What’s for Thanksgiving Dinner This Year?

This year, Hubby told me that his brother and family are coming for a visit on Thanksgiving. Hooray! More people to cook for! I might have never mentioned it, but I love to cook. It’s just the clean-up that I could do without. In spite of that, I’ve been much more adventurous in my selections lately, in part thanks to my sister, who gave me five Weight Watchers cookbooks when I last visited sunny Florida.

So, what’s for dinner this year? Well, thanks to several low-fat cookbooks, I’ve got a fairly decent menu filled with mostly good dieters’ food. No, I’m not really dieting (though I could stand to lose about eight pounds to get back to my goal weight from Weight Watchers), but I do want to maintain the figure I worked so hard to get back. So I use a lot of light cooking recipes.

This year, I’m making a turkey (19 1/2 pounds) with stuffing (in the bird – it hasn’t killed me yet, you know). The stuffing is my father’s recipe, or as close as we can get to it considering he never wrote it down. While boiling the onions, etc., I add the spices that he recalls putting in until it smells like his stuffing. Then I add that to the bread that I dice up on Wednesday night.

In addition to the turkey, I’m making mashed sweet potatoes (third year), garlic mashed potatoes (first time, Weight Watchers’ recipe), green bean casserole (first time in years, trying another Weight Watchers’ recipe), rolls (Pillsbury low-fat crescents), and some kind of apple-pie-like dessert. The dessert is either a straight-out apple pie recipe off the pie crust box or an apple crisp recipe that I made last year from my Fix It and Forget It Lightly cookbook (a crockpot recipe collection). I haven’t decided, but I know I have enough of everything to make either.

For breakfast on Friday, I’m making an overnight egg bake from Weight Watchers. (I am still working on what penance I’ll do instead of meatless Friday this week. I have a neat story about that, too, if I remember to write about it.)

For now, I’m off to the store to get a few things, but I might try to put some of the recipes up. In spite of what some people think, most of the low-fat recipes I’ve encountered have been delicious. In fact, if I don’t tell anyone, they typically don’t know. One thing is for sure: if it doesn’t taste about the same as a regular, high-fat recipe, I won’t make it a second time. My tendancy towards gluttony (oh, how I love food!) makes me pretty picky about how things taste. My general opinion is that if it doesn’t have flavor enough, I don’t want to put it in my mouth. God did give me tastebuds for a reason, you know!

Recipes and a timetable are forthcoming. (The timetable is mostly because I need it, but also because Hubby is currently battling some stomach virus that had him up all night, and Big Girl is feeling queasy today. I am PRAYING that I don’t come down with it, especially on Thanksgiving, when I have a houseful of people and a ton of food to cook! Please pray for our family to be healthy in time for our visitors!)