Creative Success

Ah, the smells of the seasons. Can we really get enough of it? This morning I cut up the celery and onions for the dressing and sauteed them. The bread just went into the oven to finish drying. Hopefully now it won't take long in the morning to put the dressing together and get it in the oven. I cut up some carrots to steam and take with us too – I thought we might need at least ONE dish on the buffet that was healthy!! Besides, we had probably 7-8 pounds of carrots in the fridge and this is a good way to use a bunch of them.

It feels good to get that much prep work done ahead of time. I'm also patting myself on the back for today's culinary inventiveness. I ran onto an older package of boneless skinless chicken breasts in the freezer the other day. They weren't freezer burned, but I knew they'd need a little extra help flavor-wise when we used them.

Yesterday afternoon, I coat

ed them in olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper, and popped them in the oven to roast. Today I chopped up half of them, threw together a homemade alfredo sauce (I'd been thinking of throwing together my own recipe using some leftover whipped cream cheese I had in the fridge, then checked online and found basically the same ingredients I'd been thinking of), and cooked some whole wheat spaghetti.

Hubby needs to watch his carb intake, so I did my own tweaks to the recipe – besides using the whole wheat pasta, I used light butter in the alfredo sauce, cut the amount of cream cheese called for in the online recipe, and used a mixture of skim and 1% fat milk instead of cream. I increased the amount of parmesan the recipe called for, and the mixture bubbled to a nice thick consistency. I added the spaghetti and let everything just sit in the pan and get acquainted for about five minutes. We were both impressed with the intensity of the flavors. And two hours after eating, hubby's blood sugar tested out at 87 – woo hoo! Success!

That was just half the roasted chicken breasts, and we have leftovers. I have a package of creamy wild rice soup mix in the cabinet – I intend to make that over the weekend and include the rest of the chicken. Gotta love taking three older frozen chicken breasts and not only resurrecting them but turning them into multiple yummy meals.

Sometimes I miss not being the one to make our Thanksgiving meal, but it's fun going to someone else's home and having everyone pitch in. I always loved the planning and prep work, as well as all the wonderful smells......and taste testing. I remember the year son was adamant that he wanted a “perfect” brown turkey as the centerpiece of our holiday meal.

Hopefully now that he's an adult and has his own home, he can do that. But unfortunately for him, I always opted to bake my turkey rather than roast it. I always wanted all that good broth to use for making both the dressing and noodles. In fact, it wasn't unusual for me to cook our turkey a day or two early – that way the broth was all ready when I wanted to put together the dressing or start the noodles. The turkey was also all carved and just needed to be heated up, instead of my having to haul myself out of bed in the wee hours of the morning to get it in the oven!

It's always interesting to integrate new people into holiday gatherings. We have Thanksgiving at younger daughter's home. She and her hubby are both creative cooks. The past several years, the Thanksgiving turkey has been deep fried, which is yummy. His family attends, too, and that's where the paths go in different directions. One of my kids' favorite part of the meal is mashed potatoes topped by noodles cooked in turkey broth. His family wants gravy. So they serve both and everyone eats what they want. She loves deviled eggs and usually has a big platter, even though we don't consider that “holiday” food. That's the good thing about holiday gatherings – it can be whatever you want!