Thanksgiving Prep

Today we shopped most of the day, and this evening we've been cooking up a storm.

For Thanksgiving, we're having a friend of ours over, and the menu is as follows:

Mushroom Bread Pudding (recipe to follow; it's in the fridge to be cooked tomorrow, and the recipe is typed, awaiting only a picture of the finished product)
Mashed Potatoes (we make them a lot like this)
Pumpkin Dinner Rolls
Green Bean Casserole with homemade French-Fried Onions
Corn Niblets (you know, heat and add butter)
Roasted Asparagus
Pumpkin Roll
Sparkling Apple Cider

We started with the french-fried onions, because we'd never made them before and they sounded like fun. Well, they were, and the next thing we knew, we decided to cut up another onion and make onion rings.

Then, "when-you-give-a-mouse-a-cookie"-style (or what my dad would call "a terminal case of the while-you're-at-its") we decided to make a few french fries, too.
And of course, fried foods just aren't any good if you don't have ranch dressing to dip them into. So we made some of that, too. And it turned out great!

Here are some shots of the pumpkin roll:

Combining the cake ingredientsGreasing and flouring a piece of parchment paper for the bottom of a 10x15" jelly-roll pan
Bake 15-20 minutes until done


Roll up in a clean kitchen towel and let cool

Unroll and spread with cream cheese frosting

Roll back up, dust with powdered sugar, and slice off the endsI wish the color were a little more vibrant, but in my experience, that's just what you get with fresh vs canned pumpkin (I seem to remember reading at one point that some of what's in canned "pumpkin" is actually yams?). The flavor was just fine and besides, I'd eat a dog turd if it was rolled up with cream cheese frosting, and this has that beat by a long shot anyway.