Naptime Chef Thanksgiving Week!: Don’t forget that this week we are talking Thanksgiving over here at Naptime Chef. Come share your recipes and ideas and enter below to win an Aluminum Professional Non-Stick Roasting pan and set of lifting forks, official rules below.

It is nearly impossible to recommend a particular dessert for Thanksgiving because there are so many! Where we happen to be going there are also a ton of awesome bakeries so it is mostly likely we’ll just order something amazing from one of them. My mother-in-law doesn’t stock a ton of baking supplies and I don’t want to buy a huge bag of flour only to use to cups and ask her to store it for a year. The good news for all of you is that we I have a ton of great desserts that have already been written about that I can highly recommend!

Naptime Chef Thanksgiving Week!: Don’t forget that this week we are talking Thanksgiving over here at Naptime Chef. Come share your recipes and ideas and enter below to win an Aluminum Professional Non-Stick Roasting pan and set of lifting forks, official rules below.

What’s Going on Today: Thanksgiving recipe test-run.

Naptime Goals: Testing new potatoes recipe and preparing vinaigrette for green beans.

Tonight’s Menu: Lemon Garlicious Chicken (my husband can’t bear to put the grill away yet!), Roasted Rosemary Fingerling Potatoes, Green Beans with Tarragon Vinaigrette.

We are green bean fanatics around these parts. My husband and I can’t get enough of the them and my daughter is even coming around to those sweet green stalks. Last summer my friend Katie told me about the favorite green bean salad with tarragon vinegar her Mom makes and the idea stuck with me. I adore the earthy mustiness of tarragon and can see how it would pair so well with green beans. Since I didn’t have her recipe on hand I decided to wing it on my own, taking care to use only basic ingredients I could easily buy in Florida.

This is the latest installment of my Tales from the Trenches Series. An ongoing series where friends and readers share their stories and recipes about the great food they fit into family life. We all have tips and tricks to share with each other: when we cook, what we cook and how we cook the delicious food we love to eat. If you are interested in contributing a story and recipe please feel free to contact me. Today my friend Merry-Jennifer from The Merry Gourmet is sharing her dear Grandma’s Sweet Potato Casserole recipe with us in honor of the Naptime Chef Thanksgiving Week.

Naptime Chef Thanksgiving Week!: Don’t forget that this week we are talking Thanksgiving over here at Naptime Chef. Come share your recipes and ideas and enter below to win an Aluminum Professional Non-Stick Roasting pan and set of lifting forks, official rules below.

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday, but like many of you, the stress of the preparation can be overwhelming. Several years back, my in-laws and my parents decided to have a joint Thanksgiving meal with us, an easy solution for bringing both families together for the holiday. Now, bringing in-laws together for several hours and for such a major meal could be have been overwhelming and scary, on multiple levels, but it was not at all. It turns out that it was probably one of the best decisions we’ve made – and it’s turned into an annual tradition.

Naptime Chef Thanksgiving Week!: Don’t forget that this week we are talking Thanksgiving over here at Naptime Chef. Come share your recipes and ideas and enter below to win an Aluminum Professional Non-Stick Roasting pan and set of lifting forks, official rules below.

The Occasion: Thanksgiving recipe test-run.

Attendees: Party of 3.

Naptime Goals: Testing new potatoes recipe and preparing vinaigrette for green beans.

Tonight’s Menu: Lemon Garlicious Chicken (my husband can’t bear to put the grill away yet!), Crispy Rosemary Fingerling Potatoes, Green Beans with Tarragon Vinaigrette.

We’ll be in Florida for Thanksgiving this year which means whatever recipes I want to make have to be easy. While I am there I want to spend the maximum amount of her naptime (and awake time!) with my feet in the sand, not tackling complicated Thanksgiving recipes in my in-law’s small kitchen. For our family feast I’ve volunteered to take care of two of the side dishes – which may actually take place on Friday, whole different matter – and this is the first recipe I am considering. Instead of making a giant vat of mashed potatoes for four adults and one toddler, I am going to roast some sweet fingerlings with rosemary, olive oil and salt until fragrant and crispy.

Welcome to Naptime Chef Thanksgiving week! With the holiday cooking season underway I thought it would be fun to spend the week talking about Thanksgiving. I am going to throw in a few great side dish recipes, share an awesome guest post from a friend and fellow food blogger and, of course, talk turkey. I am also giving away a fantastic professional aluminum non-stick roasting pan with rack with a set lifting forks (usually sold separately, but they packaged them together for you!) courtesy of my friends at BigKitchen.com. I love this particular pan because it is constructed out of strong aluminum, fits up to a 24 lb. turkey (that’s a big bird!) and should last a lifetime. It is exactly like the one we have at home and use all the time. So, if you are in the need of a new roasting pan look no further – see the entry rules below and join in the fun!

1. Pumpkin-Ginger Pie
2. 23 Ways to Use up Leftover Candy
3. 7 Ways to Cook Polenta
4. 8 Cookie Dough Recipes

I am taking a break from recipes today to share some of my favorite things from late summer and early fall. We’ve been back in the swing of things with the school but have still managed to escape to Cooperstown and Martha’s Vineyard for some family visits. Along the way I’ve been reading some terrific books, reading new favorite websites and browsing newly released cookbooks. Here are some of them that have really stood out along the way:

About once a month I open my refrigerator to see half-used containers and cans of condiments that are perilously close to their expiration dates. It may be a tub of sour cream that I used for a cake two weeks ago, or a tub of yogurt we haven’t quite finished up. Whatever it is, I hate (hate!) to waste it. My parents always taught me to “waste not, want not” when it came to cooking and baking and that included the simple things like basic dairy-based condiments. Sure, it would be easy to flush them down the drain before they go rancid, but I find it easier, and less wasteful, to build recipes specifically around what I need to use up. This can be tricky to do with dairy which is why I thought I’d share some of our favorites for using up little bits of this and that lingering in the fridge instead of letting them go to waste.