We spent Thanksgiving at Darrin and Maura’s home – technically, they are dear friends but actually they are much, much more like family. They are more like our grown children than plain old friends and their children are our grandchildren. Being a part of their extended family is one of the things for which we are very thankful not only on Thanksgiving but every day.
My contribution to Thanksgiving dinner was to make enough dessert for a large, extended family gathering. So, I decided to make four pumpkin pies (as many as fit in my oven). Usually my pies turn out well, I always make my own pastry and don’t have any problems with that turning out the way it should. These four pies just didn’t turn out well at all – not because of the pastry but because I put more than twice as much sugar in the pumpkin mixture as the recipe called for.
Pumpkin Pie Failure
It was late on the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving and I was trying to be quick about making the pies. I didn’t bother to put my reading glasses on and thought the recipe said each pie needed 1 3/4 cup of sugar so I multiplied that by 4 and put 7 cups of sugar in for the 4 pies. They should have finished baking in an hour but it took 2 1/2 hours for them to get firm. By that time, I knew something was wrong – not just the long baking time but the smell was dreadful. Instead of that wonderful pumpkin pie smell wafting from the oven there was a sickeningly sweet, burnt sugar smell filling the house. A sticky sugar syrup was bubbling out of the pies and all over my oven, when I took the pies out of the oven the syrup was at the hard crack stage making long crispy strings as I lifted them out and put them on the counter. It was a mess. Anyway, I looked at the recipe again to see what on earth might have gone wrong (with glasses on) and saw that each pie only needed 3/4 cup of sugar! For the 4 pies, I should have only used 3 cups of sugar and I used 7!
No one tasted these pies but I bet they tasted really awful. They certainly smelled awful. I put them out in the garage before I went to bed so they would quit stinking up the house and they were thrown out Thanksgiving morning.
Coconut Cranberry Bars
Thanksgiving morning, I baked Coconut Cranberry Bars to bring for dessert. Luckily, I had all the ingredients they needed and they were quick and easy to make. I had seen the recipe on the Land O’Lakes site several days earlier. They turned out nicely and tasted great.
Thanksgiving Dessert
Here is a link to the recipe:
They turned out so well and people seemed to like them so much that I made them again to take to my Knitting Night on Tuesday. Everyone there seemed to like them, too – at least they ate them and even asked for the recipe!
Coconut Cranberry Bars For Knitting Night
The Land O’Lakes site has many good recipes, they are easy to find and the pages don’t have any pop-ups or weird ads. I’ve had good luck with any of the recipes I’ve tried from their recipe collection.
To see more pictures from Thanksgiving, here is a link to a set of pictures on Flickr:
You can click on any of the pictures in this post to see a larger version.
Filed under: Cooking/Recipes, Family, Holidays | Tagged: baking, coconut cranberry bars, failures, pumpkin pies, Thanksgiving | 2 Comments »
This week was busy and fun – not a lot of time for knitting or blogging though. On Tuesday, I watched my five year old grandson after school. He is in Kindergarten this year. We played Pirate-opoly – a version of Monopoly with pirates especially for kids ages 5 to 8. It is very fun and he loves to play as he usually always wins! (I don’t let him either!) He also
loves to play the game with plastic jumping frogs that is kind of like tiddly winks – I can hardly get them to jump 
in the container but he does it so well that he wins every time. Bubble gum is another of his favorite things – just look at the size of the bubbles he can blow. He is so full of energy and fun. Being a grandma is great!
On Thursday evening we went to a birthday celebration for the daughter of our close friends – she turned eight. Her Mom fixed a great dinner for everyone – there were almost 20 people there! Afterwards, she opened her presents and then everyone had cake and ice cream. She had a Hannah Montana cake – it seems like all the little girls around here really like Hannah Montana. Since it was a week night there wasn’t much time for anything else but we did get to play a few card games with the kids. They love to play Go Fish, Crazy Eights and Old Maid.
Anyway, it is easy to make – you need a lot of spinach, I used a huge sack that was about 14″ x 14″ stuffed with spinach. You also need some bacon (1/2 a pound of so); one bunch of green onions; pepper; vinegar of your choice and several hard boiled eggs for garnish. Cut the bacon into small pieces (I used a scissors – so much quicker than a knife); chop the green onions and then cook the green onions and bacon in a large heavy pot until the bacon is cooked. Stir in some pepper (1/2 tsp) and about 1/3 cup of vinegar – I used a combination of white wine vinegar and balsamic vinegar. Let this come to a boil and then start putting in the spinach. Fill the pot with spinach and stir it until the spinach wilts down and then fill the pot with spinach again and stir it until the spinach wilts down – keep doing this until you use up all your spinach or you think there is enough. Put the pot contents into a serving bowl and garnish with boiled eggs – serve as soon as possible.
After dinner everyone visited and played games. Some people (mostly the young men) played the Rock Band video game. They were very good at it. I’ve tried playing it a couple of times when we’ve been over and it’s very difficult. My husband and I played a version of monopoly with the kids, it’s called Boo-opoly – it was fun, exactly the same as monopoly but the properties are named different things with a spooky twist like Dark Place instead of Park Place.
On Saturday, we went to the First Birthday Party for a sweet little girl. All the same people were there from the Barbecue plus quite a few more. Even though it was a cold, dreary, rainy day the party was happy and fun. 
