Post-Thanksgiving Festivities!

Debbie and I were nervous that we would be a bit down after the wonderful Thanksgiving holiday, so we decided to have FUN the Sunday before going back to work. We did yoga, cooked lots, decorated, feasted and watched the wonderful Xmas movie, Elf!

Here is Debbie stringing cranberries and popcorn onto thread that we later hung around my house!

Here is one of the many wonderful dishes we made: stuffed and roasted pumpkins. We emptied out the pumpkins, roasted them and made a rice dish to later stuff into them. The rice dish is a mixture of brown rice and barley, with onions, garlic, GINGER, CRANBERRIES, dried fruit and nuts. After stuffing them in the pumpkins, we topped them with some vegan cheese and baked them a bit longer. 1/2 a pumpkin was very filling! Delicious as left overs too!

Here's half a pumpkin, so yummy!

One of our pumpkin/cranberry strands decorating the dining room chandelier.

Another two strands around the fire place, with Frosty the snowman!

Christmas lights in the family room!

Christmas lights in the dining room!

Popcorn/cranberries in the kitchen!

Christmas lights in the kitchen!! (The only room without lights is my bedroom and that's fine since I try to only sleep in there anyways!)

Roasted pumpkin squares: I roasted sliced pumpkin yesterday and used some of the puree in the lentil curry dish (described in previous post). This half of the pumpkin I decided to save for Monday's dinner. I covered the pumpkin with EVOO, garlic and ginger powder, rosemary, thyme and oregano, S&P and a bit of nutritional yeast. I roasted for about 30 minutes and MAN they were good!!

Stuffed acorn squash. I've decided the two main things you can do with pumpkins/squash are roast then stuff and make into a puree. I have plenty of puree so with my 3 acorn squashes we stuffed them with a mixture of millet, tomatoes and beets and turnips. It is OK. I need way more seasoning. Yesterday the mixture tasted good but today after being in the fridge a day I decided they need more of something. When I was eating it I used some of that Sweet Thai Chili Sauce and of course that made everything better! It was good, just not the best I've done. 

The last thing I made (it just got out of the oven and I didn't take a picture of it) are sweet potatoes. Debbie helped scrub the mold off them because they were in my fridge for a week and that was too long. I sliced them in big chunks and stuck them into pans. I then covered them with maple syrup, brown sugar, pumpkin pie spices and a bit of salt. After about 45 minutes, they were looking dry. I poured almond milk and more syrup on them. They needed more time and they were in at 450!  I gave them another 30 minutes or so with a bit more milk half way through and just took them out. I'm hoping they're pretty mushy and sweet! I didn't take time to really think about the recipe or look one up so it really was an experiment. I hope they are OK!! At least I saved them from the compost bin due to too much mold...