My Thanksgiving Appetizer Contribution

So a little backstory about Thanksgiving... For as long as I can remember, we've gone to Buffalo for Thanksgiving. The whole family gathers, it's the one time of year we all see each other at the same time, in the same place. It's better than Christmas because we all focus on each other, making good food, spending time with each other, and no presents to interfere. My grandmother used to do much of the cooking, and my grandfather had turkey duty.

Thanksgiving tradition picture with the bird,

Since my grandmother's passing, my mom and aunts have taken up the apron and my dad shares turkey duty with grandma. We split the work, one of us plans and executes Thanksgiving day appetizers and desserts, Grandpa's birthday dinner which is always within a day or two of Thanksgiving, day before Thanksgiving dinner, and leftover duty. Hubs had his first encounter with our hard core Buffalo Thanksgiving last year and luckily survived his food coma. This year however, hubs and I decreed that we were not traveling anywhere for Thanksgiving, as our original due date for baby John was Nov 30. He came on Oct 27, so although we were unable to travel I was able to help with the cooking. It ended up being my parents and grandmother who live down the street, my siblings came home, and my grandfather and one aunt from Buffalo came down. And us of course. We had Thanksgiving light, and my mom took Thanksgiving dinner and I did appetizers, desserts and grandpa's birthday dinner.

Monkey Bread

Now, when my family cooks we cook for serious, and it takes quite some time. Because of this, we implemented Thanksgiving day munchies (same applies for Christmas) so that we could have controlled amounts of tasty food for everyone without spoiling appetites for the actual meal. I started my munchies early after Mass with Monkey Bread -- a perfect bite to go with some coffee and provide a sugar rush to get us through football helping Mom cook, clean, set the table etc.

 Later on, I brought out sausage stuffed mushrooms, stuffed sweet potatoes, and brie and pear tartlets. The brie and pear tartlets are just cubed d'anjou pears tossed in brown sugar, topped with a slice of brie and a dab of honey, baked in home made pie crust in mini muffin tins at 400 until the crust is done and the brie is bubbly. Just enough to get everyone through their drinks the day and to the dinner table.

Where to start...

So... my first blog post. And I have too many directions in which I want to go, so I don't really know where to start. I was going to start with a recipe, but I don't have any good pictures to go with it so let's start with some background and go from there.

I'm a stay at home mom with a career during naptime. I met my husband on the school bus back in 2000. It happened to be the only year that the bus went to two different schools -- the all girls' school I attended, and the all boys' school where he went. After highschool we both lived in Florida for six years, I lived down the street from his family and we never crossed paths. We both moved back to Virginia within a week of each other and our moms put us back in touch.

My husband and I have two beautiful sons, our oldest is 16 months old and our youngest was born 3 weeks ago. We are a Catholic family, and look forward to expanding our family further. When I'm not working or wrangling children I love to cook and bake -- this is truly my most favourite labour of love. Hopefully I can share some of that with this blog. I keep a recipe journal and make notes in cookbooks, and theoretically I'll be able to record my kitchen undertakings if for nothing else for posterity's sake.

I used to be a fairly good writer but I seem to be out practice, so hopefully I'll be able to reignite my writing with this blog as well. I love taking pictures of everything and documenting all milestones (major or othewise) but I'm no professional, I just have a really good camera thanks to my brother. I'm sure my family's other interests will end up coming to light at some point while I'm on here.

Well... they say the hardest part of starting something is actually starting, and after writing and re-writing this post a few times I think that's true. I'll probably stick to recipes for a while until my writing comes back to me.

For now, suffice it to say that family means the world to me and some of the best ways I can show my love and dedication to my family are through food, the little things in life, and by giving them my time and attention. If that means that cleaning my oven takes a back seat to pushing my son on a swing set, or that I forgo my ironing for a few hours while I watch the Bills game with hubs and my boys, I'm ok with that.