kart Wii, then I made us some dinner. We had pan fried chicken breasts, parmesan mashed potatoes, and roasted asparagus. I also roasted a head of garlic. YUM! For the chicken I made a great sauce using red wine, dried cranberries, and POM. It had that perfect festive color, and a great savory/sweet contrast of flavor. I think the POM really made it!

Red Wine Cranberry POM sauce (inspired by America's Test Kitchen Healthy Family Cookbook)
1/4 yellow onion, finely diced
2 large cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp dried thyme
1 Tbs. flour
3/4 cup red wine
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1 Tbs. honey
1/3 cup regular POM pomegranate juice

Once you have pan fried your chicken

(breasts dried, tossed in flour s&p and fried in canola oil until golden and cooked through) remove it from the pan and keep it warm.

 Add the onion to the pan and saute until softened. Add in the garlic and stir until fragrant.

 Stir in flour and cook 30 seconds, then pour in wine, stock, cranberries, thyme, honey and POM juice. Scrape bottom of pan to loosen browned bits.

Bring to a simmer, and cook until sauce has thickened and reduced slightly, about 3-5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve over the chicken.

This was the perfect easy meal, that tasted and looked like Thanksgiving without the hassel! I've been using POM juice in other ways too! I made a spritzer out of it with lime juice and seltzer! Yum!

After dinner we had Ben's pumpkin pie and watched the new Star Trek movie.

Then it was off to work for us! I got to decorate this birthday cake! It was really fun! I think piping is my favorite! So many things you can do!

Hope everyone's work week was good, it's Friday!

The In-between Thanksgiving Post

Hello everybody! I am home from our wonderful anniversary trip to Tofino! We had such a good time! I am still sorting pictures, as we took millions! The highlights? Great hikes, beautiful scenery, long sandy beaches with crashing waves, our room with a view, awesomely fresh sea food, exploring new places, a boat ride, and 3 grey whales! Good times!

So now that we're back, and I have been looking through all of the things I have saved up to post, I realized that although I posted about our anniversary which was on Canadian Thanksgiving, I never posted about our actual Thanksgiving dinner! It's the ultimate food blogger sin! What was I thinking?! So, because we celebrate both Thanksgivings (old habits die hard) I thought I'd share about one to prepare others for the second! I'll be posting the actual recipes for some of this in upcoming posts.

Here is our turkey defrosting. Our bad little cat Andy decided he'd check out the poultry when nobody was looking, and ended up tearing through the plastic and munching down a bit of his own Thanksgiving dinner.

He was very pleased with himself!

Hurray for pretty turkey!

My FIL has a wine making shop, Pender Island Cellars, and he contributed this wine to top off our dinner!

Our Thanksgiving table! Terrible picture lighting, I know.

YUM!

These are the dinner rolls that I made. Pretty darn tasty!

This is my cranberry orange relish. My mom always used to make it, and I love it! Especially compared to that canned stuff! I really like that you can make this as sweet or unsweet as you want. Perfect! I have always thought of this as "mom's recipe", but she told me it's really off of the cranberry bag! Who knew?! I used about 3-4 cups cranberries, zest of one orange and started out with about 1/2 cup of sugar. Tossed it all into the cuisinart and did a rough chop. Taste and add Tablespoons of sugar to your liking. Try not to blend it too much, you want it to stay coarse. YUM!

I baked some asparagus, and added some garlic gold nuggets for seasoning with the salt and pepper.

Stuffing!

Here's my plate, all loaded up!

Someone else wants some Thanksgiving dinner too!

Yeah, I ate that much!

This is the blueberry bavarian cream that I made, using blueberries that we picked from the farm down the road! It's so nice to have a light fruity dessert after that heavy meal!

We couldn't resist having the traditional pumpkin pie too, so Ben made this one. Beautiful and delicious!

Here's my piece of pie with the vanilla ice cream that I made! I loved this ice cream recipe! Don't worry, I'll share it soon!

We opened our anniversary presents and cards after dinner. We got so much fun stuff! It was our cotton anniversary, so we got some cute halloween things from my mom! Evidently Canadian money is made of cotton, so Ben's parents gave us some CASH!

We also got these awesome cotton t-shirts from my grandma! Thanks grandma, they're super cute! (I feel like we should go jogging in our matching clothes or something...)

I'll be posting recipes for the rolls, bavarian cream, and the ice cream! Keep an eye out for them, so you can make them for your Thanksgiving dinner too!