Thanksgiving Eating Festivities

Back from a great thanksgiving weekend, I basically let my healthy go out the window for the weekend...but it's still lingering around today (I finished a half bag of chips while watching TV...) Anyways, my family had the classic turkey dinner, prepared pretty much by my brother. He likes to cook off of www.foodnetwork.ca and surprisingly does a pretty good job :P Saturday night was turkey night, so he let the turkey sit in a brine bath overnight, seasoned the outside, and roasted it for 4 hours I believe.

It came out a little burnt...but the meat was delicious (and the skin's got all the fat anyways :P)

After "carving" the turkey with an electric knife (we didn't really need the formalities of traditional carving), we amassed a huge plate of turkey meat :)

As a side, my brother prepared a roasted root vegetable dish, and the recipe can be found here: http://www.foodnetwork.ca/recipes/Side/Vegetables/recipe.html?dishID=8640 so, thank you chef Michael Smith. We didn't have any maple syrup so it was substituted with brown sugar. It was still really good.

And here's one of four identical servings I ate that night (minus the corn for every plate). As you can see, we're super Asian when it comes to our plates for holiday meals.

After dinner, we were sentenced to chop up and freeze A LOT of root vegetables (sweet potatoes, yams, beets) since both my home and my apartment were running low. I wish I took a picture of just how much we chopped, but I didn't. I'm pretty sure it was a good 30-45min of peeling and chopping....yay! (However, the convenience and meals I make with those ingredients later will be the "real yay")

I swear it's not blood....it's just beet juice....

The next day, we decided to make chicken wings and poutine. The chicken wings came in a box from Maple Lodge Farms already marinated with BBQ and honey garlic (separately). Honestly, they took FOREVER to crisp up, and I didn't feel like waiting at the time to wait for the honey garlic wings to crisp so we just pulled them out as such:

For our poutine, we sort of followed this recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.ca/recipes/Cheese/recipe.html?dishid=11311 by letting the Yukon gold potatoes soak in water overnight, but we didn't deep fry them so it didn't really matter much. We just baked them in the oven. I wanted to have wedge-style poutine but it doesn't really work because it's just to big to fit in your mouth alongside cheese curds. Next time we're planning on super skinny fries (that we'll pan fry....we do have a deep fryer but it's so unhealthy....) and the use of sweet potatoes. Maybe another type of cheese? (I've done blue cheese before). Can you tell I really like poutine :P

Later that night, as a mahjong snack food, my brother and I made some salsa :D This time, we cut the tomatoes a lot smaller, and used a jalapeno pepper to spice it up. Also added were onions, cilantro, lime zest, lime juice, salt, and pepper. Tortilla chips were provided by Costco, the brand of which I can't recall. It looks like there's a Mayan drawing of a bird on the bag...which is also a tan coloured bag....anyways...

Hope you also had a wonderful thanksgiving and coming soon will be a post on what I'll be doing with all the leftover turkey :D