Save Me

Rather than needing a tourniquet, as the song goes, I think I need a stomach pump. I swear that if my grandmother wasn't still alive I'd be channeling her when I cook Thanksgiving dinner. Yesterday was great, but I'm still recovering. I took a picture of the table set, and promptly forgot to take a picture of the turkey or anything else, other than Kristie and the kiddo.




You'd think an army was coming instead of me and 7 guests and a toddler who doesn't eat much anyway. I cooked a 15 pound turkey, my grandmother's meat stuffing, turnips, mashed potatoes, butternut squash, boiled onions, gravy, salad, wheat rolls, regular cranberry sauce, diabetic cranberry sauce, a diabetic key lime pie, and we had a veggie tray. My mother helped for quite a bit of it, which I'm sure she was thrilled about, and Shawn's mom brought a cheese dip and crackers and an appetizer with shrimp and pastry cups. Then just in case the key lime pie was awful (I had serious doubts, but it was actually awesome) Mom and I picked up a pecan pie, a sugar free angel food cake and some fruit salad to go with it. Not to mention a coffee cake. And Chris and Kristie brought some wonderful cannoli and some sugar free pastries for Shawn and a lovely bottle of wine. So it was completely nuts. Needless to say, it's a really good thing I bought that stand alone freezer last year.

Diabetic Key Lime Pie:

This Recipe was from Fix-It and Enjoy-It Diabetic Cookbook, which I slightly modified as will be explained below.

1 1/2 cups of graham cracker crumbs
1/4 cup firmly packed Splenda brown sugar blend
1 tbsp butter melted
3 tbsp canola oil
14 oz can fat-free sweetened condensed milk
1/2 cup key lime juice (because I'm an idiot I bought key west lemon juice by accident. So I mixed it half and half with real lime juice.)
2 egg whites
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
2 tbsp sugar

1. Combine first 4 ingredients. Press into 10" pie pan
2. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool.
3. In a mixing bowl, stir condensed milk and lime juice until blended. Pour into crust.
4. In a clean mixing bowl, beat egg whites with cream of tartar at high speed until foamy.
5. Gradually beat egg whites until the sugar dissolves and soft peaks are formed, about 2-4 minutes.
6. Spread egg-white meringue over filling. Bake at 325 degrees for 25-28 minutes.
7. Chill 8 hours or overnight.

It was really, really good. You wouldn't have known that it was a diabetic recipe. For those needing nutritional info, the pie is to be divided into 10 slices, and one serving is 3 Carbs and 1 fat in the diabetic exchanges and it had 250 calories a slice with 42 grams of carbs, no fiber and 7 grams of fat.

The cranberry sauce recipe we found on the net was a 12 oz bag of cranberries, 1 cup of water and 8 teaspoons of Splenda (but we had to add 2-3 more teaspoons to get it sweet enough to not pucker your face tasting it). You take the water and the cranberries and bring them to a slow boil in a sauce pan until the cranberries pop and soften. Then you stir in the sweetener and let it sit overnight in the fridge. I didn't like it much. I thought there was a chemical after taste I wasn't fond of.

The remainder of this week I spent getting ready for the new job, and prepping the Thanksgiving day feast (which we had on Saturday). I did do some spinning on Wednesday while doing the eight loads of laundry to wash all the new stuff. I had some Corriedale blended batts in the stash from DyakCraft (formerly Grafton Fibers) that I started spinning up. I have 8 oz and I've only done half, so no plying yet. I'm working on trying to spin up my fiber stash. It takes up less room when it's yarn.

I'm a little nervous about tomorrow, which is my first day at my new job, but I'm sure it will be fine. Wish me luck!