Thanksgiving

As usual we celebrated the American festival of Thanksgiving and as usual in the end it was worth the hassle of making a big meal and digging out the photos of the birth parents of Lily and Isaac.

By lunch time my entire preparations were taking the chicken out of the freezer, but come 6 pm we had roast chicken, roast potatoes coated with roasted couscous (I won't do that again but what's a celebration without an experiment!) mushrooms with bacon and onion stuffing, broccoli and broad beans.

I had to make a pumpkin pie really fast and unlike the USA they don't sell tins of pumpkin pie filling here in NZ.
So I bought two little butternut pumpkins, and microwaved them whole for about 8 minutes. This made them soft enough to cut out the flesh, then I microwaved the flesh for about 5 minutes and zapped it in my food processor.
I smashed the canister that holds my mixed spice as I went to add it and ended up putting much more mixed spice in then planned.
I added some lemon juice and zest from a lemon straight from our garden, a slurp of cointreau and two tins of condensed milk. I didn't bother with a pastry or biscuit crumb base as I didn't have time, just tipped the lot into a flan tin and baked it for about 40 minutes. It was lovely!!

We lit candles to give thanks for the birth parents of our adopted children - Lily, Rachel and Isaac and then took turns to say what we were thankful for this year.
Lily chose her 21st birthday and visit to Disneyland, Noah also chose Disneyland. Isaac chose (well I chose for him) learning to eat, Hannah chose buying her new car and Paul and I chose all the above plus the new house, our 30th wedding anniversary and Paul getting his company INRonline into the finals of the NZ trade and enterprise competition.