A few Thanksgiving treats...

Warning. Please don't look too closely at ME in the pictures. I have been cleaning and scrubbing and sweating and baking, so I do not look my best. Please, be kind. 

Happy Thanksgiving to all my lovely bloggy type friends!

My last post was a bit of a downer, so today I'm going a different way and going to share with you all my awesome things I have done for Thanksgiving this year.

We have two celebrations this year. One with Cuinn, Aislynn and myself (which was tonight), and another with my brother, sister in law, and her son (which is tomorrow).

I'm just posting a few things tonight, and you can hear all about our adventures with the fam in a couple days.

So, this year I attempted to do what my mum always does for us, and bake a couple pies entirely by scratch. No store bought pie crust for my family this year. No sir-ee. So here are my amazing creations.

My first ever, home made pie crust! 

My first ever home made pie! This is an Apple Dutch pie. The recipe is here. One of the mommies from my group made it for one of our lunch playdates and told me were I could find the recipe. I would have eaten the whole pie at the lunch, if there hadn't been other people there wanting to eat it too. Seriously good pie. I hope mine is as good. Oh, I did take the peel off the apples, but my friend did not. So if you like the peel, keep it. If you don't, take it off. I have a couple kids eating this pie though, and sometimes the peel gets kinda troublesome, so I was just trying to make my life easier. 

Pumpkin pie. If I didn't make a pumpkin pie, pretty sure my husband would leave me. He has a serious love affair going on with pumpkin pie. I really hope it's to his standards. Ha ha. I found the recipe on the back of the pumpkin pie filling can. Yup, I cheated, I bought the filling rather than using a real pumpkin. But, given how much work I've done over the past couple days, I still did pretty awesome. In my humble opinion.

Showing off the Pumpkin pie and the one on the right is called Creme de Menthe Cheesecake, so it's not technically a pie. But you have to do it in a chocolate pie crust, so in my mind, it's still pie. I can't give you the recipe because it's in one of my cookbooks. But I actually don't do it the way the cookbook says. And I can never really remember how I make it. I just kinda...go with it. But it's a crowd pleaser, so, y'know, yay.

So those are the desserts I made. I also made a tiny little pumpkin tart for Cuinn. It's just like a mini pie, because those three pies are for our family shin dig tomorrow, and I didn't make any dessert for just us. Because three pies is already excessive. But he got to have a mini Dutch Apple Pie and a mini Pumpkin Pie. Basically it was the left over pastry from the big pies, and just a little bit of the filling from each. He said they were really good, but, he really does eat anything, so I'll see tomorrow what everyone thinks.

I also made a new centerpiece for Thanksgiving. I usually do a much bigger and nicer one, but what with all the cleaning, baking, cooking, stressing, I just did a nice simple one.

Just a vase from our wedding, with a tea light candle holder, filled with fresh cranberries. The difficult part? Stopping Cuinn from eating all the cranberries. Serious. He's like a second kid sometimes.

I dunno, I think it's pretty. It's very basic, I'm not over the moon about it, but I had the vase and the tea light holder thingy, so all I needed was the cranberries. Maybe next year, after I've done a few holidays, I'll get back on my creative track.

I also made a new picture for Aislynn's room. It's pretty cute. And made entirely of paint chips.

I haven't decided if I love it, or not yet. It was really simple too. Just paint chips, and my flower punch. Already had the frame, so this little project cost me the grand total of zero dollars and no cents. Pretty cool.

And here is our small family dinner.

Cuinn and Aislynn, playing while I get everything on the table.

I love these two. 

Yum! Dinner! Ham, potatoes, carrots and cheese pasta thingy. It was very basic, but since we are having the big thing tomorrow, I didn't want to do too much today. I really loved this dinner though. And it was SOOOO simple. Everything, except the pasta, was cooked in the crock pot. I threw the ham, cut up potatoes, and carrots into the slow cooker, threw in a can of rings of pineapple, with juice. Added a bit of salt and pepper. Cooked on low for 6ish hours. It was all done. I was a little nervous about the pineapple juice with the carrots and potatoes. But I have something to admit, that I doubt my family will believe. I did NOT put vinegar on ANYTHING. That's how tasty it was! Seriously. I didn't add ANYTHING to my food. I just ate it how it came.

And y'know what?

It was pretty amazing.

In fact, I think I might only do my carrots that way from now on. Seriously good.

Aislynn loved all of it. Surprise, surprise. He favorites were the pineapple, potatoes, and the ham.

This is the face she makes when she eats. It really means she loves it. Even though it doesn't look like it.

And right before bed, we had a little snack.

Aislynn was pooped by 7:30! So tired that I barely had to rock her.

So, there is our little family dinner. My family is coming tonight and we're doing our thang tomorrow. We have a tradition of going to a pumpkin patch on Thanksgiving and then coming home for dinner. So we're going to the city and heading to a new pumpkin patch that has a whole bunch of other stuff. Hay rides, corn mazes, haunted barn, magicians, live entertainment. Should be a good day.

And don't worry, I know you're all dying to know how it goes, so I'll probably blog about it tomorrow evening.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE! ENJOY YOUR FAMILY TIME!