Thanksgiving for the service peeps

Happy Thanksgiving!

What? I’m 2 days late? Uh.... well Happy Thanksgiving Week! My Colorado friends and I, being employed in the lovely hospitality/service industry, worked our little booties off on Thursday hence the feasting celebrating on Friday. Friday celebration was fine with me, since we had more than enough food to stuff our faces with...I guess we did the holiday proud.

I was in charge of cornbread w/ butter, roasted asparagus, and cranberry sauce. Nothing extraordinary on the first two; I just baked a box of Jiffy mix with whole corn kernels to be served with softened butter mixed with chopped thyme while the asparagus simply roasted for 15 minutes in the oven alongside smashed garlic cloves. One thing that was a bit more near and dear to my heart was the cranberry sauce!

What makes mine so special? Well first of all I had to go through with permanently staining one of my favorite zip-ups...thanks to POM! These little things are what I love about my cranberry sauce. I almost bought a short-cut already separated arils for $4.99, but for $1.99 ended up with a whole pomegranate and a brochure that simply read, “EASY OPEN.” ‘nuff said.

I never knew the trick with the water! But like the brochure said, all the arils sank to the bottom leaving the white chunks float!

I used a can of whole berry cranberry sauce, jellied one, an orange and last but not least the POM!

I bring the sauces into a simmer then get a good squeeze out of the orange,

then I add the POM and simmer again for another few minutes. How easy, no?

Well I guess it wouldn’t be a Thanksgiving post without pictures of the bird (the juiciest turkey breasts!):

And here goes our assembly line!

We all squeezed and sat around Amy and Jeffrey’s gorgeous dining table...

Then got ready to FEAST!

The night was capped off with a round of good ole Cranium and Jay's famous Apple Crumble Pie with vanilla ice cream. Good food and good company always equal good times...

This year, I am thankful for so many things... first and foremost my beautiful family who gives me so much support from so far away. Then my wiener of a boyfriend and his family who I’ve come to call my own. :) I’m thankful for dear friends back in WI and NY/East Coast, as well as new friends out here in the mountains... Thankful for my jobs, thankful for Yoshi, thankful for my car... thankful for my God who allows me to wake up every morning and be thankful everyday.
 So which post next? Well I believe after Thanksgiving comes the bestest leftovers!

aireese's pieces' pieces

As per usual, I was reading through a few of the awesome food blogs from my blog roll, and somehow it got me to go back on my blog archive. I started to read my first few posts, and boy my blogging "style" has gone off lately. I read this one, this, and this and I had to think 'whoa, did I really write that?'
 
I think I took my affection for photo-heavy posts a little bit too seriously. And granted I have flippin' 10 posts for this month, but which ones actually count for having quality content? Okay, don't answer that. It's a rhetorical question. haha
 
One of the reasons for my short and sweet, photo-heavy posts could be the fact that I feel like I need to be a posts-pumping machine and try to squeeze in any posts I can without delay. So what was I going to do when I'm going to be overloaded with work starting next week? Just post pictures? Hmmmm...
 
I need to take some time and make sure I put out the good stuff. In the meantime, back tracking through the blogs led me also to this post which will be my inspiration for the next cooking extravaganza. :)

Kudos to my BB :)

I've been going to Smoke (the modern barbecue) a lot. First, it's right by my place and second, the prices are right up my alley, and lastly the food is deeeelish. I went to another ladies' brunch and had this humongo plate of pulled pork salad. Can you see the crunchy fried okra bits?

Then a side of their famous macaroni and cheese...

Then a few nights after the brunch, I went for dinner where I had a giant plate of barbecue (brisket and chicken), and we shared the nightly special mac n cheese, chicken and mushroom Tuesday. I didn't care so much about the side mac n cheese, but this special mac n cheese was absolutely out. of. this. world. YUM.

All these photos are taken by my good ol' Blackberry Tour. Didn't it do a good job? Oh, and check this Mr. Scruff after sniffing through the snow:

Speaking of snow...we are expected to get about a foot of snow from Sun-Wed! Two of our mountains open up Thanksgiving Day, the town is slowly waking up from the dreadful off-season! Aaaand another reason to be more excited? We have our food tasting for the new menu items at work today, yippeedadoo!