Doctoring Food or Making it from Scratch
When Hurricane Sandy hit in the fall of 2012, my sister lost half her home. With that being said we purchased a Thanksgiving Dinner package from Shoprite. I doctored up all of the sides. They came out delicious. Last year I was closed out of the Shoprite special. This year I made sure to put my order in on time. I picked up the food on the day before Thanksgiving. I sent the turkeys to my sister along with the gravy. I then took the sides and I totally redid them. I did taste them first before I went to work. Let me begin with the stuffing. I cooked up my carrot, onion, celery and mushrooms. I added fresh thyme and sage. I then added a little dry white wine and chicken stock. I added their stuffing and baked it. It was delicious. I then made a cornbread. I started a saute of diced up granny smith apple, carrots, celery and onion. I then added cranberries and chopped pecans. I crumbled the corn bread that I made and added that too. I added all of this to their stuffing and it was delicious. I then moved onto the sweet potato puree. I tasted it and it was bland. I put the sweet potato into my stand mixer. I added maple syrup, butter and brown sugar. I then made a topping of brown sugar, flour butter and pecans. It was so good. All of these recipes are posted on the bonappetitmom recipes page. The mashed potatoes were the challenging part of the cooking. I think their mashed potatoes were made from flakes. They were watery and tasteless. I had to add half and half, garlic butter, salt, pepper and more potato flakes to fix them. The mashed potatoes were the hardest to fix. I did not love them, even with all of the doctoring. I did not post a recipe for those potates. I must say with the exception of the sweet potato puree, everything else would have been cheaper and easier to make from scratch, especially the stuffing. The potatoes would have been better because I would have used either russet or a yukon gold potato. Next year my sister and I decided to our sides from scratch. We like the taste of our scratch recipes so much better. I also must say I love a Butterball turkey. There is no comparison. There other other turkeys The other turkeys out there are good but you cannot beat a Butterball. That is just my opinion.Looking forward to making dishes for the upcoming holiday season. Stay safe my fans and Bon Appetit.