Cooking up a Storm

We really got busy this morning.  My mother, my sister, my niece (Sonia) and I all were cooking at various times, although never more than three of us at a time.  We made a new salad because I had these beautiful carrots bought at the farmer's market, and wanted to do a salad to showcase them. Some are purple on the outside and orange on the inside, others are bright yellow.  I also have the traditional orange carrots.


Three C’s Salad

4 medium carrots, grated (we used some purple carrots, some yellow carrots and some orange ones)
½ cup currents

½ cup chopped celery

Vinaigrette
½ cup olive oil
¼ cup rice wine vinegar
2 TLB raspberry cordial
1 tsp chopped garlic
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp pepper


Ruth and I are on for bringing the snack for The Party Monday night, so we needed to make something for that.  We also were doing our weekly meal cooking and planning.  So we made:

Meatless Meatloaf - we made two of them and will freeze one.
Meat balls (these contain hamburger meat) - we made 8 dozen
Pigs in blankets (otherwise known as hot dogs wrapped in bun dough and baked.  This was for The Party, so we cut the hot dogs into thirds and ended up making 12 dozen of them.  That should be enough.
Vegetable Pecan Salad
Peas and Corn Salad
Turkey Casserole (two of them)
We're planning on cooking a pork roast for Sunday dinner tomorrow, so I purchased a pork loin roast and it was so large we cut it into three, froze two portions and put the third portion to marinade until tomorrow.

We had to run out to get groceries twice - once before we started and just when we thought we were finished another sister phoned to ask if I could bring them over lunch, so I ran out and purchased luncheon meat and buns and a few more groceries.

Here's the recipe for the pea salad.  We looked and looked for a recipe for a pea salad that had a vinaigrette instead of a mayonnaise dressing.  Here's what we came up with:

Peas and Corn Salad
1 cup frozen corn
1 cup frozen peas
1/3 cup chopped celery
1/2 cup chopped red pepper
1/2 cup chopped green onions
2 TLB chopped parsley
1 TLB chopped mint

Vinaigrette:
1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
1/2 cup oil
1 tsp sugar
salt and pepper to taste

Finally, here's the recipe for the turkey casserole.  It's great because it uses up all of your leftovers after Thanksgiving.  In fact, you may want to keep some of the main course back, just so you'll have enough for this.

Turkey Casserole
4 cups of diced leftover turkey
4 cups diced bread cubes (or 1 box stuffing mix)
1 white onion, chopped
1/2 cup chopped celery
2 TSP poultry seasoning
1 cup turkey broth
2 cups leftover turkey gravy

Combine bread cubes, onion, celery and poultry seasoning with the broth to make stuffing.

Layer the turkey, stuffing, and gravy, starting and ending with turkey.  If it looks to be really dry, add either more gravy or broth on the top.  Bake at 350 for 40 minutes.  This recipe freezes well, so if you freeze it, you'll need to bake it longer or thaw it first.