Turkey Stuffed with Cornish Game Hen Stuffed with Cornbread Sausage Stuffing

Stuffing turkey for Thanksgiving. This year, we couldn't get one big turkey, so we stuffed two 13 pounders, one with cornbread, chicken sausage, onions, oyster mushrooms and sage and the bigger turkey we stuffed with a small cornish game hen stuffed with the cornbread sausage sage dressing. Homemade whole wheat mini-brioches were made day before and frozen overnight, then thawed before being baked on Turkey Day. Cutting butter into flour, rolling pastry rounds for apple and apricot pies. Our son sliced the apples for pie, then made his Curried Pumpkin soup for a delectable first course. Roasted turkey comes out steaming from oven covered with sage, rosemary, lavender herbs harvested from garden. Golden and deep red beets roasted in pan with turkey juices, then sliced and served. Mashed potatos, glazed cranberries, giblet gravy and red chile complete a delicious Thanksgiving dinner made by everybody in the family and enjoyed by all with lots of love, storytelling and laughter with flaky apple and apricot pies for dessert. Hope your family gatherings were blessed with love and sweet time spent together as well.

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Photos and text by Charleen Touchette 2009

www.OneEarthBlog.blogspot.com

Thanksgiving Still Life

Trips to Farmers Market and La Montanita Coop for Thanksgiving dinner bring subjects for harvest still life home to our kitchen. Colors and textures of fall vegetables are a visual feast as well as being delicious ingredients for family dinner for children home from college for holiday.

Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday. It began as a celebration of a massacre of 700 Pequot Indians in the northeast, but has been turned into a holiday perpetuating the American myth using the doctrine of "Manifest Destiny" to justify the conquest of the Americas.

Despite Thanksgiving's dubious origins, for generations, indigenous families have used the Thursday off in November to gather with family, share food, stories and laughter and celebrate the harvest more in keeping with the spirit of the Green Corn Dance held by American Indians for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans.

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Photos and text by Charleen Touchette 2009

OneEarthBlog.blogspot.com