Just call me Betty Crocker

I wrote this at the end of our week of Thanksgiving celebrations, but have just gotten around to adding the pictures to it.

November 24, 2006
I have basically lived this past week either in the kitchen or in front of a plate of food, so that definitely means it has been a good one! Monday I did all the shopping for the festivites we have had this week. Tuesday I made brie in a pastry shell for an appetizer and an apple crumble for dessert. These were taken to our friends Tim and Lynn's apartment where they hosted 24 people for Thanksgiving! It was great because many of their co-workers are Belgian, so we had quite an array of traditional Thanksgiving food and some not-so-traditional food (stoemp and Belgian beer for example).

I came home Tuesday night and started cooking for the neighborhood coffee my friend Kelly and I were hosting Wednesday morning. Because we live in an apartment that doesn't have much room for entertaining large groups, I told Kelly that if she could host the coffee in her large living room, then I would bring the food. So Tuesday night I made a breakfast casserole and refrigerated it overnight. Wednesday morning I woke up bright and early to make a caramel sauce to dip apples in and a croissant custard from the Barefoot Contessa. I have learned that if you want your food to taste good, you make it as unhealthy as possible and then it will always taste great. For the croissant custard, it called for 3 whole eggs, 8 egg yolks, 5 1/2 cups of half-n-half, a cup of sugar and 6 croissants. No wonder it tasted so great!!!

Thursday evening our church hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for the homeless, so I made an apple crumble for 20 as I got ready to attend the Thanksgiving dinner the American Club was hosting. We were lucky enough to be invited as some friends' guests, so we got to eat lots of turkey, dressing and sweet potatoes without my having to cook a thing! They have hosted the dinner at this hotel for the past few years and have learned their lesson the hard way--the first year they did not provide the cooks with recipes of such American classics as stuffing, so when the food came out, they had pâté on their plates instead! I guess that is the Belgian idea of stuffing.

We took a day off to recover from eating so much because on Saturday we headed to our friends Kate and Ryan's house for another Thanksgiving dinner. Of all the dinners you get invited to, Kate's is not the one to pass up! She is an incredible cook and the food is always delicious there.

To finish off the festivities, we went to our friend's Maggie and Todd's house. Throughout the week we had a large dinner, a formal dinner, and an elegant dinner, but this one was the flat out fun dinner. The drinks were flowing and the converstion covered a wider variety of topics than most polite dinner conversations do, which always results in lots of jokes and laughter.

Tonight Kyle and I made another batch of caramel sauce to deliver as early holiday presents. We will be in the States starting December 9, and I have an overnight babysitting job next weekend, so I wanted to go on and get this checked off my list.

Sunday I am in charge of organizing the food for 150 people for our church. The goal is for 20 people to each bring 50 hor d'oeuvres--totaling 1,000 hor d'oeuvres. Right now we have about 15 people volunteering to bring food, so I think I might be making a lot of things on Sunday. We are also supposed to be going to another Thanksgiving dinner where I will be bringing the apple crumble that I could make blindfolded after this week! Bon Appétit!

Click here to see photos from our Thanksgiving marathon.