Turkeyzilla- The Feast!

I like to have an annual Turkey dinner sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's kind of an early Christmas celebration and a late Thanksgiving, or an On-Time American Thanksgiving. I am American after all. And Canadian. I do enjoy celebrating the holidays of both my home countries! I also just really enjoy cooking and feeding a crowd. If I had a bigger place I would invite more than I do and cook twice as much food. With this bigger place I also request two ovens and at least a 6 burner stove. Please? Thank you in advance for donations to the "buy Selina a bigger kitchen" fund. :)

I also enjoy challenges and have a friend who is religiously fasting from meat and dairy for Advent. This provided the challenge of making all of the regular Turkey side dishes less meaty and buttery, and dessert less eggy and milky and buttery. On certain days he is able to eat fish so that helped some because I didn't really feel like trying to make turkey flavored tofu and tofu gravy, and I wasn't sure what to do for protein. Haddock answered my prayers.

I also gave my first ever official cooking lessons to three friends this weekend. I had SO MUCH FUN! I definitely love teaching and without a doubt I adore cooking. Why did I not think of this before? Another thing to add to my list of dream jobs/millionaire jobs- friendly neighborhood cooking instructor! 

So myself and three 'students' prepared a turkey/haddock feast for 10. I actually had to write down the recipes in my head so that I could create a small cookbook for them to use in the future. I am going to be nice and share those recipes here. The only think I am sad about is that in the heat of the kitchen and excitement to eat, I did not snap any photos of our feast or the 7.775 Kg (17.5 lb) Free Range Windsor NS Turkey (Yay  Lovely and Local!) .... Sorry!

To cut down on the length of this particular post, and to help make me less crazy with editing and formatting in Blogger, I have created pages for the recipes that are linked below. Also, this way you get to see the menu and pick and choose which recipes you want to look at if you don't feel the need to view them all. 

Roast Turkey and Gravy
Lemon Dill White Fish
Roasted Smashed Potatoes
Glazed Carrots
Rhubarb Apple Cranberry Sauce
Caramelized Onion Cranberry Apple Stuffing
Berry Lemon Tart

Something great about these recipes is that many of them are versatile in that they can be made vegan friendly or not, and more or less healthy based on using alternatives. For instance, the olive oil on the potatoes is definitely a healthier choice than bacon fat, and still very tasty. Most of the recipes that call for sugar can use agave, honey, maple syrup or maple sugar instead for a less processed and easier on the body sweetness.

I also served condiments and bites with the meal such as pickled onions, gherkins and green tomato chow for those that don't care for cranberry sauce or might just really like those little onions (my fiance is one of those people :) ). And we had green beans. No recipe. Just good old canned french cut green beans. They are one of my favorite veggies. Also, some of the guests brought biscuits, fruit, juice, ginger cake and chocolate chip cookies to add to the feast. All of which were delicious and led to much fullness and a lack of desire to move. It was fantastic.

Happy Eating!