Thanksgiving Feast

387.  Thanksgiving is a favorite time of year for so many reasons.  The great meal with stuffing, mashed potato, pan gravy, homemade pies and roasted turkey.  Each year I try to make something new or edit a favorite dish but this year I migrated back to our favorites done just as they simply are.

Here are a few photos of our feast...sweet potatoes with pecans, stuffed mushrooms, green beans with almonds and stuffing (in the bird! the only way to do it!)

I make homemade cranberry relish with orange where I take an entire bag of cranberries, a whole orange, rind and all and a cup of sugar.  Place them all in a food processor and chop.  Then spoon it into a serving dish.  Perfect every time!

Each plate was perfect...colorful...but more important, delicious!

And for the finale...apple pie, pumpkin pie and pecan pie.

“Pride slays thanksgiving, but a humble mind is the soil out of which thanks naturally grow. A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.”– Henry Ward Beecher

Pumpkin Pie Biscotti

318.  Thanksgiving is near and I'm trying a new recipe for Pumpkin Pie Biscotti.

I experimented with a few recipes and found that if you add to a plain recipe; 1/2 cup purée pumpkin, canned or fresh along with pumpkin pie spices: 1/2 tsp clove, tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, 1/2 tsp ginger and 1/4 cup flour with the dry ingredients,  1/2 cup chopped Ghirardelli white chocolate and 1/2 cup chopped pecans...you will have a great variation to your biscotti recipe.

 The texture of your batter should be moist but not dry or sticky and should be able to hold the shape of a log once formed.  Bake as your recipe states but make sure you do not over bake.  It should be browned and firm.

 I use Ghirardelli white chocolate baking bars because they melt smoother and will not become hard inside your biscotti. The white chocolate chips always seem to burn or become very hard when baked.
Once the biscotti are finished I make a drizzle of white chocolate and a teaspoon or more of crisco to bring the chocolate to a runny consistency for drizzling.

Experiment with your recipe and see how easy it is to change and adapt a recipe to new flavors.

Here is a great link to a variety of biscotti recipes:  http://italianchef.com/biscotti/

and http://allrecipes.com/recipe/17241/biscotti/

"Like most things in life, rushing the process only leads to disappointment."

- Mary Berry, Britains Great Bake Off