Starting Black Friday with a POP

Neiman Marcus's Zodiac Room has nothing on me in the popover department....

Will there be anything to gobble?

My mom called around 9:30 this morning to say we may or may not be eating Thanksgiving dinner at 4:00 as planned and we may or may not have anything to eat because BOTH of the ovens in the kitchen had stopped working. What a great start to Thanksgiving day...

By the time the Macy's day parade was over, my mom had moved 'operation Thanksgiving' to the small kitchen in the guest house where Nannie lives and my dad had dropped off the dressing at our house for Adam to bake. Yes, my dad trusts Adam enough to bake his famed dressing.

Despite all the chaos, dinner was served only an hour after my mom had planned! This Thanksgiving, we were definitely thankful there was food on the table. HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Some how this is the ONLY picture from Thanksgiving???

Easy as pie

My mom usually starts baking for Thanksgiving early Wednesday so that she has plenty of oven space for the turkey, dressing, and mac and cheese that take up most of her oven cooking time. I thought I would help out this year by making a pie.

I love to bake and make lots of cupcakes, cakes, cookies, muffins, breads, etc but I have NEVER made a pie from scratch. How hard could it be? I know how to bake. Could a pie with homemade crust really be that hard? I researched Thanksgiving pie recipes on foodnetwork.com and came across the maple pumpkin pie with pecan streusel. It was described as the 'must serve' Thanksgiving pie as it combines pumpkin and pecans into one pie and it had an 'easy' difficulty rating...sounds like a winner to me.

I called my mom around 11:30am to tell her that Maison and I would be by for a short visit after her nap, as I was going to surprise her with my fab pie. Let's just say 'easy' has a whole new meaning...

Nothing is fast about homemade crust. I got the dough mixed together in minutes but didn't realize that it had to rest for at least 30 minutes before I could use it. Then I noticed the recipe called for toasting the pecans before making the streusel. Uh, how do you toast pecans? I seriously had to google it. Then I struggled to get the dough to go over the fluted edges of my Emile Henry pie pan. It seemed every time I covered one side the other side slipped down. Ok, so maybe I wouldn't be dropping off the pie shortly after Mais's nap.

This easy pie had a million steps and literally took me all day to make. I believe it was close to 7pm when I finally left to drop the pie off. It was already dark and Adam was already home from work so I made him drive me. I did not want anything happening to this pie on the way to Nooey's house. I sure hope it tastes as good as it looks and was worth a whole days work!

Gobble, Gobble

Today we had Thanksgiving dinner at my parents house. Maison is still sick with c-diff and we aren't supposed to be feeding her dairy products as it makes her stomach issues worse. Given that it's Thanksgiving and my mom's mac and cheese is legendary, I thought, what the hell...if you've been pooping your brains out for almost 2 months, what's a little mac and cheese going to do to you? It's homemade for goodness sake!

Maison ate the best she's eaten in weeks. The treatments she has been going through to cure her c-diff have side effects worse than the symptoms. She goes though 4-5 day bouts of not eating solids and not sleeping. But she was definitely in high spirits for the holiday. She ate turkey, mac and cheese, and sweet potato casserole. She ran around hitting everything and everyone with her Dora the Explorer bat. Since she can't have stuffed animals until she is better she has become obsessed with her Dora bat so we HAD to bring it to my parents.

Unfortunately, Maison's high spirits died around midnight when she woke up screaming bloody murder and I had to hold her until 6am so that she would sleep. Did I spend my black Friday shopping? No, I would be sleeping. Ok, so I did go to Galleria with Shari but it was late in the afternoon.

2 families, 1 Thanksgiving...and a baby

This Thanksgiving Adam's entire family came to spend the holiday with us and to meet Maison.  We just moved back to our house on Wednesday, as in the day before Thanksgiving, so there was no way we could do Thanksgiving for 7 people.  We hadn't even stayed at our house in 5 weeks, our dinning room table chairs hadn't arrived yet, and my dad and I were distressing our kitchen table and it was sitting in the garage half finished.  So we literally had NO place to eat.  My wonderful mother graciously agreed to host everyone at her house.  We had 12 people for dinner plus Maison.  After dinner we watched the UT vs A&M game before heading back to our house. 

Adam's family stayed until Monday.  Through the weekend we did a tour of local Dallas restaurants.  We even took Maison to the original Sonny Bryan's on Saturday for lunch and to Bread Winners for brunch on Sunday.  Both were learning experiences for dining with a newborn...

Sonny Bryan's only has old fashioned school desks inside and a couple of picnic tables outside.  Maison's carrier wouldn't fit in an old fashioned school desk so we didn't have much choice but to sit outside.  Luckily, the weather was warm enough for her but the table next to us had several smokers.  Not exactly the best environment for a 6 week old and this wasn't exactly the part of Dallas where you could politely ask them to stop.

At Bread Winners on Sunday it was packed we had called ahead so luckily got a table in the corner with a booth on one side.  But the hostess had counted Maison as a 'child' so she brought us a booster seat...uh she is 6 weeks old...what on earth would I do with that?  We told her we didn't need it since we were trying to make it work so her carrier could sit in the booth with me.  Then she brought us a high chair which too was useless.  Third try she just bought a normal chair after I had told her twice I would just put her carrier in the booth with me.  The restaurant was super busy and the table was rather cramped with the carrier taking up more than a seat, but what are you going to do?   That's not really 'news worthy' but the fact that they discontinued their impressive coffee drink menu was rather disappointing.

So lessons learned:  Don't take a baby to a restaurant that doesn't even have adequate sitting even for an adult and don't take a baby to a crowded brunch place and expect the hostess to appreciate your situation of trying to eat with a newborn in a carrier...much less expect them to know the difference between a child and a baby.  But most importantly, call ahead to make sure they still have fab coffee drinks especially when you could use a little something to take the edge off ;o)

Adam's family returned home on Monday and it was back to work for everyone except me as I'm still on maternity leave until 1/25.