A Local Thanksgiving

Amy's beautiful Thanksgiving Table

Yesterday, we had the pleasure of sharing Thanksgiving with our good friends, Geoff and Amy, their son, as well as Amy's parents, and a couple new friends too. Our families made our best effort to have a "mostly" local Thanksgiving dinner.

We started with the produce that came in our CSA basket. From it we made mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, acorn squash, and a mixed green salad for the main course. In our basket we also received, sorghum molasses which was made into a gingerbread cheesecake, persimmon pulp which became persimmon pudding, and apples for an apple pie. We also bought local wine from Oliver Winery.

Our turkeys came from Schacht farm, a local farm only seven miles from our home. On Wednesday Amy and I went out to the farm to to pick up our Burbon Red turkeys, who Amy decided to name Fred and George after the Weasley twins. Fred and George were happy turkeys that enjoyed roaming freely on the farm and hiding in its trees, that is until early morning when they were processed and brought home to be cooked for our Thanksgiving dinner.

It was a little more challenging to keep other food items "mostly" local. For example, there wasn't anyway to buy flour that was produced locally, so I settled for buying bread from a local bakery to make croutons for the stuffing. And one of our dinner guests had a wheat allergy so I made a gluten-free chocolate cake. It's sometimes difficult to use local ingredients when baking gluten-free. However, I did manage to use 8 farm eggs from our CSA basket in the cake. All in all I think we did a fine job keeping our dinner "mostly" local.

The food was wonderful but spending the afternoon in the company of good friends and family was even better!

Turkey place cards made from card stock and yarn.
Gingerbread cheesecake
Gluten-free chocolate cake
Thanksgiving hike at Griffy Lake