Holiday Dinner

Home made

I decided that I would like to try and make a somewhat traditional holiday meal, similar to what we usually eat at Thanksgiving and Christmas. For my holiday menu, I decided on: Roasted Herb Butter Turkey, Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes, Caramelized Onion Cornbread Dressing, Green Beans with Red Onion and Lemon, and for dessert sugar cookies, and my friend made individual Strawberry Shortcakes.

Here is the table we ate, decorated for Christmas.

The turkey in the beginning, just covered in herb butter. Instead of putting stuffing inside the turkey, I stuffed it with herbs, onions, and lemon. It is in a roasting pan on top of celery, carrots, and onions which helped make some nice drippings for a good gravy.

Here's the turkey after it came out of the oven. To the left are some sugar cookies courtesy of Meaghan Schaible.

Here is what a full plate looked like:

Some turkey, green beans, crescent rolls, mashed potatoes, and stuffing.

Some sugar cookies I made. They weren't expertly decorated, but they were still pretty good. 

Strawberry Shortcake

Overall, I thought it was a success. I'm not usually a big fan of turkey, but the recipe I used helped make a juicy turkey, which was nice, as opposed to the usual dry almost cat food like taste. The herb butter also helped make the skin super crispy. The mashed potatoes were good too, although I don't think I would add as much butter or cream as it seemed a bit too rich for me. However, someone else said they would have liked more butter, so it could have gone either way. I am used to a more traditional bread stuffing, so to try cornbread stuffing was a different experience, but I ended up liking it. The caramelized onions made it even better. The green beans were good. The red onions with them were not as good as I would have liked. I cut them the day before to prep, but I think in doing so, they let out a lot of moisture, so they just didn't get as crisp as I would have liked. The strawberry shortcake was also good, but by then I was just too full to eat anymore. The sugar cookies, especially the ones made by Meaghan were great. 

Four stars

If you would like any of the recipes I used for this meal, feel free to leave a comment, or send me an email at kayla@kaylademint.com