Kitchen Adventures: Thanksgiving Style!

Living 3,000 miles away from my family makes it tough to get home for every holiday.  Christmas trumps Thanksgiving in my holiday rankings,  so my Turkey Day is normally spent with friends.  With a few exceptions of cancellation due to illness, I've always been very fortunate to have some kind soul adopt me and do the heavy lifting in the turkey cooking department.   But I'm a courteous house guest and always happy to help out in the kitchen, so in addition to the perfunctory bottle of wine, I try to pull out a fun recipe or two to support the party and guarantee a return invite.

This year I'm in charge of bringing some appetizers, and I was kind of bored with the stuff I always do, so I went digging through the recipe box.  In the process, I found a quick and easy new one, plus a forgotten gem from a prior Thanksgiving more than a dozen years ago.

Let's start with the new kid on the block - Sweet and Spicy Nuts!

I love nuts, and I've seen different versions of this same kind of concept at other gatherings before.   These are coated with a mixture of sugar, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, season salt and ground black pepper.  The binder is a beaten egg white.    Bake for 1 hour at 250 degrees, low and slow.  YUMMY!

One important thing I learned?  Don't let these suckers cool off too much, or you have a little challenge prying them off the baking pan (even though it's greased).   But the pay off is durability -- store these guys in an airtight container and you've got leftovers to snack on for up to 2 weeks AFTER the holiday!

My second choice came to me in a flash of inspiration thinking about a Thanksgiving gone by - Grandma Hiller's Spinach Balls!

First, a point of clarification about Grandma Hiller.  She isn't MY grandmother.  She belongs to an old boyfriend.  Sadly, he had to go, but she was a kind and generous woman and shared two things with me during a holiday visit to Oklahoma City back when the boyfriend was still a boyfriend.  The first was this spinach ball recipe, which she decided I MUST like after eating half the spinach balls she made us.  She also shared her famous from-scratch hot mustard recipe, which is the dipping sauce that accompanies the spinach balls.

Well, I found the spinach ball instructions, but I couldn't find the hot mustard recipe!  I know it's here, but my recipe box is stuffed and I was short on time and patience to find it.  Luckily I found another one for Key West Lime Mustard Sauce, so I made that instead.  Taste testing confirmed it's a pretty good substitute.

But back to the spinach balls.  All it takes is a couple of boxes of frozen spinach, some crushed stuffing mix, grated Parmesan cheese, butter, eggs and a few chopped scallions.  Combined together and rolled into balls, you bake them for 12 minutes (15 if you're using my oven) and you have a tasty veggie that isn't carrot sticks!

So now that my party contributions are ready, it's time to get gorgeous and go be social, which is my favorite part of the holiday!  I hope you enjoy your Thanksgiving as much as I'm going to enjoy mine!  Gobble-gobble!