Thanksgiving Leftovers

Here's what we did with our thanksgiving leftovers. We had a ton of mashed potatoes left, so we made these mashed potato puffs with Parmesan, bacon, green onions and eggs.You can find the recipe here. We really liked them, but I think I might use cheddar next time.

 Imagine that there's turkey in the salad above. We used romaine with a little radicchio for the base. We also had turkey, a little red onion, pomegranate seeds, sliced almonds, chopped celery and green onion. Pomegranate seeds were the biggest hit of the salad. All the little cousins kept sneaking them before we were done with prep work. The salad was inspired by this one with arugula and pistachios. It was good to have a light and refreshing dinner after the wonderful but very filling Thanksgiving meal.

Pumpkin Pie- Cooks Illustrated Version

So where have I been? Probably the same as you- busy. But I have to share with you this amazing pumpkin pie from Cooks Illustrated before Thanksgiving. If you love pumpkin pie you probably already have a favorite of your own, but you should definitely give this version a try sometime. It uses candied yams to up the flavor of the custard and cooks down the yams and pumpkin to concentrate the pumpkin-y goodness. Kyle and I both agreed it was the best pumpkin pie that has made the journey to our mouths.

I also discovered my new favorite pie crust (which I used for the pumpkin pie). It was developed by one of my favorite food bloggers, Kenji over at Serious Eats. It's so much easier to get right than traditional pie crust recipes. Instead of carefully cutting the fat into flour, in the first step you make a flour/ fat paste and then work in a little more flour. His method also eliminated the guesswork for adding water since you get more consistent cutting. The link to the recipe talks more in depth about the science of why this works. This recipe gave me the flakiest and most delicious crust I've ever had. If you have trouble with pie crust, or just want to try something new you should check out his recipe.