Thanksgiving 2011: Part 1

Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, I know I did! A great day with great food and great company. We had an incredible dinner filled with delicious treats.

I made several things for the meal including:

·         Maple Roasted Brussel Sprouts with Crispy Prosciutto that I got from my friend Carrie  at Bakeaholic Mama.

·         Fresh Crantinis

·         Jewish Apple Cake

I ate so much of course and it was all delicious! We had so many amazing options between the 15 of us. Here is just a sampling of what I ate:



http://www.peasandcrayons.com/

All three of these would make great additions to any holiday meal.

Mackenzie made these beautiful cranberry-quince jam party favors our all our guests.

The Fresh Cranberry Martinis I made were from Philadelphia’s own caterer, Peter Callahan's feature in House Beautiful magazine. His recipe called for straining cranberries, orange juice, and zest but instead I boiled the mixture and it was amazing!

Either way works but if you don’t have a food processor use my version. But for our purposes I should have made twice as much of the cranberry mixture since one batch made roughly 8 instead of the suggested 12.

These are so good and incredibly festive.

I love the frozen cranberry skewers and sugar rimmed glasses for extra flare. I used wooden skewers instead of swizzle sticks for convenience, and they look cute!

Fresh Crantinis: 8-12 servings

(Adapted from House Beautiful)

Ingredients:

4 cups fresh cranberries

5 oranges, juice and zest

½ cup sugar

1 cup water

3 cups chilled vodka

Club soda

Ice

Cranberries and wooden skewers for garnish

Optional: orange twists

Extra sugar for rimmed glasses

Directions:

Thread three cranberries on 12 half-cut wooden skewers or swizzle sticks and freeze until serving.

Juice and zest the five oranges and add with 4 cups of cranberries to a medium pot on medium-low heat.

Bring mixture to a boil until all the cranberries pop. Once mostly popped, add water and continue to boil for roughly 20-25 minutes.

Take off heat and strain the mixture in a large sieve or coffee filter. This should produce a thick strained juice, add sugar and mix. Chill in the fridge.

(This mixture can be made up to three days ahead of time.)

For actual cocktails mix vodka and cranberry orange juice together over ice.

Wet glasses with a cut orange and dip martini glass rims in sugar.

Add a splash of club soda to each glass and add equal amount of cranberry vodka mixture.

Top with another splash of club soda, an orange twist and one cranberry skewer.

Serve for holiday joy!

Love,

The College Cuisiner

Stop by this weekend for my Jewish apple Cake recipe!

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