Happy Practice Thanksgiving!

About 6 years ago, a friend of ours was going to be in charge of Thanksgiving dinner for his extended family for the first time. He was very nervous about it, because he had never cooked a turkey before, and he didn't want to risk getting it wrong on the big day. So he decided to have a test run ahead of time, and cook a practice turkey for his friends. And so, a new tradition was born: Practice Thanksgiving. Every year, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, a big group of our friends get together and test out potential new recipes or dishes that we might want to use on the big day. Sometimes we all have a good laugh at some disastrous attempt, other times some brilliant new dish is discovered. It is always fun.

This year for Practice Thanksgiving, Mr. Geek and I are trying out a few new recipes using buttercup squash. Because we have a few buttercup squash to spare, even after giving many away.



Yesterday, I tried a recipe for buttercup squash pie. I'll admit, I made an extra pie to try ahead of time (even thought that kind of goes against the spirit of Practice Thanksgiving) just in case it was really gross. The final product turned out to look and taste pretty much like pumpkin pie - maybe a slightly milder flavor. It seemed a little anticlimactic after fretting all day about how my squash pies would taste, to have them turn out like a regular old mundane run-of-the-mill pumpkin pie. Mr. Geek made a buttercup squash dish that resembles sweet potatoes. I haven't tasted it yet, though.

In additional to our numerous buttercup squash, here are a few late photos of our other fall crops. We harvested about a gazillion sunflower seed heads, which we will let the birds eat this winter.



We had gourds of all shapes and sizes. We kept a few for decorations and gave the rest away.


And we harvested lots of interesting decorative Indian corn that had been cross-pollinated to varying degrees by sweet corn.

And of course, the pumpkins. This was only a part of the pumpkin harvest. Except for the couple that we kept for ourselves, all the pumpkins were long gone weeks before Halloween. It turns out that pumpkins are much easier to give away than buttercup squash - go figure.

So Happy Practice Thanksgiving to all! And incidentally, today is also B's arbitrarily assigned birthday, so happy birthday to B, one year old-ish today!