framboise manor thanksgiving traditions and tips

our indian summer has been incredibly lovely this year.

the beavers who moved into strachan's brook for several years have left for higher paying jobs in the city. here is a close-up look at all of the dead trees that they left in their wake:

canadian thanksgiving is this sunday. we normally celebrate american thanksgiving because we are invited out every year - to our besties c&b's house and also to our bro c&g's house.

this year - our thanksgiving with our besties is going to be even more special than usual. usually we have dinner with our besties and their son and daughter who call us their second parents - isn't that awesome? we love their kids, s & d. anyway, this thanksgiving is extra special because d and another of our friends k, are pregnant. they are expecting a baby girl at the end of december. so we are celebrating the birth of a new baby and our other friends k and b, who are k's parents, are also invited. jambaloney gets to see b when he goes into work but i haven't seen k for a few years. so our thanksgiving dinner this year is going to be especially special.

we'll be celebrating with our bro and sis c&g by taking them down to the beach next week. we are having a beautiful indian summer this week and it looks like it will hold out for next week too. our bro and sis have just moved down full-time and we want to welcome them with a special beach picnic. we love our bro and sis.

anyway - on to framboise manor thanksgiving traditions and tips. first off....do not pick the hottest day of all of october to start your thanksgiving meal....we know this because we did this yesterday and by the afternoon, were soooo sunstroked that we turned the turkey off in the oven and went to bed - bad mistake. we slept for 4 straight hours!!! and then got up today and finished making our turkey dinner...more on that in another post.

but for starters - one of our biggest traditions here at the manor is proper stuffing. and by proper, i mean proper. stale sourdough bread that you roast in the oven with EVOO, butter, garlic, salt and pepper. once those are toasted and cooled - you pop them back in the oven with more oil, butter, salt and pepper, onion, garlic and fresh sage, thyme and rosemary. like this:

once all of that is roasted, separate the croutons from the spices.

chop the roasted spices.

add the spices back into the croutons.

now here's the exciting part. when your croutons and spices are roasting....cook up some onions and mushrooms. add celery, pear and cranberry. yummeh!

add that into your croutons and spices.

next up is your brown and wild rice.

add a couple of splashes of your homemade broth and you have stuffing. you want that stuffing made and sitting for several hours before putting it in the turkey.

so the morning that you are planning on cooking your turkey, you want to make the stuffing pronto. once it's made - it's time for turkey day breakfast soup - oh yes!!!!

some butter and EVOO in a pan:

drop in your turkey neck:

next up - your bag of giblets:

chop them up and add them to the neck:

some chopped celery:

apint of home-made bone broth:

a sprig of parsley:

framboise manor thanksgiving morning breakfast soup! we love it!

next up - framboise manor cranberry sauce - this is some good stuff kids! you start with 3/4 cup of water, 1 cup of sugar and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. once the sugar/water/salt is boiling drop in a litre of fresh cranberries.

you want to keep it at a boil for about 4-5 mins....listen to the cranberries - they'll be popping. you want it to look like this.

once it looks like that - the excitement begins. chop up 2 beautiful pears, 2 cloves, a tspn of cinammon, a tblspn a fresh-crushed ginger and tom-pile of pepper.

stir it around until it looks like this.

then set it aside to cool. you can eat it hot or you can serve it cold - we like it cold.

you can use this sauce like a jam on toast, cakes, pancakes or on ice cream - it's to die for!

we woke up to this this morning.

we got cracking, finished cooking our turkey, made all the sides, it took us all morning but we were eating our thanksgiving dinner at noon. now we are stuffed and moaning and going outside for only 20 minutes at a time. it's soooo blue and sunny and we don't want to sunstroke ourselves again - bahahahah! but we'll get our mats and go do our stretches, do odd jobs around the house and yard...and enjoy another brilliant summer day in october.

thank you october!

for any canadians out there - Happy Thanksgiving! thanksgiving is our favourite holiday....i am sure you can figure out why! (if you can't - it's because it's a last blast of summer...and a time to give thanks. something we try and do every day. and it's not hard when you live in a paradise of 6 months of winter and 6 months of biting bugs - bahahahahah! xoxox)