Story leftovers

(As a quick note, News in a Nutshell is on hiatus through the holidays -- I'll be out of town some and I'd really like to try to get Christmas cards sent before Valentine's Day this year, so I won't have a lot of time. But if I run across any really interesting articles, I'll let you know. And I'll try to update a little more frequently.)

So this Thanksgiving was definitely a good test of my culinary skills. I had to cook a dish for a get-together with work friends on Thanksgiving (yes, I worked), and then prepare the meal for my parents and brother, who were coming into town on Friday. I went to the grocery store at the beginning of last week and realized two things:
1) You shouldn't go to the grocery store the week of Thanksgiving because it's a mad house.
2) You shouldn't wait that long to buy a turkey either. They were out of fresh turkeys and only had frozen ones that wouldn't have thawed in time.

So I decided to go with ham -- delicious and easier to make. Everyone wins!

For the work dinner, I decided to make sweet potatoes, something I hadn't done before, but figured wouldn't be too difficult. Plus, I could make a double batch of it, take 3/4 to the work dinner and keep a fourth of it to serve the next day to the family. I bought fresh sweet potatoes, scoffing at the cans of sweet potatoes. I needed eight medium sweet potatoes, but apparently I was in the mutant sweet potato section because they were all pretty big. When I began to peel and dice the potatoes, I began to rue how I had laughed at the cans. I get it now.

I also had more sweet potatoes than I really needed, which required some ... improvisation with the ingredient amounts. It worked out all right, except when I realized I didn't have brown sugar like I thought I did. So while one batch of potatoes was boiling, I quickly drove to the store to get a bag of brown sugar and get back before I accidentally burned my apartment down or something. It turned out pretty well. Some people who don't normally like sweet potatoes even said they liked them, so maybe there's something to be said for the trouble of fresh sweet potatoes.

Just stay away from the giant, mutant ones.

As far as Thanksgiving, the menu called for:
Ham
Sweet potatoes
A corn/cornbread dish, the recipe for which my mom gave me
Croissants
Sparkling cider

Most of that stuff was pretty easy to make and it all went off without a hitch. Although due to a typo in the corn recipe, I bought nine boxes of corn muffin mix instead of one. I thought nine seemed like a lot, but there was no way on Earth I was going back to the grocery store again last week if I was wrong. (And they were only three for $1.) So now I can make corn muffins to go with pretty much every meal I make for quite some time.

Corn muffins make a great Christmas gift, don't they?