My Turkey Day...unhealthy recipes included :)

Happy Turkey Day, everyone! Our holiday was a small and modest event. It was just me, hubby, Baby, and my sister-in-law, all gathered here at our home. On our menu today was turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy from a jar, green bean casserole, butternut squash soup, rolls, store-bought pumpkin pie, and banana sour cream bread. I had never made the soup or banana bread before, but I thought they turned out pretty good. Good enough that I'm gonna share the recipes here. I know that, personally, I like to get recipe recommendations from people I know (versus allrecipes.com or the such), so just in case any of y'all are the same way, here ya go:

Butternut Squash Soup

(Don't you just love my special holiday plateware?)

• 3 butternut squashes, olive oil, crushed garlic, salt

Cut each squash into 2-4 pieces and place cut side down on foiled pan drizzled with oil, garlic, and salt. Roast for 1 hour at 350 degrees. When done, scoop out seeds (or you can do that before roasting) and then scoop out the squash and set aside.

• 6 T chopped onion
• 4 T butter
• 3 cups chicken broth
• 1/2 tsp dried marjoram
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 pkg cream cheese (original recipe called for 2 pkgs...I thought it was plenty rich with 1)

In large saucepan, saute onion in butter until tender. Add squash, broth, marjoram, and peppers and mix well. Puree squash mixture in blender with cream cheese. Return to pan to heat through. Do not boil. Add more broth if you like your soup soupier.

Banana Sour Cream Bread

• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 3/4 cup butter
• 3 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 6 very ripe bananas (mine were somewhat green so I added banana extract)
• 16 oz sour cream
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3 tsp baking soda
• 4-1/2 cups flour
  
• Topping: 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup flour
• 3 T softened butter
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/3 cup crushed walnuts

Preheat oven to 300. Grease four 7x3 loaf pans (I had different sized pans...no biggie). In small bowl, stir 1/4 cup sugar and 1 tsp cinnamon. Dust pans with mixture. In large bowl, cream butter and 3 cups sugar. Mix in eggs, mashed bananas, sour cream, vanilla, and cinnamon. Mix in salt, baking soda, and flour. Pour into pans. Mix together topping ingredients and sprinkle on top of bread. Bake for 1 hour. (After an hour, mine were still gooey in the center, so I increased temp to 325 and baked for another 10 minutes, and they came out perfect.) Recipe says to let cool, but there's nothing better than very warm banana bread with a little butter. Mmmmmmmm!

Baby update: She's been on soy milk for about a day-and-a-half, and today Chris and I finally felt a glimmer of hope. We had many moments today with our old baby, our happy baby. She's still irritable and cries more than usual, but nothing like the past few days. She even managed to play by herself for what has been the longest time ever for her. It was probably around 30 minutes. That's just insane for her! Here she is just sitting happily by herself with her books while Daddy and Aunt Emily talked nearby.

I had to laugh at her 'cause she totally reminded me of the day I took her in to get professional photos done at Sears. She was around 6 months old. The photographer got her all set up on this real fancy looking rug made of fake flowers. She turned Raina around so that her back was to us, the concept of the pic being that Raina would look over her shoulder at us. Well, the flower rug was just way too cool to look away from, so she never did look over her shoulder. Of all the pics that were taken, the pic of her playing with the rug with her back to us was the one I took home. It's hanging on the wall in our living room. Here's a pic of her playing today, back to us, totally in her own world, with the flower rug pic hanging in the background.


Hope everyone had a great Turkey Day. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. We plan to relax as much as Baby will let us :)