A friend for dinner in January

We wanted to spend an evening with a good friend so I prepared Harter House pork chops with medium thickness, grilled asparagus and a wonderful recipe from the January Food and Wine for Warm Quinoa Salad with carrots:

Christmas Day 2011

We were excited to have out of town family at our Christmas table at my sisters.  My contributions were Marie and Cleo's Cranberry Salad, Spinach and Artichoke casserole and my famous Libby's recipe pumpkin pie:

Christmas 2011

Christmas is a time for being with family and friends.  We did some(alot) entertaining Christmas weekend but no one requested anything from the BGE.  Here are a few pics of our cooking along with a lovely host/hostess gift from a lovely blogger and entertained Hospitability Yours- Stephanie Madsen:

Thanksgiving Dinner continued

Gary made his fresh mashed pototatoes, Mom brought cranberry sauce, Cathy prepared Trees and Raisins and rolls, and we were ready to start the buffet line.  Minkie was just exhausted but a great meal and a good time was had by all.  Happy Thanksgiving!

PS-  Gary made the pie crust and I made Cindy's Pecan pie and pumpkin pie served with fresh whipped cream.

Thanksgiving morning and turkey prep

 We got up at 6am to light the grill and prepare the turkey.  We added onions, herbs and orange from the brine to the cavity of the turkey.  The grill was filled with Big Green Egg lump charcoal and lighted with starter.

We dressed the turkey with olive oil, garlic salt and California pepper.  We added fresh herbs to the cavity along with an orange, 1/2 lemon, halved whole garlic, 1/2 onion, thyme, rosemary and sage. .  We struggled a bit with the fire temp.  Gary was able to evenly distribute the hot coals to where we finally got the temp to maintain at 350 degrees.  We added a 1/4 cup of apple chips to the fire.  It was 7:25am when we got the turkey on after placing the Big Green Egg plate setter with legs up, we filled the drip pan with 1 carrot, an orange, rosemary and thyme along with vegetable broth.  After about 1/2 hr we were able to maintain the grill temp at 270 degrees.

 My Dad came over to help me with the dressing.  I had gotten Nancy Nahon's recipe from Mona McCann this week.  It called for 2 baked boxes of Jiffy cornbread which Dad cooked yesterday.  I had left out a 24 ou loaf of white bread out on a cookie sheet.  Dad began tearing the bread's up and mixing them together.  We ended up only using one Jiffy and half of the bread for our 9 x 13 baking dish.  In the meantime, I was boiling all of the giblets in water over high heat on the stove.  I chopped an onion and half of a bunch of celery then put it in a saucepan with 1/2 stick of butter.  To that we added fresh sage which I had chopped.  We sauted that until done and added some vegetable broth to the giblet mixture.  Dad added the celery and onion to the bread mixture which he had put in the baking dish.  We added salt and pepper to the giblet mixture and poured what we thought we needed on the bread mixture.  We placed a few whole sage leaves to the top.  We baked the dressing at 350 degrees for 45 minutes

At 10:30am we checked the turkey and it was done at 170, inside the breast temp.  We brought it in to rest.  The dressing was done in 40 minutes and looked beautiful.

Thanksgiving Eve 2011

So excited to try the turkey on the Big Green Egg.  I talked to several friends and looked at web recipes for my plans.  One of my friends, Ronnie, picked up a fresh turkey for us on the Farmer's Market last Saturday from Autumn Olive Farms.  It is around a 16.3 lb bird.  I've keep in the frig at 36 degrees.  We prepared a brine of 1/2 c brown sugar, 1/2 c of sugar, 1 orange rind, 3 sprigs of fresh rosemary, 1 c kosher salt, 2 onions quartered, 1 halved garlic and 16 c of H2O.  We put that in our Playmate and topped it with ice.  The outside temp was 40 degrees so we were able to keep it out back.

Sunday night with BGE pork, cauliflower and a table of family

A couple of Sunday's ago I lighted the grill to cook Hormel Lemon-Pepper pork tenderloin and some pork chops.  These were grilled for around 25 minutes at 350 degrees.

I grilled the asparagus while Gary boiled cauliflower and mashed it with butter and skim milk. He  used Penzey's Garlic Salt for flavor and we added chives from the garden.  Notice that the Turkey plates were out in anticipation of another Big Green Egg smoked turkey for Thanksgiving.