Getting ready for Thanksgiving!

Hi!

I took the day off today to get ready for Thanksgiving tomorrow and also because I had a dentist appointment. I usually take off the whole week of Thanksgiving, but this year I only took off today. My 2 sisters and I are cooking our Thanksgiving meal and my youngest sister is hosting at her house. There won't be too many people there- just my mom & dad, my sister, her boyfriend and her baby, my aunt, me and my other sister. I'm in charge of the pies, stuffing and the mashed potatoes and I thought that I'd get the pies and stuffings prepared today. Things didn't get off to a great start when I couldn't find my pie plate or my tart pan and I tore apart my pantry (which was rather disorganized) looking for them. I finally found my tart pan and the mystery of the missing pie plate was solved when I texted my sister and she said it was at her house. I have no idea why it's there or when I left it there- I can't even remember the last time I made pie! At least now I know where it is and I'm going to pick it up later so that I can bake my pumpkin pie. I've partially put my pantry back together and am trying to keep it a little more organized.

Here's a little list of what I'm making this year:

Cornbread stuffing with bacon, apples and pecans. I started off with a box of cornbread stuffing from Trader Joe's and I used this recipe from goodLife {eats} as a base, although I modified it by using apples instead of pears and onions instead of leeks and I left out the cranberries and raisins.

Johnson Stuffing from BakedBree. I'm not sure where the name comes from and it seems a lot like the Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix you'd buy in a bag except here you're using fresh bread instead of dried bread. It smells really good though and I'm sure it'll taste great when we eat it tomorrow!

Pumpkin Pie. I usually make this double decker pumpkin pie from Rachael Ray's magazine, but this year I decided to do something different. When I saw that Food Blogga made Dorie Greenspan's Twofer Pie, I wanted to make that. However, my sister loves pecan pie and she insisted that I do an individual pecan pie and didn't want it paired with the pumpkin pie. So I'm using Dorie's recipe for the pumpkin pie portion and instead of topping it with the pecans, I'm going to sprinkle toffee bits on the top after it's baked, an idea I got from Recipe Girl.

Pecan Pie. For my sister's pecan pie, I use this recipe from myrecipes.com but instead of making them squares, I used a pre-made pie dough, pressed that into my tart pan and then made the pecan topping from the recipe and baked it as a tart.

I'm also going to make BakedBree's pumpkin butter cake but since I seem to be on a kick of modifying recipes, I'm going to use sweet potato butter because I bought some from a farm when I went pumpkin picking earlier in the fall and I want to see how it tastes with sweet potato butter.

Mashed Potatoes- I'm making these tomorrow so they're nice and fresh and I'm using my potato ricer to get the smoothest potatoes possible!

I'll come back with pictures of everything and more tips after tomorrow! Happy Thanksgiving everyone : )