Happy Thanksgiving

Jeremy and I have been "lost souls" the last two years at Thanksgiving - unable to go home and no family around to spend Thanksgiving with. Last year we had all our "lost soul" friends over for an all-day Thanksgiving feast. It was a glorious day. This year all our friends had family plans so we had dinner at Meeting.

But that didn't mean we couldn't pull out all the stops for breakfast! There seem to be rituals all day long and all weekend long in my family. Thanksgiving morning always starts out with apple dumplings. Peeled & cored apples, with the centers stuffed with brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter, and the whole thing wrapped in a pastry dough (or maybe it's more of a biscuit dough...). Then the dumplings are baked in a syrup of sugar, water, cinnamon and cloves. They are oh-so-heavenly.

I kind of let the syrup cook for too long and then the apples weren't quite done and I let those go too long so things got a bit dark. They were still very tasty - but the craziest thing is that the syrup turned to caramel. Not chewy though, but rock hard. It was gooey coming out of the pan, but then the strings of caramel coming off the dumplings hardened up. It was crazy!



This was also the first time we got to use Jeremy's great grandmother's china, which we got back in September. It's a beautiful set with teacups, saucers, plates, bowls, serving dishes, a creamer and sugar container. We laid it all out and I used one of the tea cozies I made. There is something about drinking tea out of one of these dainty cups, using a teapot (instead of steeping tea in your mug), and sitting around with friends... I think I drank 10 cups of tea!