Happy Thanksgiving

I want to take a few minutes to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. May your holiday be blessed with love and good times. And of course good food. 

Our family tradition is to gather at the home of my sister M, who has the biggest space. This year we will have four generations around the table. Each family group contributes something to the meal. It appears to have become a tradition for me to bring our Mom's brown sugar butternut squash as well as a pie ( but not pumpkin since another family member is in charge of Mom's pumpkin chiffon pie). This year I chose to do apple.

I got started yesterday and cut three large butternut squash in half, scooped out the seeds, laid them cut side down in two baking pans, added water and baked them at 350` for an hour. After allowing them to cool I peeled off the skin and ran them through my food processor to puree. I melted butter and brown sugar and a smidgen of cinnamon (my tweak on this dish) and stirred it into the puree. It is now ready for reheating in the microwave.

I then went on to make pie. Since GF and I also will be going to his sister's house in the evening I will be bringing a cherry pie there. I like to do my own simple pie dough but make it fancy using pie cutters. I have a double sided one purchased a couple of years ago from Lehman's Hardware that looks like this:

I used frozen sliced Ida red apples added sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and tapioca. Dotted the filling and put on the top crust. It looked like this before going in the oven: 

I used two cans of cherry pie filling from Aldi plus a cup of thawed frozen sour cherries in the second pie. Flipping the pie cutter over I used the fall leaf side and the pie looked like this going into the oven: 

I can now enjoy a relaxing morning watching the Macy's thanksgiving parade, sipping coffee, and munching on cinnamon rolls before getting all gussied up and heading out into this: