Turkey Day Crafts & Recipes

This year Jamie's family joined us here in Tampa for Thanksgiving and he and I hosted our first Thanksgiving dinner. It took a lot of planning and preparation but it seemed to come together pretty seamlessly.  We worked very hard to ensure that it would be a day filled with fabulous food and creative crafts in hopes that our guests would have a terrific time! Below are many pictures from dinner as well as some instructions on how to recreate some of the recipes and crafts in case you are already planning for next year!

We had eight adults and two children join us for Thanksgiving so we set our dining room table along with a spare folding table that we had. I bought a fall themed table cloth and napkins from Bed Bath and Beyond. I used the candles we already had from Halloween but replaced the candy corn with cranberries and walnuts and the centerpiece was a cornucopia filled with fresh flowers that Jamie's mom brought us. The table settings were something that I worked really hard on to make unique. I purchased clear glass plates and decoupaged fall leaves on the back in order to make beautiful fall dinner plates. Since the tablecloth and plates had the fall leaves theme in common I really wanted to tie the table setting together with some turkeys! I found a template for these place cards (please disregard the fact that I found them on a website entitled amazingmoms.com, I swear it is not a site that I frequent!) and made a couple of changes which resulted in some very cute place cards! Jamie was in charge of folding the napkins and with all things put together the table looked gorgeous!

For a while I had known that I wanted to have a turkey shaped bread bowl as an appetizer. It took a little research but finally I ended up with a pretty easy and cute one! I took a pre made bread bowl and sliced off the top. I took that top piece and sliced it in half to use as the wings on the side of the bowl and attached them with toothpicks. I then took the end of a french bread loaf and sliced off a small piece to use as the turkey's head. I created the turkey's face by using raisins for eyes, a carrot for a beak and a roasted red pepper for the wattle. I bought craft feathers from Michaels and filled the bowl with my own hot spinach dip to complete the turkey! The turkey bread bowl was a favorite of our guests on Thanksgiving.

As for dinner I kept it pretty traditional. We had turkey cooked in a bag which is still a crazy concept to me but it really keeps the turkey extremely juicy! Mashed potatoes were the side everyone was most looking forward to so I made almost 10 pounds! We also had Mac N Cheese, which is a very popular Thanksgiving side in the south so it didn't take much convincing for me to include it. My favorite side of the night was this Green Bean Casserole, it is seriously awesome-no condensed soup here! The slight changes I made were I omitted the mushrooms, we are not big mushroom people, I used good ol' french fried onions instead of the shallots (I just couldn't part with them) and I cooked it for about 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven. I would seriously recommend trying this as a side for a non Thanksgiving dinner, it is that good! We also had two types of stuffing; one was regular that I stuffed Tom Turkey with and the other had craisins and granny smith apples in it. I also made my own cranberry sauce-the thought of the one in the can really freaks me out-plus it is super easy to make.  We had creamed corn, corn bread and semi homemade biscuits as well. I think it was safe to say no one finished dinner hungry! We had some great desserts that were brought by Jamie's mom and Jamie's cousin's girlfriend, Elisha. Dinner was followed by the usual Early Holiday Hunt and a great time was had by all!

Thanks for reading & we hope you had a nice holiday!

Love,

Jamie, Crystal & Bandit