Thanksgiving Potato Pie

Would it surprise you all if I tell you that I'm not cooking this Thanksgiving?  The Wilde kitchen will not only be quiet, it will be completely empty.  There will be no turkey in the oven, no potatoes on the stove and no tubes of cranberry sliced on my cutting board.  The lack of thanksgiving cooking does not mean that I'm just heading to someone elses home for the traditional feast.  Thanksgiving dinner will probably consist of pizza, or sandwiches, and I'm very excited about it.

Don't get me wrong, I love all holidays that revolve around food.  It's the main reason I like celebrating memorial day, picnics!  Thanksgiving is a long standing tradition in my family back home in Buffalo.  Every Thanksgiving of my childhood was spent preparing a dish and heading out to my Aunts house for a great big Thanksgiving dinner.  The dish that we would prepare?  Our classic Jell-O dish!

I have many memories of bundling up and hopping in the car, driving all the way to Grand Island.  The drive always felt like it took forever, although these days I know it only takes about twenty minutes to get there.  We would arrive in the house and shed our layers, slowly coming into a warm house that smelled of turkey.  That smell always brings you into the holiday spirit, if I make a turkey in the summer I still think of Thanksgiving.

We would inevitably wind up eating dinner at four o'clock.  The kids would be first in line to eat and my Uncle would always cut in front of one of us, telling us he was taller.  The adults would retreat to the dining room and the cousins would sit around the kitchen table.  At one point in the years we had dinner there, the kids were relocated to the living room, next to the dining room.  I think it was to let us feel like grown ups.  I spilled red Jell-O on the white carpet that year, the next year we were back in the kitchen.

This year is the first Thanksgiving that boyfriend and I will spend together, living in the same place.  What have we decided to do this year?  Go to New York City and watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade!  Since we won't be at home to prepare a giant feast this year, I prepared a little Thanksgiving dinner yesterday.  It's delicious, it combines everything you want and it doesn't take five hours to prepare. 

Tomato and White Bean soup

I can't believe that it's almost Thanksgiving!  Where has this year gone?  I suppose that it helps that this time of year is my favorite time.  While I'm not a fan of the coming winter, I enjoy fall immensely. 

There are a series of events that make fall the best time of the year.  First, we have the changing of the leaves.  This is one of my favorite times to take a long walk outside.  When I was younger, we would always head out to Chesnut Ridge Park and walk through the leaves.  My family and I would crunch through piles of fallen leaves, while gazing at the bright colors still clinging to the branches.

After the leaves begin to change, we are greeted by Halloween.  As we've discussed before, we never got trick-or-treaters at our house.  This didn't keep us from decorating the house and carving pumpkins.  I always carved using a template, my mom always made beautiful  pumpkins without any help at all.

Once we've put away the costumes and the pumpkins have gone to the mulch pile, it was time for the most important day all year, my birthday.  I just celebrated my birthday, which means that we're in the thick of Fall!  From here we get to celebrate Thanksgiving (at least here in the USA!) and on to shopping and christmas we go.

For the next few weeks, we're all going to be very, very busy!  With that in mind, I've made you this delicious and healthy soup, that will be ready in ten minutes.  Fabulous!

Coconut-Cherry Muffins

When boyfriend and I returned from Thailand, we slept a whole bunch.  For some reason we were just fine when we got to Thailand, well almost fine.  As we walked home from dinner the first night (after sixteen hours on a plane keep in mind!), my body started falling asleep.  My feet would all of a sudden go to bed, while I was trying to walk.  There are some good looking pictures of me, falling asleep at the restaurant.  I nearly fell over at least five times on our way back to the hotel.  Someone kept making fun of me and taking pictures of me as I fell asleep.


Coconut flowers and a sprouting coconut



Look, a baby coconut!

After getting a good nights sleep, we were much better.  It was much easier to walk down the street when my legs were trying to take a nap.  The jet lag wasn't too bad and I'm assuming it was because we were so excited about being in Thailand.


Cooking down coconut syrup

 

Nearly finished coconut sugar

  Returning home was a totally different story.  Jet lag hit us both, hard.  We arrived home after travelling from Phuket to Hong Kong to Vancouver to New York City, in a mere twenty-four hours.  We went from eight-five degrees and high humidity to a snow-covered, below-freezing New York, it was not a pleasant return.  When we finally got back to our apartment, things went well for an hour or two.  We emptied out the suitcases, put a load of laundry in the washing machine and showered.  Then we sat on the couch and turned on some HGTV.  That's when it went downhill as we fell asleep for about four hours, oops.


Palm sugar, cooling into their traditional shape



The bees like palm sugar too!


The first morning of being back in our house we woke up at the completely unnatural hour of four o'clock am.  The rest of the week we kept falling asleep at 9:00 and waking up at 5:00.  I was so proud of us when we stayed up until the evening news on Friday night.  Yup, we're party animals.


Getting the meat out of the coconut



The finished product, coconut oil!

There was one exciting thing about coming home, other than sleeping in my own bed again, packages in the office!  While we were gone I had a few packages arrive in the apartment office.  One was a book, one was a present for boyfriend and the third was from Kelapo!  I was contacted by Kelapo just before we went on vacation about trying some of their virgin coconut oil.  After travelling to Thailand I was even more excited about getting this package in the mail because we visited a coconut farm! 

The pictures you see throughout this post were from the coconut farm, where they made everything from coconut oil, coconut (or palm) sugar, coconut milk and items made from the coconut shell.  The farm smelled wonderful and was full of bees.  At least the bees weren't interested in stinging us, they just wanted to eat the palm sugar.  When I returned home and opened up the Kelapo virgin coconut oil I was transported back to the coconut farm.  Thank you Kelapo, for bringing me back to vacation.