Traditional Akhtar Family Thanksgiving

2012 will go down in our family's history as the first year I have made a traditional Thanksgiving meal completely from scratch!  It is quite an exciting feeling as a wife and mom.  But, when you are away from home and you want that 'home-y' feeling, then it's time to put on the apron and get to cookin'!

Almost all of the recipes I found online, and amazingly enough all of them turned out good.  So if you are looking for recipes that have been tried and proven to work, here are most of the recipes.




Dinner Rolls

Creamed Corn *best scratch recipe*

Healthy Pumpkin Pie
                                   
Regular Pumpkin Pie (pictured)

**Did NOT use canned pumpkin! Find out more here.**

Green beans..
haven't quite figured these out yet...but I did find a great cream of chicken/mushroom recipe

Stove Top Stuffing 
*tasted just like the box ;-)

Garlic Mashed potatoes
(this is my own recipe that I can share later)

Sweet Potato Biscuits

Pumpkin Snickerdoodles

The only item I have yet to tackle is the Turkey!  Here in Thailand they range from $25-$85, so it was just more economical to have a roasted chicken.  Also, our fridge freezer is a little bigger than small so it just didn't make sense to try to "fit" it in there.



After giving thanks as a family and eating well together, we delivered a couple of plates of our traditional American food to our neighbors!  

It is such a fun and exciting feeling 
creating family memories from scratch.

Taco Tuesday!

Every week on Tuesday we make some variation of tacos, makes for an easy plan during the week.  I got this idea from a friend (thank you April!), and I have been finally putting it into practice!

Usually I cook chicken or beef with taco seasoning as a staple item.  On the side it varies week by week depending on what we have in the house.  Recently, was avocado season here in Thailand and that was wonderful!  We always had avocado's around to use with dinner.  One of my 2nd staples on taco Tuesday has become homemade tortillas.  The first time I tried these it was a huge undertaking, but they did turn out great.  The recipe calls for enough ingredients to make 30 tortillas, which I did the 1st time and only the 1st time.  Unless you need this many for a group event, I would recommend 1/2ing the ingredients and making 10-15 tortillas to start with.  Also, I DO use 100% whole wheat flour and it works great!

To be honest, I'm usually not much for salsa {unless it's mango season!}, maybe it was the cilantro flavor ..?  But I've been wanting to try to make my own for quite some time.  On the spicy scale I am a minus 1, so I decided to make my salsa without any peppers AND...it turned out wonderful!  I could have eaten the entire batch of salsa all to myself ;-), but had to share for dinner.

Salsa Recipe

Tortilla Recipe

In the picture below I shared pics of the tortilla before cooking, during cooking, and after cooking.  Sometimes it helps to see what it's 'supposed' to look like.