Thanksgiving Food Photos

This year's feast was a pretty one. Check it out!

My plate was filled with mostly vegetables. Wild rice, roast root vegetables, mashed potatoes, bread dressing, green bean casserole and some turkey with cranberry sauce. Everything was tasty. The turkey my grandma baked was on point and juicy, so was her turkey gravy.  

My aunt's family made some gingerbread and sugar cookies. This was a cute spread. The cookies were in the shape of leaves, squirrels and acorns. 

No special Murphy dinner is complete without chips and salsa. My dad usually makes the salsa and this year it was especially tasty with lots of cilantro. Spicy goodness!

My mom usually makes the pumpkin pies for our Thanksgiving dinner. She makes these pies all night and works with a huge plastic bowl when making the filling. The house smells like pumpkin pies for three days. 

My mom also makes the yeast rolls every year. This year's rolls were perfect! They were a little sweet, yeasty, fluffy and fresh.

For the last few years, I've been making the cranberry sauce from fresh cranberries. This year, we didn't have any orange juice, so I improvised and used apple juice. It was tasty!

I also spent all night peeling, seeding and chopping all these vegetables. I have a small bruise on my hand from all the rough knife work. The finished product was OK. I think the parsnip took over the dish because it was a little bitter and odd. I covered it up with some brown sugar which made the sweet potatoes pop.

I also brought some Brussels sprouts to the party.

I made roast Brussels sprouts with baby purple onions and walnuts. I halfway steamed the sprouts and onions and finished them in a cast iron pan with some bacon grease. This was tasty and I'm surprised that many members of my family said they loved Brussels sprouts. I spent nearly an hour peeling those damned onions! How do you peel them faster?

This, I thought was one of the best things I've made (without a recipe) in a long time. It's wild rice with cranberries, toasted walnuts and Portabella mushrooms. I cooked the wild rice in half water and chicken stock, sauteed the mushrooms and added the two together. I added the cranberries and toasted walnuts when the butter melted into the rice. I was so satisfied and excited to share with this everyone. I think they liked it. Not all of them are open to new foods.

I ordered the wild rice from an acquaintance on the Fond du Lac reservation in Minnesota.