My little girl cooked her heart out yesterday (and the day before for that matter). She has taken this cooking thing very seriously lately and decided that this year - at the age of 5 - that Thanksgiving was going to be her thing.
Wednesday night we made buns. Now, buns are pretty common in our house - but these were extra special, yummy buns. The kind with milk, butter and sugar. The kind we can only have a couple of times a year. Making them from scratch, and without a microwave, meant a lot of pots going on the stove making sure the milk and butter were the right temperature. We even went the extra step and painted egg on the top of the buns before they went into the oven (by "we" I mean Jenna with a bit of my supervising).
And, OH MY, they were good!
Tuesday I had made a loaf of French bread and let it sit out for the day. We cut it up and using her Grandma's recipe turned it into stuffing to sit on the counter over night to be ready to stick in the bird.
She was so excited by her bun success she woke up Thanksgiving morning ready to make the meal!
We started the day making pastry dough. The last time I did this was when I was in Brownies and had to make a pie for my cooking badge. For whatever reason I chose cherry pie which was kind of a scaring experience (pitting too many cherries). But, I've bought many pie shells here and all of them were a disappointment - we decided to make our own. It actually was not all that hard - except for the part that was - hard that is. I put the ball of dough in the fridge to get hard - the recipe said to put it in a Ziploc bag which was pure genius. The idea is that then you can take it out of the fridge and roll it out in the bag - thereby not making a huge mess and having it all fall apart. I guess I was not fully awake as I pressed down on the dough with the same firmness I would have used for bread dough. My marble rolling pin came crashing down on my middle finger and as I was holding it up (!) I taught the poor kids some very un-thankful words. Sigh....
Brad stepped in and saved the day by rolling it out. The bag worked really well. Jenna whipped together Tim's pie recipe and poured it into the pie plate. Alvero taught her how to crack eggs (on the counter) and she's by far the best egg cracker in the house.
I have learned so much about really enjoying cooking from Jenna. If you had asked me if I would have cooked a Thanksgiving meal that was lead by a 5 year old I would have never believed it. It brings so much joy to the kitchen. And brings the whole family together!
It was nice too because we used recipes from home - which helped us miss them less.
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