Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Thanksgiving

We spread Thanksgiving out the week before, and the 3 days the week of.  We spent a lot of this time cleaning out the house, something I do with a vengeance every year just before I pull out the holiday decorations.

Monday - playgroup.  We had our Thanksgiving pot luck dinner and we decorated cupcakes.  Somebody *really* liked the cranberry sauce!

 

It was fun, and when do kids with food allergies/sensitivities/intolerances ever get to decorate cupcakes?!?


Tuesday - baking day.  The first Tuesday, we made corn muffins and shook up cream FOREVER to make our own butter.  Ana shook the first 15 seconds and the last 15 seconds - she was quite proud of herself when she opened the jar and saw she had shaken the cream up into butter! She promptly drank all the buttermilk.




The second Tuesday, we made carrot soup.  It wasn't what I had planned;this was Ana's idea.  I've been telling the story of Hugin's Carrot, and the last line of the story is "and Hugin made carrot soup".  Ana stood up and said "Ok" and walked into the kitchen.  When I asked where she was going, she said "I making a carrot soup, just like Hugin does!".  So off we went to make carrot soup for lunch.

I think she just wanted to use the peeler.  It is her current favorite kitchen gadget.


And spices - she is obsessed with adding large amounts of spices to everything.  Her favorite food is "'picy salad" - a mix of kale, cabbage, and lettuce into which goes a huge amount of olive oil, apple cider vinegar, cajun spice, pepper, garlic salt, dill, and parsley.  She eats it daily. 




  

Considering we used no recipe and just threw into the pot what we had in the fridge, the soup was surprisingly tasty! It made a nice lunch paired with the leftover bread from our Thanksgiving dinner. 


"Recipe" for carrot soup:
Peel and cube several carrots and place in a stockpot.  We had probably a pound and a half, orange, yellow, white, and 1 purple.   Add one diced onion.  Add spices - Ana put them all in so nothing was even remotely measured, but we used freshly ground pepper, salt, garlic salt, parsley, thyme, and dill.  Add water to just cover the carrots and bring to a  boil, them simmer until the carrots are tender.  Add broth; I used chicken bone broth because that's what I had in the freezer.  It was probably a cup and a half.  Puree the carrot and broth mixture; I used our nutribullet for this.  Add cream or milk, rewarm if necessary.  It was the perfect temperature for Ana and Meems with the addition of the cream. 


Wednesday - Painting day.  Autumn colors in liquid watercolor, which I later cut into leaf shapes for our thankful tree.



Thursday - Sensory/Tactile.  We made pumpkin pie playdough.  I've recently discovered that you can add cornstarch to relatively anything and end up with playdough.  So we mixed together a can of pumpkin puree with cornstarch and pumpkin pie spice, and broke out the pumpkin cookie cutters.  The whole house smelled delicious!





Friday - Craft day.  We made handprint turkeys.  These are the start of a calendar's worth of handprint art that we are working on for Tata for Christmas.



And, of course, we had to set up our Thanksgiving nature tables this week! 

  

 

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