Pre-Holiday Feast

This year, instead of one large Thanksgiving meal I'm hosting two smaller ones. The first was yesterday, with pork roasted with onions and potatoes, applesauce, butternut squash, an apple pie and pumpkin bread pudding.

The pumpkin bread came from my first attempt to make pumpkin muffins a few weeks ago. The bottoms had burnt because my oven is so unreliable, so I sliced off the burnt parts and froze the rest. Yesterday I tore up the muffins into a 9x13 baking dish and added a custard: 2 cups milk, 4 eggs, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon. This was baked at 350˚ for about 25 minutes which was just enough to set the custard. It was served with salted caramel sauce.

The apple pie was tricky because I was trying to not add as much water to the crust - which worked because it turned out very flaky and light - but which made it harder to roll out so when I went to put the top crust on it broke into several pieces. The elderchild and I patched it together and made a bunch of leaf cut-outs to cascade down the ugly side and made it quite lovely, I think. I'll have another opportunity to try it since I plan to make another pie for Saturday's meal.