Since Greg and I will both be traveling outside of Seattle for Thanksgiving this year (me to Plam Springs and him to Wenatchee), we decided to have his mom and brother over for a pre Turkey Day dinner on Saturday night. Roberta’s birthday also happens to be the Saturday after Thanksgiving, so we celebrated that as well.

I had a menu of a bunch of new vegetable dishes planned, but then I picked up my CSA box for November late last week. Holy cow. Now that we’re in winter, the farm provides one large box per month. And large it is. Check out the crazy amount of food I got for $65. There’s no way I could have bought this much food at the store or Farmers Market for this price. Even better, since it’s winter, it’s mostly root vegetables and we should be able to get through most of it before it goes bad. I’m not sure the pictures really shows just how much produce came out of the box.

Instead of going out to get groceries for different veggie dishes, I chopped up a very colorful mix of beets, turnips, purple carrots, orange carrots, Brussels sprouts, and onions for a veggie roast. We had that along with a roast chicken, mashed cauliflower, and spiced apples. Before dinner we snacked on an appetizer of delicious almond-stuffed, bacon-wrapped dates. Dinner turned out really yummy and I was impressed with my planning/timing on the dishes. I managed to chit chat for all but about 10 minutes will I sautéed the apples. If I do say so myself, I might be turning into a decent cook.

The Menu

I forgot to take any real pictures during our dinner. But, as you can see on the above menu, we also had a signature drink. (It was later renamed the “Bertini”, which rolls off the tongue a little easier, but I had already taken the picture I guess.) Roberta loves pears, so Greg made a French pear martini as her birthday drink. None of the four of us are big dessert eaters, so we thought we’d go with a birthday drink over cake. I’m sure they tasted delicious, but since it was day 27 of my Whole30 I did not partake in even a sip.

Place Setting, or "What to do with the decorative gourds from the CSA"

My future husband is becoming quite the entertainer with me. He is in charge of the signature drink (last week when we had friends over for a taco bar it was a jalapeño margarita – and no, I did not have a sip of that either) and the music. And he does all the dishes the next morning. I’ve got myself a winner I think. For this particular party, he was also in charge of “carving” the chicken. Neither of us knew how to carve it, so he literally quartered the chicken. It was hilarious, I wish I had taken a picture of the four (very even) chunks of chicken we ended up with. Here he is hard at work. We definitely made a forever memory laughing trying to cut this chicken and our guests didn’t seem to mind their funny pieces of meat, so it all worked out.

Future Hubs Carving the Bird

I need to get better at taking pictures of people, but this is proof that I have made a Thanksgiving dinner and have successfully cooked for my future MIL, who used to own her own catering business. Oh, and did I mention that the entire meal besides the drink was Whole30 compliant and Mike and Roberta enjoyed it? Paleo is possible for entertaining. Roberta was even spotted drooling over some of the recipes in my Paleo Comfort Foods cookbook. Guess what someone’s getting for Christmas…